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Position names are wordplay, but the philosophy behind them is real

· 19 min read · 한국어 원문 읽기 → · 日本語版を読む →

Intro: so how is that different from SI?

Lately I keep seeing a position called FDE in startup job postings in Korea. It stands for Forward Deployed Engineer: an engineer who goes directly into the customer's workplace and builds while solving problems alongside them.

It isn't a brand-new concept. Palantir started working this way in 2006, and it's getting attention again now that AI companies are putting together FDE teams to help customers adopt their products. One analysis found that FDE job postings on LinkedIn grew 42x between 2023 and 2025.

But whenever this position comes up, one question always follows: so how is that different from SI? (In Korea, "SI," short for systems integration, is shorthand for the contract development shops that build custom systems for clients.) I find this question pretty interesting, because it connects to something I've been thinking about for a long time: how startups handle positions.

Startups love inventing new position names

Startups do new things, and they seem to love giving positions new names to match. Growth hacker instead of marketer, People team instead of HR.

The classic example is the CSM, or customer success manager. As I understand it, it's a position created by putting a twist on the traditional customer service rep. The name carries an intention: don't stop at answering inquiries; help customers actually get results with our product. I think that intention itself is a good one.

Of course, there's a counterargument that a CSM isn't just customer service with a new name. Instead of waiting for inquiries, CSMs proactively watch for customer signals and own renewals and expansion revenue, which makes it a different job. I don't think the role is meaningless either. I just see naming a role and actually working the way the name says as two separate problems.

The moment a name becomes an excuse

Frank Slootman, the former chairman of Snowflake, is pretty sharp in his criticism of customer success organizations in his book Amp It Up. His point is that customer success is everyone's job, and that you should fix the root problems in product and support that block customer success rather than using a customer success org as a band-aid.

That passage resonated with me, because I've seen similar scenes often at work. A company creates CSMs because it wants to prioritize customer success, and over time, customer success becomes the thing CSMs handle. And the moment the CSMs stop functioning well, you end up with a strange team where nobody cares about customer success. The name created to get closer to customers ends up being an excuse to drift away from them.

A position is supposed to be a convenient concept that defines the scope of each person's role among people who've gathered to achieve the organization's goals. It's what people usually call R&R: a device for deciding what this person needs to do for it to count as results. But more often than you'd think, that boundary turns into a wall that says "my job stops here."

On the flip side, the point that "everyone's job" easily ends up being nobody's job is also valid. It's hard for a salesperson to close new deals and also look after what happens after the contract, and some push back that Slootman's argument came out of the special environment of Snowflake, a company whose product fit the market very well. So I'm not in the camp that says get rid of dedicated positions. I'm in the camp that says the dangerous moment is when the existence of a dedicated owner justifies everyone else's indifference.

In soccer, everyone started as a striker

Blue Lock, a manga I like, tells it this way: soccer started with all 11 players as forwards. When an incredible forward appeared, defenders were created to stop him, and midfielders were created to help him, and that's how positions split up.

I got curious and looked it up, and the actual history isn't that different. Early soccer in the 1870s used formations like 1-1-8, almost all forwards, and the balanced 2-3-5 formation didn't spread until the 1890s. Positions weren't fixed from the start; they split off whenever they were needed.

So what if we got rid of positions altogether? Some companies have actually tried. Zappos, the US online shoe retailer, adopted holacracy in 2015, eliminating ranks and titles, and about 18% of its workforce left in the process. Completely eliminating positions wasn't the answer either.

That specialization raises productivity is also a long-standing conclusion in economics. So I don't take issue with dividing up positions in itself. Defenders in soccer came about because they were needed. What I want to say is this: the fact that defenders exist doesn't mean the rest of the players get to skip defending.

I once wrote in a short post, Anyone can be a striker, that I disliked the analogy comparing sales, marketers and CSMs to forwards, midfielders and defenders. Back then I said a team where everyone is a striker beats one with clumsy position divisions. Now my thinking has settled a bit: divide the positions, but make sure everyone shares the reason each position was created.

A position name carries a philosophy and an attitude

So yes, I think position names are, to a degree, wordplay. But the philosophy and attitude that get packed in the moment a name is chosen aren't wordplay. If anything, they're the most essential part.

Let's go back to FDE and SI. On the surface, both involve going to a client company and doing custom development. But people who talk about FDE point to the differences: an FDE doesn't just work around the product's limitations discovered in the field, but feeds them back into the core product so the next customer benefits too, and is evaluated on the results the customer got rather than the hours put in.

In the end, I think the name FDE is closer to a device that gives authority to the people doing this work and signals that this is now the right way to work. There's evidence that names change people's attitudes, too. One study found that when employees were allowed to create their own job titles reflecting the value of their work, emotional exhaustion decreased.

Actually, diving into the customer's workplace isn't new. Toyota has long emphasized the principle of genchi genbutsu, go to the actual place and see the actual thing, and Coupang (Korea's largest e-commerce company) reportedly built its Rocket Delivery service early on with a team that had no logistics experience and designed the system by going into the field and figuring it out hands-on. Where companies once covered this kind of effort with capital and headcount, AI is now dramatically lowering the cost. And because AI products are hard to prove valuable until they're plugged into the customer's actual work, not going into the field has become a serious liability. That, I think, is the backdrop for why the name FDE has resurfaced.

Of course, there's criticism that FDE is ultimately just an expensive labor service, and a device for locking customers into one company's system. It's also worth keeping in mind that a large share of the explanations of FDE come from companies selling FDE services. So if it's FDE in name only and the discoveries from the field don't make it back into the product, then it's literally just SI with a new name. Whether you actually live up to the philosophy in the name is what separates the two.

Two traps that positions create

The reason I've gone on about this at length is that I think there are two traps that repeat every time a new position appears.

The first is deifying the position. Like believing customer problems will be solved just by hiring FDEs: expecting that if you import the name, the way of working will follow. But a name is only a vessel for a philosophy, and without an environment to work according to that philosophy, a new name quickly loses its shine.

The second is the attitude of drawing a line: "that's not my position." The moment people think the customer's workplace is the FDE's job and customer success is the CSM's job, the existence of a dedicated owner becomes an excuse for everyone else to take their hands off.

Some will push back that expecting everyone to look after everything isn't realistic. So what I hope for isn't an organization where everyone does the same job, but one where positions are divided and everyone shares the reason each one was created. In soccer terms, a team where the forwards run back when defending and the defenders push up to the goal when the chance comes.

When I see a new position name, instead of asking how it's different from SI, I'm going to try asking this question first. What attitude toward work does this name promise, and does that promise have anything to do with me, even though it isn't my position?

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