Why its hard to evaluate what makes a great Forward Deployed Engineer.

There’s a lot of craze over the Forward Deployed Engineer role in tech right now. A ton of interest, and in many places very little clarity or consistency around what the job actually entails. Most job descriptions for FDE roles read like a generic senior SWE posting with "customer-facing" tacked on. But the engineers who actually thrive in the role have a pretty specific combination of traits that doesn't show up cleanly on a resume or in a standard technical interview. From what I've observed, strong FDEs tend to share a few things: They're comfortable with ambiguity. An FDE at a customer site might debug a data pipeline at 9am, write a quick internal tool by lunch, and explain architecture tradeoffs to a non-technical stakeholder by 3pm. A lot of breadth, and many different hats throughout the day. They bias toward shipping over perfection. The feedback loop is fast and customer-driven. Engineers who need to "finish" something before showing it tend to struggle. This can be incredib