Is the FDE role becoming less desirable?
Is the FDE role becoming less desirable?Job postings for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) have surged, but many professionals don’t want the role because it’s more like solutions engineering than software development.
Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from last week’s The Pulse issue. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here. An interesting trend highlighted by The Wall Street Journal: companies want to hire for FDE roles, but devs are just not that interested:
Last summer, we covered the rise of the FDE role, and looked into what it’s like. Back then, this is how I visualized what was then a very hot role:
At the companies where I interviewed FDE folks – OpenAI and Ramp – the role seemed to live up to this visualization. However, I’ve since talked with two engineers who took FDE roles and were disappointed. This is how they saw it, in practice:
The role seems akin to a “sales engineer” where FDEs help close the deals, or a solutions engineer (or even consultant), where FDEs deploy to a customer to build them a solution. They don’t contribute back into the platform, and don’t do much that’s considered “software engineering” beyond integrating software which the product team built. Some engineers figure out the nature of the role during the interview process and pass on it. Meanwhile, some others take the job and later quit. Here’s what a dev told me who accept an FDE role at a company, but didn’t find what they expected:
In today’s job market, if there’s high demand for a role which pays decently but attracts little interest from engineers, there’s always a reason! Read the full issue of last week’s The Pulse, or check out this week’s The Pulse. Thanks for reading! If you missed them, you can catch up with recent The Pragmatic Engineer issues:
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