alt Hacker NewsI remember interviewing at Palantir back when they were making this role popular (probably a decade ago). I wanted to be an SDE and the recruiter kept pushing me towards this “forward deployed engineer” role. After hearing the pitch I went…oh so you want me to be a sales consultant? They did not take this well, I guess because Palantir was trying very hard to convince the world they were a tech unicorn and not a glorified consulting firm.
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Yeah, I'm reading this and find myself wondering what's so new about this. Haven't tech companies always had this role? I suppose Forward Deployed Engineer sounds more like an engineering role than Sales Consultant, which sounds like you're a salesman rather than an engineer, so it feels to me like this is mostly PR to make the role more attractive to engineers.
It's certainly working on me, because I like talking with stakeholders and identifying problems I can solve, and I don't like sales. I'm far more likely to apply as Forward Deployed Engineer.
I think an FDE is a post sales thing. It’s basically the sale has been done and as a company you don’t have enough expertise to scale what you bought.
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).
The FDE is really the consolidation of two existing roles: solutions architect and engineer.
In the old days, sales would close a client with the help of someone in technical sales and a solutions architect that would come up with a high level spec for a solution. That spec would be fleshed out post sales and then given to an engineer to develop.
Today the FDE often does both.
The difference between Palantir and pure consulting is that Palantir has a core software platform that they customize per client. The business model is more akin to IBM or SAP products.