My Weird Prompts
Daniel Rosehill
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Where Generalists Get Priced: Inside the FDE Role
Daniel asked where an intellectually restless generalist actually gets priced — and refused the lazy answers. The answer has a name: Forward Deployed Engineer, a role born at Palantir in the mid-2010s and exported across Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale AI, Sierra, Harvey, Glean, Mistral, and Databricks. It pays a 30–50% premium over equivalent backend or ML engineers, with senior compensation at frontier labs hitting $485K median and principals crossing a million. But the real question is harder: what separates someone who accumulates knowledge from someone who ships? The two highest-ranked hiring signals aren't knowledge stock at all — they're shipping production code and running a discovery interview without a sales script. We dig into the 47% customer-facing workweek, the "Duane" problem in enterprise AI, and whether this role is a genuine new discipline or a rebrand of integration engineering with a fashionable business card. Key sources: • David Epstein, *Range* (primary author page). — https://davidepstein.com/range/ • Greater Good Berkeley, specialist vs generalist. — https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/is_it_better_to_be_a_specialist_or_a_generalist • Wharton, generalists' team value. — https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wharton-podcast/generalists-vs-specialists/ Episode 5927 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5927 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/144768)
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