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
...sounds like a consultant to me!
Also, even if "long-term" was an important distinction, the term FDE itself became popular a very short time ago!!! https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f... so how can you assert FDEs work with customers for the long-term
In these days of mass layoffs every month, talking about "long-term" sounds like a cruel joke.
FDEs have been around for a long time in the defense contractor space and Palantir picked up the term, broadening the meaning a decent bit. Then it spread to the rest of the software/tech space.
Historically FDEs in defense are engineers who would literally forward deploy out to other countries where the hardware was being deployed so that they could provide on the ground hardware and software support. They'd either literally be called FDEs, Engineer (forward deployed), field engineer, or some other title that roughly got the meaning across.
You'd deploy some platform and send along an engineer or two and a few technicians. Depending on the platform or the scale of the deployment the engineers would either be normal engineers forward deploying for a few months to a year or so or you'd hire a dedicated FDE for that given deployment/site.
AFAICT it became a lot less common as internet communications got better and you could do practical remote debugging and live video conferencing but you still see FDE roles in the traditional sense from time to time.
But yeah then Palantir and big tech came along and basically rendered it into a glorified consultant and/or systems integrator role.
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...
Is the nominal difference between an archetypal FDE and an archetypal SA greater than the difference in the SA role from company to company?
Frankly, it is a waste of time. It is expensive to build, expensive to maintain going forward, and often already dated by the time it is finished because things have moved on.
Also, as much as I like code, and would personally prefer to build things in code, a lot of internal innovation happens because end users have access to agentic tools. Yet, from the outset, both OpenAI and Anthropic FDE approaches seem heavily code-driven. I might be mistaken.
In my opinion, it is much better to deploy a more customisable harness that sits across the different technology stacks that is also user-friendly. But then I am biased, because that is what we do, so take this comment as you will.
That's pretty straightforward; even if the role came to exist two months ago, you can still have signed a five-year service contract.
gnabgib•1h ago