Career path and the shape of compensation
Read an FDE offer line by line — base, equity, travel, on-site share, no quota — and choose the path the role leads to from evidence the job produces.
On this page
An FDE offer has five lines that vary between companies: base, equity, travel, the share of days on site, and a quota, which in this column should read "none". The shape of each line holds across companies and years; a figure goes stale within months, so this lesson gives no figures. It ends with the four paths the role leads to and the evidence that says which one fits.
Note, checked 2026-10-17: this lesson deliberately states no salary, equity or bonus figures. Before you sign, consult current levels data (self-reported compensation by company, level and city) for the exact title and level in your offer, and compare like with like.
The five lines
Base. The fixed part, set by level and location. The level is the lever, not the number. The FDE title is new at many companies, so ask which engineering level it maps to and where the base sits in that level's band. An offer at the bottom of a band has room to grow in place; one at the top grows only by promotion.
Equity. The line that varies most between companies. Read it as units, times a price per unit the company states, set on a date, vesting on a schedule; assume four years with a one-year cliff, a common shape, though your letter states its own. A grant quoted only as a value, with no units and no price date, cannot be compared with anything.
Travel. Usually paid by the employer in money, and always by you in hours and nights, which the next section counts.
On-site share. The fraction of working days at the customer. It is never flat across a pilot. The week in the role was two days of five on site in week 3, but discovery weeks and rollout weeks run higher and build weeks lower, so the average in the offer understates the peak you will live.
Quota. None. The FDE's Success cell in the role table is that the customer is live, using it, and renews. Pay tied to bookings is the sales engineer's measure, "quota attached"; pay tied to hours billed is the consultant's. If either appears in the offer, the job is in that column whatever its title says, and you will be pulled toward that column's answer every time it conflicts with the customer's number. A bonus tied to company or team results is a different thing; ask what it is measured on.
Count the on-site share in hours
The mistake is to read "around 40% on site" as a mild inconvenience and sign. Convert it to days, nights and hours before deciding anything.
Assume 46 working weeks a year after leave and holidays, so 230 working days. At 40% on site that is 92 days at the customer. If the customer is a flight or a long train away, each on-site stint is one round trip and a night away for each day but the last. Two days a week is one trip a week and one night: 46 trips and 46 nights. Assume four hours door to door each way. That is 46 × 8 = 368 hours of travel a year, about nine 40-hour weeks, and none of it shows up in the 40%.
The average still hides the part you will feel, which is the peak. An 8-week pilot runs on site most in weeks 1–2 (discovery, four days a week) and weeks 6–8 (rollout and handover, three days), and least in weeks 3–5 (building, two days). That is 4 + 4 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 3 = 23 days of 40, a 58% average, with a peak of 80% in the first fortnight. An offer that says "about 50%" is consistent with that pilot, and a candidate who has only heard the 50% is surprised in week 1.
Reading an offer, line by line
A typical letter in shape: base at a stated level, a grant of units on a four-year schedule, "travel as required", "on-site per engagement", no variable pay. Four questions go back before signing, one per line that can move:
- Which engineering level does this map to, and where in that level's band is the base?
- What price per unit is the grant stated at, when was that price set, and what do I keep if I leave before the cliff?
- At the peak of a deployment, how many days a week on site, and for how many weeks a year?
- Is any part of pay, now or at review, tied to bookings, renewals or hours billed?
"Travel as required" is the line to get rewritten, because it is the only one that cannot be priced. An answer like "two days a week on average, four in the first two weeks of a pilot, three to four pilots a year" can be converted into nights with the arithmetic above; "as required" cannot.
Then compare like with like: two offers at different levels are not comparable on base, nor two grants priced eighteen months apart on equity.
Where the role leads
Senior FDE. Staying in the column and taking the hardest accounts: the first customer in a new segment, where nothing is in a field note yet. The evidence is that your deployments with the least prior material went live on their dates.
Product. You already do the PM's discovery, at depth, at one customer at a time; the field note is a draft of a spec. The evidence is how many of your field notes became rows on the product's prioritisation sheet. The PM course's lesson on the two columns shows what that conversion looks like from the other side.
Solutions leadership. Running several FDEs across several customers, where the unit of work becomes the deployment playbook and the measure becomes time to live across customers. The evidence is that the second deployment you ran on a system was shorter because of what the first one wrote down: 40 engineer-days becoming about 30, as the role's origin lesson works through.
Founding. Five customers with the same last-mile gap and no product filling it is a market, seen from inside. The evidence is a field note that repeated across customers and was never picked up.
In an interview
The recruiter screen asks for your expectations; the hiring manager asks how you feel about travel and where you see yourself in three years. What is being tested is whether you know what the job costs you and have chosen it anyway. For compensation, ask for the level before you name anything. For travel, answer in days with a peak: "two days a week is fine, four for the first fortnight of a pilot is fine, four every week of the year is not." For three years, name the evidence that would move you: "leading deployments, once the second one I run is shorter than the first".
The mistake that loses points is answering the travel question with "I'm flexible". The hiring manager has watched engineers leave at month four over travel they agreed to without counting it, and "flexible" says you have not counted. A number with a peak says you have.
Check yourself
1. Offer A says "about 40% on site". Offer B says "two days a week, four in the first two weeks of each pilot, four pilots a year". Which is more travel, and what do you ask of A?
B, worked: 46 weeks at two days is 92 days, plus two extra days in each of 8 discovery weeks, 16 more, so 108 days, about 47%. A's 40% is 92 days but says nothing about the peak. Ask A the question B already answered: days a week in the first fortnight of a pilot, and pilots a year. Until A answers, B is the offer you can actually price.
2. An offer's only variable line is "an annual bonus tied to utilisation". Accept the shape, or ask?
Ask, because utilisation is billable hours over available hours, which is the consultant's Success cell: the deliverable accepted, hours billed. A bonus on it pays you to log hours at the customer, including the hours that do not move the customer's number. Ask what the review measures; if the answer is renewals and time to live, the bonus line is mislabelled and should be rewritten before you sign.
3. After four years and seven deployments you have two internal offers, product manager and lead for a team of five FDEs. Nine of your field notes became roadmap rows; your second deployment on the same policy system took 31 engineer-days against the first's 41. Decide.
Both pieces of evidence are real, so compare their size. Nine rows from seven deployments is better than one per deployment, strong evidence that you write notes the product can use. The 41 to 31 is a 24% cut, close to the 25% (40 to 30) a good field note buys on its own, so it shows you can shorten a deployment, not that you can make five other engineers do so. Take the product role, unless the team-lead offer comes with a second deployment someone else ran from your notes in less time; that would be the evidence for leadership.