I came across an interview* covering Palantir's Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, which pointed to a trend I've definitely observed: Post-ZIRP many startups, specifically AI startups, didn't only scale with revenue very quickly, treating their business model with as much priority as their engineering work, but alongside revenue also treating their users as first citizen, and working much closer with them, through outbound-focused product management, deployment engineers, field engineers, solution engineers and similar roles. Actually one of the reasons I didn't continue my series on Professional Services a few years ago (yet) was precisely this shift.
At one point in the interview the interviewee says "that's services ... historically something you wanted to minimize". Amongst a lot of questionable points, this one is valid. Until Cloud became really big in the 2010s, Professional Services in general, and Consulting specifically, was seen either as something dirty (a cost center) or, worse, just another revenue driver (a profit center) - which often conflicted with the product due to its high margin contribution. Services heavy organizations often took hefty maintenance fees (around 20%) and on top of that required expensive business consulting services, often making it look like the product was not accidentally, but very much intentionally, complex - regardless whether it was essential or not. I think it changed with Cloud because it was the simplicity of AWS services, both in terms of integration and pricing model, that removed these entry barriers. Consequently, they turned Professional Services into a strategic cost center, an enabling function where margin was less important than adoption, and in turn reducing friction. That didn't mean it would be free (I strongly believe it should never be, but that's another post), but it was margin neutral. In such setups, SaaS businesses would often track the need for services as "sub-linear", growing slower than revenue, reflecting essential complexity.
While Palantir made the FDE model famous, around 2010 when it was called Delta (seriously, what's up with those military references, especially when you don't want to be the one Deltas land on), SRE had long been a thing inside Google with a similar user-first but less heroical mindset, and alongside it CRE not much later, just when I joined. Google at the time was not known to be a specifically user first company in the sense of being user specific, it had to be focused on extreme scale. Ease of use was important, but in the sense of universal accessibility. So it was an interesting cultural change to work much deeper with users. There wasn't even a place or process for SCEs to write code on the boundary between Google3 and user's systems, and when I was working in the BigQuery (Dremel) codebase, introducing use-case-, or even user-specific flags was heresy. AWS by that point in time had long written user-specific code, easier to do thanks to their multi-tenant architecture, often running custom tuned versions of a product for large users to build new features before rolling them out. In other words, in my mental model (I have no insight into either Palantir nor AWS), FDE was just one of the possible reactions to the "services over product" and outsourcing (BPO) trend of the late 1990ies / early 2000s, and fits into the countermovement started by SRE and culminating with AWS CAF around 2014 or so.
FDE was unique in one element, though - travel on-site. The Cloud providers wanted to prove, maybe too much, that local infrastructure is obsolete. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater, they missing that localization in itself had value, more often of than not being late to local markets and enterprises - a wedge that Azure was able to leverage, especially in Europe and the middle east. I see the current FDE hype more in line with Return to Office (RTO) mandates, where Microsoft is also setting a sad precedent. In a rare rejection of scientific findings about increased productivity, RTO is purely there to set the vibe "we don't trust you", burying competition and discontent in loyalty. Through this lens, FDE embodies the current Post-Twitter "working hardcore" style, with famously AI startups pushing for 007 work hours and embracing weird ideas about masculinity as some kind of "reaction" to DEI programs - when these programs, alongside remote work, actually proved successful. Tech is clearly irrationally reacting to changed politics and picking the prevailing loyalty over essence vibe.
I am glad for the DEI programs I participated in, and I don't miss high school gyms. I prefer scientific, rational, collaborative, unbiased and ultimately optimistic work. What made FDE unique was listening to their users wherever they are. Being users first on their terms. But the important part was listening - that's what FDE, SRE and CAF have in common. And while each had an edge in one or another area, for example Azure is clearly lacking the resilience of SRE culture, it's what they have in common that proves the success. They all reacted to a mindset that forgot the product, long term commitment, over short time margins, they forgot the strategy in exchange for tactical. Applying either of these models is not about more exclusion, taking shortcuts, it's about more inclusion, doing the hard work, staying with the trouble. That's a loyalty I can get behind, collaboration. Not sitting in front of your boss waiting for instructions. So please, don't turn into a military contractor, swinging war terms around and pretending to be a drill instructor. You're making the same mistake, forgetting a better product over short-term margins. Try to build products as if lives depend on it, not as if your goal is to destroy life. In SRE we used to say, "Hope is not a strategy". That's true - Hope is a mission.
*) which I am not linking because it was a tasteless piece of military propaganda normalizing how PayPal, Palantir, OpenAI and the US Army fit together - I really wonder if in the current spirit of renaming they soon call themselves War Combinator
