Like in "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"? Seems like they've just copied a page from an the old book... and this still works, and lots of more competent startups who could do their jobs better will not get those contracts.
- Upton Sinclair
As for getting the ax, that didn't happen to me, but even if it had, I've never had problems finding a job, nor have I ever lived paycheck-to-paycheck. It'd be inconvenient but that's about it.
The first is vague bordering on meaningless and trivially true for any engineer, the second is simply nonsensical without context. It's bullshit in both cases but I'd be much more inclined to ask about the latter, what it even means to deploy an engineer "forwards"?
I found that most forward deployed engineers are in practice deployed ever so slightly off-centre, and you really need to hire a couple of them to make sure it averages out. For tasks sensitive to robustness I sometimes like to stut them between a leftward and a rightward deployed engineer on either side.
How would you compare or contrast, say, EDS or Bloomberg?
I remember thinking that sounds like a good way to build a below-average team that seems very impressive from the outside. When you look at what they're doing, this strategy actually starts to make a lot of sense.
They're selling a product that's somewhat incomprehensible. The value of that product is very difficult to measure, due to both its complexity and the "how do you put a dollar figure on social impact"-factor.
They're selling that product to government agencies, which probably can't properly evaluate that kind of purchase and don't care much about cost or ROI (due to government's inherently inefficient incentive structures). Credentials matter for winning contracts, because if you're the person who makes that decision, credentials and prestige are something tangible you can point to and prove you did your job.
This doesn't sound like the makings of a great respectable tech giant, though. This sounds more like one of those companies built specifically to exploit inefficiencies in government spending.