alt Hacker NewsI'm swimming against the current with this, but I think the role is really cool. Blessed by your own company to wear the vestments of an expert, and expected by the customer to deliver the sort of advice that will get a team "unstuck", a forward deployed engineer is in the perfect spot to prove just how much of a hotshot he or she is. Especially in fields like defense where the customer is staffed with teams that are highly risk averse. It's one of the few careers I get a bit jealous of, even though the burnout rate is probably pretty high.
Replies
If you hear a pitch from McKinsey about being a consultant it will also sound like the coolest job in the world.
If I did that to the best of my ability, I’d want to be a boss and not a chump. The real question is how do they actually reward the people who excel in this role, and do they really recognize who’s delivering or do they look at gamey metrics and pedigree. These are important questions for the EV calculation
[dead]
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 the customer - putting more time into understanding their needs.
The reason this shifts a lot with LLMs is that a sales engineer / forward deployed engineer can tackle customer needs much more quickly with Claude Code than they could have themselves, which means these feedback loops can become a crash course in customer experimentation and understanding.
Teresa Torres wrote an amazing book about continuous discovery that I use with my teams (https://www.producttalk.org/continuous-discovery-habits/), and a third of the book is about talking to your customers every week if you can. Someone in a customer facing role who can also build code has a huge leg up compared to someone coming at product from an academic setting. Case studies in an MBA are great for strategy, but they're usually fixed points in time. Getting that nimble feedback to hone your product sense is the hardest part of getting good.
I agree that the idea is cool, but from what I've heard from people in the role at most companies it's essentially a solutions architect role by another name.
Funny enough, the Pragmatic Engineer (author of the post linked) had a follow up from about a year after the post above and he reports the same thing.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-pulse-forward-deploye...