Ben Weisel

I was CPO at Blend before their $4 billion IPO. We rejected the “forward deployed engineer” Palantir model that everyone is copying now. Here’s why: Blend could have followed the forward-deployed engineer approach. Both our CEO and CTO were early Palantir. They'd seen it work. Instead, we built a SaaS product with core components. Move fast, iterate, use data to learn. Not custom code for every client. That Palantir model is having a resurgence. Now Sierra, Decagon, and others are hiring forward-deployed engineers. But it’s not the right approach for every company. It’s fundamentally the wrong answer for Assembled’s customers. Here's what we understand about support teams and why we’re not going the forward deployed route: Customer Support teams are used to getting no resources and no support. On the surface, you'd think they'd be excited about engineers building custom solutions. "Finally, someone's offering us developers!" The reality is support teams are terrified of getting help they can't afford to keep. Support teams are wary because they know the math. They don't have budget for expensive, scarce resources. At some point the shoe drops. The engineers disappear when priorities shift. And custom solutions break. Support is left holding the bag with something they can't maintain. They're resource-starved by design. The idea of a dependency on resources they can't control is terrifying. So instead, the goal should be to give support teams the ability to manage, change, and solve their own problems. Not dependencies on engineers they can't keep. Smart, competent people who teach them to do it themselves. Palantir wasn't even a product company for years. They were a custom development shop with reusable components. Show up, build something bespoke, maybe extract learnings. That's not scalable for any but the largest support teams who need sustainability. Forward-deployed engineers are the new shiny object. I wasn’t a fan of it at Blend. And I’m not a fan today either. What I see in the customer support space is that teams need empowerment, not dependency. I want the teams we work with to be able to say: "I love that you’re partnering with me. And I love that I can do this myself too." That's the difference between building a product and building a consulting practice.

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What does a modern database look like? If we were going to start over with the design of databases, instead of pulling forward the design decisions of the last 40 years, what would we choose to do? It's a huge question, but an important one. In a new blog post, I start to break down some of the changes that have come with modern hardware, including SSDs and the cloud, and how those changes affect database system architecture. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/gYWX3dzR

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As Fred Brooks wrote decades ago: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” Coordination isn’t free. New devs mean onboarding, syncing, and re-aligning. The fastest teams aren’t the biggest, they’re the ones that communicate best.

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It's a big day at Honeycomb! We're announcing major advancements in Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline that unlock a new era of observability—one without tradeoffs. 🔥 Over the past several years, conversations around observability have revolved around challenging tradeoffs: retention versus fidelity, availability versus speed—and always, the constant pressure of cost. With the rise of OpenTelemetry shifting telemetry ownership from vendors to engineering teams, it was no surprise to see telemetry pipelines quickly emerge as essential infrastructure. Yet—as standalone solutions—these pipelines reinforce divisions between the producers and consumes of telemetry data (but this time, more toxically, often within the same organization). Honeycomb is committed to a different approach: deeply integrating telemetry pipelines into the observability experience itself. ✨Enhance✨ is the first step toward this vision, eliminating the traditional tradeoffs in data management. Teams now retain easy, cost effective access to all their telemetry, even (especially! 💥) the bits they didn’t expect to matter. By aligning telemetry data management directly with data usage patterns, we're able to foster positive feedback loops across engineering teams and lay the groundwork for a more integrated, insightful, and collaborative future. Welcome to an era of true lossless observability. It's gonna be exciting. 🚀 Learn more from our press release: https://lnkd.in/dqgCZDyy

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