alt Hacker NewsThis term is so eye rolling. Unless the FDE has legitimized pull within the core product team they are nothing more than a glorified field engineer/technical consultant.
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I saw those comments and thought that too, but in Field Engineer and software consultant communities as well as Sales Engineering communities and Solutions engineering communities, there is a lack of relatability into the actual tasks because what Forward Deployed Engineers are expected to do is different enough
and on the other side, the companies hiring for them are figuring it out on the fly. It's mostly an engineer embedded in a 'fleet' of sales people to add legitimacy to them, and also accepting that a full software engineering team isn't necessary any more
and there often is pull within those company's client organizations
overall, a field engineer that's ai assisted specifically to make ai automation software could overlap completely with what FDE's are doing. FDE is associated with that specifically as opposed to any other kind of software, so language exists to convey a shared concept and the term fulfills that
most companies will make the FDE role but not understand the value of the FDE org, which is to drive product strategy and function as R&D