Top engineers want to work on the core product instead of being forward-deployed, ex-Snowflake CRO Chris Degnan said.
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Investor Chris Degnan is pouring cold water on one of the buzziest jobs in tech right now: the "forward-deployed" engineer.Popularized by Palantir, the forward-deployed engineer, or FDE, is embedded within a client company, building technology and helping customers apply it from the inside. The model is especially popular in the AI era, as firms race to make their workforces "AI native."Degnan spent over 11 years as Snowflake's chief revenue officer before retiring last year. Now, he works as an investor and startup advisor. On the "20VC" podcast, Degnan highlighted the challenges of staffing FDEs and the realities of the day-to-day work.He called this engineer a "glorified professional services person.""If you're a really good engineer, you do not want to be a forward-deployed engineer," Degnan said. "You want to work on the core product."These engineers develop products for a contracting company that may never return to the employer, Degnan said. The problem: the customer is left to maintain the tech."There's a lot of technical debt that forward-deployed engineers are going to leave, and there's a lot of risk," he said.
