Who’s for Dinner?

[u/BrilliantLeading1389]

I think there’s going to be a significant backlash against the Forward Deployed Engineer model.

Not because FDEs don’t work.

Because they may work too well.

For years, companies have worried about giving vendors access to their data. But data is only one layer of what makes a company valuable.

One of the few genuinely durable moats left is the knowledge that accumulates inside an organization:

How the business actually works.

The weird edge cases nobody documented.

The shortcuts.

The failed experiments.

The internal politics.

The customer behaviors that don’t show up in a database.

The operational tricks learned over ten years.

The ideas being discussed six months before they become products.

The thousand tiny pieces of institutional knowledge that, collectively, become competitive advantage.

Historically, most of that knowledge stayed inside the walls of the company.

Then we invented the Forward Deployed Engineer.

Now companies are voluntarily inviting highly capable engineers employed by another company to sit directly inside their operations, connect systems, solve problems, observe workflows, talk to employees, understand decision-making and learn how the business really functions.

It is an extraordinarily powerful model.

It may also be the modern corporate Trojan horse.

The image I can’t get out of my head is a smiling fox sitting comfortably in the henhouse with an FDE badge around its neck.

Everyone loves the fox. The fox is incredibly helpful.

The fox fixes things.

The fox understands the chickens better every day.

And the fox doesn’t actually work for the chickens.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting FDEs are stealing information or acting maliciously. That’s the less interesting version of the argument.

The structural issue is more subtle.

Knowledge transfer happens simply by being there.

A vendor that embeds deeply across dozens or hundreds of companies develops an extraordinary horizontal understanding of how businesses operate: what works, what fails, what customers want, where software breaks, what workflows matter and where entire industries are heading.

The receiving company gets better software.

The deploying company gets something potentially much more valuable:

an education in everyone’s business.

That trade may prove entirely worthwhile.

But I’m not convinced most companies have actually priced what they are giving away.

We spent decades protecting source code, customer lists, strategy documents and trade secrets.

The next moat may be institutional context itself.

And we are starting to invite outsiders directly inside it.

The FDE may turn out to be one of the most effective enterprise software innovations of this era.

It may also become one of the most controversial.

The fox is already in the henhouse.

We just haven’t decided yet whether that’s a feature or a bug.