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Comment by SeeDave | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of truth to this and they use rather unique (bordering on gimmicky) job titles such as 'Forward Deployed Engineer' as opposed to 'Solutions Engineer' or 'Technical Consultant' to add an aura of spooky government mystery and mask exactly what they do.

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I think I lost some points with them a long time ago during an interview when, while trying to determine exactly what the "Forward Deployed Engineer" role that I was interviewing for actually meant, realized that it was actually just that of SWE consultant, a job which I'd previously held. So I kept referring to my extremely relevant experience from previously being a consultant, calling it as such, and that rubbed the interviewer the wrong way, because clearly FDE was much more special.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

- Upton Sinclair

Having been a "salaried contractor" for my second job, I learned to avoid those positions like the plague. When customers stop buying the company's software, guess who's the first to get the ax? Also, you get to sit by and watch project managers agree to all sorts of outlandish features that you'll be stuck implementing.

Agreed. Avoid any software consulting job where someone technical isn't in the feature design phase. It will suck your soul out, crush it, and then the project will fail anyway.

Feature design phase? Sounds like waterfall. Avoid that too.

It really wasn't that bad as a first job out of college. The travel was sometimes enjoyable, and I was really close with my coworkers, most of whom were of a similar age and place in their life.

As for getting the ax, that didn't happen to me, but even if it had, I've never had problems finding a job, nor have I ever lived paycheck-to-paycheck. It'd be inconvenient but that's about it.

'Forward Deployed Engineer' (ab)uses tactical military terminology meaning an engineer at the customer site, who works with his team to do anything and everything to win the battle (make the customer happy), whatever the cost shall be. In some rare cases, these engineers really are deployed to combat zones (e.g. with US airborne or marines in Afghan). The problem is they end up with very smart people doing mundane tasks, such as installs and data cleansing, without any specialization and division of labor. Most FDEs are massively overqualified for the job they actually do.

"Solutions Engineer" is supposed to tell me more about their role than "Forward Deployed Engineer"?

The first is vague bordering on meaningless and trivially true for any engineer, the second is simply nonsensical without context. It's bullshit in both cases but I'd be much more inclined to ask about the latter, what it even means to deploy an engineer "forwards"?

I found that most forward deployed engineers are in practice deployed ever so slightly off-centre, and you really need to hire a couple of them to make sure it averages out. For tasks sensitive to robustness I sometimes like to stut them between a leftward and a rightward deployed engineer on either side.

I think it means deployed on the customer site, for better communication with the customer. At least, that's what I'd do if I were Palantir.

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