Forward Deployed Engineering...
is dumb and we should not buy into the bullshit.
There was a minor freak out at work a few weeks ago as our CEO started dropping the phrase “Forward Deployed Engineers” on an all hands. People started reading up on what the concept was and immediately started worrying that the expectation was that they would need to fit into this “new mold”.
As a primer, I’m stealing this definition from Gergley Orosz because he’s awesome and smarter than me lol:
What’s a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)? A software engineer who alternates between being embedded with customer teams and core product engineering teams.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and argue that the definition is wrong. Or even that the role shouldn’t exist. Because that’s not what I do here, I’m not here to JUST shit on things and say they’re dumb (don’t get me wrong, I’m going to do that but I’m not going to ONLY do that lol).
The argument that I want to make is, that this very reasonable definition of an expectation of certain high level engineer is a trojan horse that will screw people over. And that’s because this is a means to get more work out of our engineers, while not paying them for all they’re doing.
I don’t think that MOST people are out there ACTIVELY trying to screw people over. I don’t think my CEO was dropping FDE as a means to screw over his workforce. I think he genuinely would tell you that this is a better alignment toward the value prop that we claim we have in the market and that this is really just a better term to describe our expectations.
Just to reiterate — I’m not placing malevolent motives on the people pushing the idea of an FDE. I’m just going to talk about how it’ll play in an enterprise and what the end results would be. Because even though MOST people aren’t actively trying to screw people over… we’ve seen the rise of CEO’s being more and more open and brazen about their distaste for their employees and the fact that our social contract at work has evolved to no longer benefit the worker.
Since this all relates back to being empathetic in the engineering world, I want to think a little about how the corporate world has treated/seen engineers in the recent past. We’ve seen three consistent trends:
