When Chaos Comes Again: Cheap Freelancing, Burnout, and the Myth of Palantir

When Chaos Comes Again

Lately, every day feels like a wave. Even within a week, so many things have happened that I can barely make sense of them.

During the emotional swings, I usually can't write, not even a short memo. I tend to avoid deep thoughts or any kind of retrospective.
But I know, looking back on those period is necessary, even though it's always painfully hard to do.

So I started to list all the things that had happened for the past two weeks. It was time to start a new project.

Somehow, new work opportunities always appeared just as the previous projects were about to close.
But the problem was that I couldn’t decide what I really wanted to do..

And so, chaos came again.

do you still want to build online brand stores?

Chaos always arrives with a question I’ve been avoiding.

When I started this business, I had this naïve fantasy that it would be possible to solve complex problems, meet clients running authentic brands, and create something beautiful conveying brand messages.

Now, four months later, I see things more clearly.

I realized that the kind of work I dreamed of doing is only possible when I have authority like when I’m trusted enough to suggest and lead ideas. This cannot be coming shortly, it should be the long term goal. But right now, I’m just exhausted from cheap labor, and I don’t feel like doing it anymore.

Still, I can sense what role I could eventually play in this field.
Maybe I can be like a translator, someone who helps bridge what clients want with what can truly express their story. So for now, I’ll just hold this unpleasant feeling and remind myself "it’s temporary feeling".

Encountering Palantir’s FDE Model

The thing that made me most frustrated in the past two weeks was the concept of Palantir's FDE(Forward-Deployed Engineer). I met a CEO who was recruiting for FDE position - benchmarking Palantir. As he described the idea, I searched about it and almost immediately, I felt dizzy. Here's the link of the article I read.

Enter the Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE)- your “special forces” of engineering. Instead of building generic features in a headquarters ivory tower, they parachute directly into a client’s environment, blend into the customer’s team, and build bespoke solutions that make your product indispensable.

By embedding engineers at the customer, you reduce integration risk, shorten time-to-value, and uncover blockers early. FDEs work directly on customer infrastructure—whether on-premise or in the cloud—to ensure seamless integration and minimize risk.

Forward-Deployed Engineering is not just a job title; it’s a strategic weapon.

The overall explanation reminded of my traumatic experience in engineering fields. When I was inside engineering academia, there is no safe zone for me. I could not find a place where I could truly belonged. Maybe it was the male-dominated atmosphere or maybe because I never managed to blend into their worship of technology. I could never understand how technology itself became the purpose.

Just reading the explanation of Palantir model unfortunately brought me back to that time. I may misunderstand their intentions since I've never worked there. But my reaction is instinctive, not logical. It comes from the body.

The so-called “stability” they claim to achieve at the enterprise level is built on fragile human middleware. A handful of engineers are sent out to the field, armed with AI and backup resources, to customize systems in a short time. The single phrase made me feel like an outsider to this world once again. A reminder that I still don’t belong in the system that glorifies this kind of perfection.

There are limits to every human effort. No matter how advanced tech becomes, the illusion that FDE backed with AI can instantly solve everything is still dangerous myth. Real work, real life never finishes neatly. (That’s something I learned the hard way through four months of freelancing.)

The toxic, elite side of engineering glorifies burnout and unrealistic workloads, obsesses over efficiency and perfection, while dismissing sustainable practices, shared responsibilities, and the respect for others. We should keep in mind the limits of being human and work with people, not through them.

Ironic(?) decision

So let's move back to when I met a startup CEO who was mimicking this Palantir model. He offered me a position as a FDE. As I wrote before, I first hated it.

But then I asked myself: what else can I do to make a living? I realized something bitter: I don’t want to work at all. That’s the truth. I don’t want to belong anywhere in this world of reasonable, promising job titles and respectable engineering positions.

I started thinking: how do I deal with this kind of existential crisis?

Even as I felt the urge to quit everything, a small part of me still wanted to be discovered to be seen, valued, named within this capitalism. So I decided to separate what I enjoy doing from what I do to make a living, at least for now. I decided to take the test to become an FDE. A decision I never imagined making before.

If I hadn’t realized that freelancing can so easily become a form of exploitation, I wouldn’t have reached this conclusion. Every experience has somehow helped me take the next step or another choice.

Maybe this is just another ironic twist in my work journey trying to survive in the very system I criticize. But at least this time, I’m watching myself clearly.

While writing this, I stumbled upon a line from MIT Technology Review [Why can’t tech fix its gender problem?]:

The tech industry loves to talk about how it is changing the world. Yet retrograde, gendered patterns and habits have long fueled tech’s extraordinary moneymaking machine. Breaking out of them might ultimately be the most innovative move of all.

Right. So I’m learning how to break away from systems, from illusions, from the way we were taught to survive.