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Comment by palantir_intern | Hacker News Reader

In addition to building dashboards, integrating data and maintaining a data pipeline made up most of what I did as a commercial Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) intern. From what I've seen, this is what most FDEs do. Software engineers, business cultivation engineers, and people in other positions do other things, and I don't know what FDEs outside of the commercial umbrella do.

I think your assessment is correct, though most people I worked with really enjoyed doing that kind of work for many hours a week.

It's not for everyone though, and it wasn't exactly what I was expecting when I accepted the offer. For example, I was expecting that FDEs would be doing more analysis on the data.

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What the hell is a "forward deployed engineer" and "business cultivation engineer"? You mean support and sales?

My guess: forward deployed engineer = implement the system at a client, business cultivation engineer = sales

A forward-deployed engineer is a fancy title for an engineer who is stationed permanently onsite at the client, usually with their own dedicated desk/office.

A business cultivation engineer is basically a sales engineer responsible for interfacing with and being a technical resource for the client's technical buying team (e.g. IT department).

> who is stationed permanently onsite at the client

Not really necessary. The distinction between FDEs and product engineers is that the FDE work is focused on a single deployment, whereas a product engineer works on a single product and is once-removed from actual clients.

Where the FDE spends time and what products he works on depends on the client requirements.

I was a "Programmer Analyst" at a consulting firm for almost four years, which is the same thing as a "Forward Deployed Engineer". Basically what it means is a consultant who writes software for the client, frequently involving on-site travel and face-to-face interaction with clients to gather requirements and design systems.

The impression I got after talking to Palantir on a number of occasions and talking to different engineers is that a FDE is a cross between a contracted engineer needed for staff augmentation and a software integrator. These are both jobs that are typically bid really low (most system integrators in the DoD space pay pretty poor salaries compared to the vendors of the products that are being integrated) and are not all that different in function from a role like a classic SAP consultant.

This approach really doesn't scale very well but given that the customer base really, really does not like to just take off the shelf software and wants to pay boatloads of money to customize software to their specifications, the software product is just a means to reduce friction and to lower the cost of integration compared to, say, building your own huge data pipeline with open source products from the ground up like oh... DCGS-A and its rebranding as ICITE http://nypost.com/2014/10/27/army-spent-5b-on-failed-technol... https://fcw.com/articles/2015/03/03/icite-faces-resistances....

My understanding is that the userfacing tool is still the ancient Java tool Palantir's been hawking since what, 2006? and that the several HTML5 rewrites haven't worked well [1].

Am I hopelessly out of date?

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cajoFN6yjB0

Yep, that tool, Palantir Gotham, formerly known as Palantir Government, is a giant tangle of Swing/Spring dependency injected AbstractAutowiringFactoryBeans, but it is pretty powerful when configured correctly.

Most BI tools are based around tabular data and charting (i.e. Tableau). But Gotham is the best tool I've seen for exploring graphical (i.e. nodes + edges) data.

The only other thing in the space worth using is IBM's Analyst's Notebook. That's why Palantir (including Shyam Sankar, quoted in the OP) used some dirty tricks [0] to undercut i2, the company (later acquired by IBM) that developed Analyst's Notebook.

[0] - http://documents.jdsupra.com/3d375dfd-be30-471c-b346-bf434f8...

i2's claims are astonishing. Can't help but think that, had the nationalty of the firms involved been the other way around, the Justice Dept would have prosecuted Palantir and Sankar (which would likely have finished them as a government contractor).

I wonder how much Palantir paid to settle the lawsuit.

FWIW, we're doing it in the web, at bigger scale (GPUs in the client + cloud), and targeting Tableau & Excel levels of visual querying & flexibility: graphistry.com . A bit different and a longer topic, we're also more focused on modern data analysis & web workflows. Still only in closed pilots, but things don't have to be so bad :)

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