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What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

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Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#101

Post by fmajid »

siva7 wrote: post #76
dude250711 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are sales then you get a (hopefully fat) sales commission. If you are forward deployed then you get deployed forward (away from comfortable home office).

Orwellian speak for ... you won't get paid like our base engineers and when we want to get rid of you, we send you to our Siberian customer because you are a forward deployed engineer haha Still i want to believe i'm wrong and it's a good job.

It's a well-paying job, but probably poison to your future career development, much as SRE or QA roles are, because you are now pigeonholed.

Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#102

Post by fmajid »

slowin wrote: post #33

These used to be called "Sales Engineers" but Palantir wanted something more militant sounding. It's a shame others picked this gross term up and started using it.

Sales engineers are pre-sale, FDE are both pre- and post-sale. FDEs are also much more involved in the client implementation, often they are the ones actually doing all the work, specially in government bureaucracies or large ossified corporations where no one there actually knows how to get things done.

Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#103

Post by fmajid »

majormajor wrote: post #39
Schiendelman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This job is really the stepping stone to product management - and it's the role that's going to really grow with LLMs. A mini-PM with Fable can solve tons of customer needs. Edit: I guess I'm not surprised to see the downvotes on this; I get that a lot of people on HN don't really understand product management, or don't value it. The path from engineering to product management can really start with getting closer to…

At that point what's the value add of the PM (and maybe even the consulting company entirely), if the PM is just doing doing custom stuff? How many of those can the customer solve themselves with Fable? OR the support agent at the vendor without needing to take it to a PM? PM in this sort of company—where there's no grand unifying vision vs just responding to customer requests—is the sort of almost-entirely-paperwork…

Good PMs are more than ICs, they are also a force multiplier for the engineers they work with.

Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#106

Post by slowin »

fmajid wrote: post #102
slowin wrote: post #33

These used to be called "Sales Engineers" but Palantir wanted something more militant sounding. It's a shame others picked this gross term up and started using it.

Sales engineers are pre-sale, FDE are both pre- and post-sale. FDEs are also much more involved in the client implementation, often they are the ones actually doing all the work, specially in government bureaucracies or large ossified corporations where no one there actually knows how to get things done.

Sales engineers do post-sales work. Typically if they're going to do a significant amount of real work, they'd just be called "consultants".

Re: What are Forward Deployed Engineers, and why are they so in demand? (2025)

#107

Post by adamgordonbell »

dbt00 wrote: post #51
adamgordonbell wrote: post #6

My understanding is Palantir used the term, and calling teams of them "Delta Force" to make a consultative-and-service-heavy software adoption cycle make sense to US Military clients.

No. They used the phonetic alphabet to categorize a number of different specialties on the BD team, including alpha bravo delta and echo. I never heard the phrase "Delta Force" used in 8 years there 2008-2016.

Yeah, my bad. I might have hallucinated the 'force' part.

But I'm reading Karp's authorized biography, The Philosopher in the Valley, and it does say names were chosen to be legible to military. Or something like that.

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