Investor Chris Degnan is pouring cold water on one of the buzziest jobs in tech right now: the "forward-deployed" engineer. Popularized by Palantir , the forward-deployed engineer, or FDE, is embedded within a client company, building technology and helping customers apply it from the inside. The model is especially popular in the AI era, as firms race to make their workforces "AI native." Degnan spent over 11 years as Snowflake's chief revenue officer before retiring last year. Now, he works