Sexy Titles, Unsexy Work
Forward Deployed Engineers, Bullshit Jobs, and the Art of the Rebrand
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. —Ecclesiastes 1:9
A flower is just a weed with an advertising budget. —Rory Sutherland
No damn cat, and no damn cradle.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Above: Stories sell. Even when they oink.
My fellow Domer (Go Irish!) and friend Joe Schmidt of a16z recently shared a great article entitled "Trading Margin for Moat: Why the Forward Deployed Engineer Is the Hottest Job in Startups"
Below is a key excerpt:
The hottest job in Silicon Valley right now is the FDE: forward deployed engineer.
Don't believe me? Take a look at the job board of any top AI application company; OpenAI alone has 22 open recs for this type of role. The race for talent is on.
This got me thinking about the power of branding, storytelling, and repackaging old things in new ways.
To be clear, this isn’t a dunk on the title or the people doing the work. It’s a reflection on how much presentation and performance shape perception and, increasingly, reality itself.
Silicon Valley has birthed another shiny acronym: the Forward Deployed Engineer, or FDE.
Sexy title, right? It sounds like digital soldiers parachuting into hostile corporate territories (behind customer lines!), armed with laptops and Stanley Tumblers. The reality is more familiar.
While the title is new and trendy, the job itself is an evolution of older roles: just with a sharper focus on rapid, customer-driven innovation and feedback
The FDE is, for all intents and purposes, the old solutions engineer/technical consultant in a fresh uniform. The tasks haven't changed: embed with clients, fix their broken systems, keep contracts alive through hand-holding. Same fundamental work, different wrapper. What changed was the story.
Give a role a new acronym, sprinkle in AI, and suddenly it feels scarce enough for every hiring manager's deck.
That's branding at work: turning the mundane into the magnificent through pure narrative perception.
In other words, rename the hammer and the whole market sees nails.
This is nothing new. As I’ve written before, “Good stories make prices go up and help things happen. They get you the job or the girl. Great stories create generational wealth and unlock leaping emergent effects."
The Forward Deployed Engineer isn't just rebranding—it's a masterclass in how perception shapes reality.
Consider the Chief of Staff role, another corporate darling. Strip away the title's gravitas and you'll (operative word) often find a glorified project manager or executive assistant. The spectrum varies wildly, but for every Chief of Staff reshaping corporate DNA, ten others are drowning in calendar invites.
In fact, this writer is not immune. Here I am spending hours crafting words for free and sending them into the ether where sometimes they're read, often they hit spam folders, occasionally they're discarded, and sometimes, just sometimes, they lead to good conversations, friendships, or paid work.
This irony is not lost on me: I’m not just writing the joke—I’m living its punch line.
David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs captured this perfectly. Namely, how modern work often feels like elaborate theater, performed for appearance rather than utility. In his words:
Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but also are held in low esteem for that very reason. But at least they know they're doing something useful. Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers—as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it's all based on a lie—as, indeed, it is.
The FDE phenomenon shows we've just gotten better at the performance.
But maybe none of this matters. AI will eat everything anyway, or so Silicon Valley's prophets tell us (and I increasingly believe them).
Today's Forward Deployed Engineers may be tomorrow's footnotes, casualties of the very automation they're implementing. There's delicious irony in watching someone dig their own grave with a golden shovel (present company included).
Until then, we're left with lipstick on a pig: beautiful, expensive lipstick that somehow makes the pig more valuable.
This doesn't mean we should give Wilbur a big, wet kiss.
This isn't cynicism; it's human nature. We're storytelling creatures, susceptible to well-crafted narratives. The Forward Deployed Engineer succeeds not because the role is revolutionary, but because the story feels revolutionary.
In writing, we call this "show, don't tell."
When you write "the boy is happy," you're telling.
When you write "Charlie flashed a toothy smile as his brother walked into the den," you're showing.
Same meaning, different impact, as the latter is much more vivid than the former.
The same principle governs professional life: acta non verba.
The Forward Deployed Engineer is both symptom and symbol of our age: where perception increasingly is reality and where packaging matters just as much as the product.
Whether this represents progress or illusion depends entirely on which story you choose to believe.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
Love it!!
Obfuscation, thy name is FDE! Heaven forbid we should call something by it’s correct nature. Well, FDE, as a concept may be more news topical than you may imagine…I think it is pronounced “Fiddy”.