I'm not comfortable going one way or another on Palantir, but...
> They hide their sales guys as "forward deployed engineers" and obfuscate their sales process to the point where it doesn't seem like you've ever dealt with the kind of sketchy enterprise sales goon you'd deal with from any of their competitors.
Really? I've known a couple of forward deployed engineers there, and I assure you, they're not salespeople.
Here's a long thread on just this topic here on Hacker News. One of their senior engineers jumped in to "clarify". It's worth reading the entire exchange.
I think these days they've deobfuscated the roles a bit. But back during this discussion, they were definitely hiring and mixing in sales people with their "deployed" engineers. Most of these guys would probably be sales engineers somewhere else, relegated to a life of doing canned demos for commission scraps.
It's actually kind of smart from a sales POV, embed your sales guy in the government site, call them engineers and let them have unlimited upsell opportunities.
You've basically tricked your customer to put one of your sales guys on staff.
From a customer POV, when you figure out the guy your paying $300k/yr to have on-site is just triaging issues and calling in real engineers to spot shoot issues, then spending their downtime trying to sell more software inside your organization it's kind of irritating.
I worked at Palantir for a number of years, and was heavily involved the hiring of Forward Deployed Engineers. The vast majority of FDEs did serious software development. There are only a few people I can think of who were not engineers, and their presence on deployments had to do with the alignment between their analytical background and the customer's focus.
The FDE's shouldn't have been doing any core software development unless it was some kind of bespoke one-off code, some kind of helper app for a specific SAP program or something, and that software, code and all, now belongs to the government.
They should have been doing implementation and FSR duties. If they were doing core product development while on Federal Contract, the government owns that software now. If it hasn't been turned over, source and all, it could be grounds for an IG investigation.
That is very serious stuff, so I hope you can qualify what you mean by "serious software development".
As for FDE's doing sales, just look at the current job openings. The BD team is full of FDE openings. What exactly do you think those FDEs do on the sales team?
Since everybody who touches the customer has the same title (except for Mission Specialists), it's easy for Palantir to start a deployment with non-sales FDE's, then swap them out for sales FDE's and start working the organization.
It's sketchy, but it's super smart if they're careful about it.
The thread is interesting. I do wonder if these reports are outdated, though. The people I know with that job title don't do sales. And I've met a few of them by now.
No, it's still current. If you take a peek at their careers page and look on the Business Development Team (that's the sales and partnership team) openings, it's chock full of Forward Deployed Engineer positions.
> They hide their sales guys as "forward deployed engineers" and obfuscate their sales process to the point where it doesn't seem like you've ever dealt with the kind of sketchy enterprise sales goon you'd deal with from any of their competitors.
Really? I've known a couple of forward deployed engineers there, and I assure you, they're not salespeople.