6 posts tagged with "AI"

TL;DR: Embed with your own company instead of a customer. Replace bloated SaaS with custom tools, get paid a commission on what you save, and skip the salary band entirely.

The forward deployed engineer has become a fixture of modern enterprise sales. You take a sharp engineer, embed them with a prospective customer, let them absorb the workflows and pain points, and have them build a custom solution that closes the deal. Companies like Palantir built empires on this model, and now everyone from AI labs to infrastructure startups is copying the playbook.

But there's a mirror image of this role that almost nobody is talking about - and it might be the single biggest untapped opportunity for ambitious engineers right now. Call it the backwards deployed engineer. Same idea, but pointed inward: instead of embedding with customers to drive revenue, you embed with your own company's departments to eliminate cost. Specifically, the millions of dollars hemorrhaging out the door every year to bloated SaaS contracts.

For the past two decades, if you wanted to build a technology company, you needed engineers. Great ones. Lots of them. Expensive ones.

Engineering was the moat. It was the reason Google could do what Google does. The reason startups raised millions before shipping a single line of code. The reason "we need to hire more engineers" was the answer to almost every problem.

That era is ending.

Growing up in the 90s, the mall was the center of the universe. It wasn't just where you bought sneakers; it was where you hung out, went to the movies, and felt the pulse of the world. Then, almost overnight, the "Retail Apocalypse" happened. Amazon didn't just offer more books; it offered a fundamentally different way to consume.

Lately, I've been getting that same eerie feeling about the software industry. If you look closely, the parallels are everywhere.

SaaS is becoming the new mall. And AI is our Amazon.

Two centuries of industrialization taught us that specialization is king. "Do one thing, and do it well." But the reign of the specialist may be coming to an end.

In fact, what we're witnessing might be less a revolution and more a restoration—a return to an intellectual structure that dominated much of human history.

You know, I've been noticing something lately, and it’s starting to feel… weird. Every email I open, every tweet I scroll past, even the Slack messages pinging away – they're all starting to sound eerily similar. Am I imagining it?

Knowledge is power commodity.
We live in a time where knowledge is no longer a rare, powerful asset—it’s widely available and often free. In this era, knowledge workers must reinvent themselves to stay relevant.