Palantir's fondness for French food cooked up tech's latest fad – forward-deployed engineers

“I always laugh at the IT industry’s terms,” says Ryan Sheehan, a senior vice president at $16 billion global solutions integrator SHI. And right now the jargon that gets him giggling is “forward-deployed engineer” (FDE) because, as he told The Register at VMware's September Explore conference, “We have been doing FDE for a long …

[Taliesinawen]

FDE and “wait staff” :o

Is there no respite from the ungender police :o

[Bebu sa Ware]

"crazy enough to get on a last-minute plane to Iraq"

"They’re crazy enough to get on a last-minute plane to Iraq" => "they’re smart enough to ship quality, same-day code"

I wouldn't have thought that conditional could be satisfied in any model.

"Ship", "same day" and "quality" would be hard to envisage (the old 2 of 3 rule again) without having the developer batshit crazy enough to head off into that even crazier part of the world.

FDE ? Anticipatory vendor lock-in ?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: "crazy enough to get on a last-minute plane to Iraq"

A hand picked squad of McKinsey's finest are dropped into a forward deployed synergy operation to facilitate foward deployment of synergies = The Consultants of Navarone

[Bryan W]

Re: "crazy enough to get on a last-minute plane to Iraq"

Ah yes. The kind of bullshido a vibe PM promises. "You can have all this, and in only a handful of weeks too! We will also grind your staff into the ground as they try to meet the impossibly short deadlines I pulled out of my ass as a bonus! They have CoPilot. They'll be okay."

Fire 'em all into the sun.

[elsergiovolador]

FDE

Real meaning is:

Fully Disposable Employee

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: FDE

We would rather you didn't refer to them in those terms.

"Employee" has all sorts of implications for care and responsibility, we prefer the term "Expendables"

[Daedalus]

Top Consultants?

Probably more like B-listers with a sideline in salesmanship. After all, can top flight engineers be trusted not to fix customer problems without charging extra? Upsell upsell upsell.

[retiredFool]

New name old job

We called them AE's and FAE's in the 80's. In the EDA world, they wrote skill code (Cadence) Tcl (Synopsys) to adapt the system for the customer. As I recall, customers would get credits for these guys to do custom stuff for them as part of deals. Almost every vendor had a interpreter front ending the system for customization.

[Sproggit]

The TLA might be newish...

... but the BS smells the same.

[blot-on-the-landscape]

here we go again

Isn’t this basically what most vendors’ Professional Services teams have been doing for years? They embed engineers with customers, solve problems and get things into production.

Every 5–10 years the industry seems to invent a new term for something that already exists, and it goes viral like some new influencer slang.

I’m still trying to get used to “DevOps”. I’ve been in the DevOps world for approx 10 odd years and never actually met a DevOps engineer. I’ve worked with developers and operations people, but developers generally focus on development and operations people on production.

Even SRE often feels like production support with more automation, monitoring and reliability practices.

New terminology, new tools, same basic jobs.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: here we go again

They embed engineers with customers

Aka disguised employees, though thanks to exemption from IR35 they can make huge profit off them.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Surprised they view it as a drain

As a few have said, new term for something that's been done now and then for decades.

I'm surprised these companies view them as a drain though... when someone on site makes sure they are getting genuine use out of your software and services that seems like a win, you have a long term customer. Plus the likelihood that the solution will have strong vendor lockin.

[nobody who matters]

Re: Surprised they view it as a drain

As this is Palantir, perhaps more likely putting their own people into the customers systems will be to ensure that Palantir have access to all that customer's secrets and sensitive data.

The term used for this years ago was 'mole'.

[Anonymous Coward]

whats so funny ?

the software tech world. hype something when its coming and then tell you it was a hype when it never came.. laughing about their own stupidity.

And oh yeah. i am all into fast forward engineering now. its FFE., playing with my cassette tape deck fast foward button...

And also that is not funny.

[Tron]

You will be paying for the neologisms too.

Vendor promise, they will love you long time. Wallet please.

I don't know how people stomach TLA-rich corporate BS like this. It's just embarrassing in grown adults.

I guess we can at least be thankful they didn't prefix every third word with super-.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Not Enough for an FDE to be a Great Coder

FDEs also have to be great business analysts -- "people people" -- to ferret out a customer's hidden, office-politics-driven requirements.

Sometimes there are bizarre workflows for things which should be "simple and obvious". For example, you'd think routine payments would be approved by Accounts Payable staff, but no, before the AP staff sees them, the customer routes routine invoices to the "Resource Utilization Review Department" for pre-approval. If you ask, customer staff will tell you things such as, "that's just how we do it here."

Further digging reveals that the Resource Utilization Review Department consists of one person, a power freak, who is in a banned sexual relationship with a highly-placed executive within the company, and that said executive created the Resource Utilization Review Department for the sole benefit of the one person who comprises that department.

[Mastufaa]

Silicon Valley’s sudden buzz over fde sounds like a page taken straight out of the 1990s Indian IT playbook. Decades ago, Indian tech giants proved that when technology is too complicated, you can't just sell software over the internet. You have to send human engineers directly into the client's office to set it up.

However, Indian IT history also warns us about losing internal skills. Companies that relied too much on external on-site consultants ended up losing their own engineering talent. That mistake is actually what forced companies to shift toward building their own Global Capability Centers , captive centers, in India so they could own the skills and code natively.

These massive tech funds prove that traditional software sales don't work for AI. But history shows that companies will either get trapped by expensive vendors, or they will eventually bypass the markup and build their own in-house AI teams...