Transitioning from Field to Engineering
At the beginning of July 2021, I transitioned from a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) within the Field Engineering team to a Software Engineer (SWE) on the Execute team. It has been such a journey and I would love to share my experience during the last few months.
Forward Deployed Engineer vs Software Engineer
While sharing the word “Engineer” in both titles, FDEs and SWEs at ActionIQ are actually different in many ways. First, FDEs and SWEs belong to different organizations: FDEs are part of the Professional Services team, whose main responsibility is leveraging features of ActionIQ platform to enable our customers’ business use cases. Software Engineers are with the Engineering team, and are responsible for building our product and infrastructure. As an over-simplification, FDEs are the internal users and operators of ActionIQ, while software engineers are the builders.
Due to differences in responsibilities, the two roles differ in breadth and depth of knowledge of our platform. A typical FDE will gain experience with most components of ActionIQ within 3 months of joining the team. This includes everything from ingest to activations, from creating attributes and audiences from UI to implementing journeys and flight plans, and so on. They will have exposure to the wide range of technologies we use and understand how to leverage them to support and enable our customers. Software Engineers, on the other hand, usually focus on a subset of our product, and build improvements and features around that subset. For example, the Software Engineers on the Activations team focus on integrating with and exporting to different channels, while rarely worrying about how data was ingested.
Making the Move
In April 2021, there was an internal opportunity to transition to the Engineering team. Having been an FDE for over a year, I increasingly felt the urge of diving deeper into our tech stacks and code base: having a breadth of experience with our product is great, but the responsibility of an FDE does not require an in-depth understanding into the code; while some understanding of how certain features are implemented would be definitely helpful, most of my interactions with our code base were limited to updating customer-specific configurations.
With the desire to further grow my technical skills, I applied for the opportunity and passed the interviews. In July 2021, I finally joined the CDP & Execute team, a team that owns:
- Spark Infrastructure — the cornerstone of our proprietary InfiniteCompute capability
- CDP Database — how customer data is stored, processed and exported
- Triggered Activations — our streaming feature that enables real-time customer experience.
With all the differences between the two roles, my moving from Field to Engineering has been a tough, fun and rewarding experience.
Tough and Fun
Admittedly, without prior experience as a Software Engineer, I found it difficult. As an FDE I worked through different technical challenges to help our customers, but understanding how the different pieces of code work together is another level of difficulty. During the first few weeks I was constantly overwhelmed and confused about what I didn’t understand and had to learn. Thankfully, I had great support from the team. Everyone is helpful and knowledgeable, and I have learned a lot from each of them. While things remain difficult, I am slowly getting the hang of it.
As difficult as it can get, learning and coding are always fun. Every new task is a journey from exploring and discovering, to implementing and deploying. During the process I have got a better understanding of how our system works, and improved my skills in coding, debugging and testing.
Bringing from and back to Field
In addition to learning from other engineers, my experience as an FDE gives me a different perspective in terms of how our product can be improved. As mentioned above, FDEs can be thought of as users of our platform — and I’m glad that I am able to bring users’ perspectives to my work as a builder.
On the other hand, as I get to learn more about how everything works under the hood, I have come to better understand the technical challenges I had as an FDE, and how better understanding of the system would have helped me and other FDEs. I am looking forward to working on better enabling FDEs and improving knowledge sharing within ActionIQ.
Journey Ahead
It’s only been a few months since I joined the Engineering team and I have already experienced and learned so much. Now I am more excited about the future than I was when joined, and prepared to embrace bigger challenges and take on more responsibilities!
Thank You
I know not every company offers the flexibility of transitioning within the organization, and I truly appreciate the opportunity. I would like to thank my mentor David, my manager Allen and Execute team members Mitesh and Pete, for supporting me through onboarding and continuously providing feedback to help me grow. Also shouting out to my former Field Engineering manager, George for encouraging me to pursue this opportunity.
