Should FDE candidates write publicly about their projects? It helps once someone is already checking you out

FDE Times looks at whether public write-ups help engineers land forward deployed roles. It starts from a Robert Half survey in which 67% of US HR leaders said reviewing AI-generated CVs has slowed hiring, which pushes employers toward evidence they can verify rather than polished documents.

The piece draws on The Pragmatic Engineer's observation that FDE employers want solid software engineering foundations, and that some, such as Commure and Matta, also value hands-on experience shipping a project end to end. Its advice: build one complete project with a real cloud deployment, API endpoints, basic authentication and logs, and document it with an architecture diagram, run instructions and known limitations.

The article is candid that a blog link on a CV rarely gets read, citing Hacker News accounts that referrals and CVs alike get little attention. The payoff comes later: a write-up explaining why you added a queue, how you cleaned messy customer fields and how you handled mistakes gives an interviewer concrete material to dig into, and that kind of answer is hard for AI to fake.

For engineers moving into FDE work, the takeaway is to document deployments, not demos, and to treat writing as a way to learn and to be trusted once someone is already looking at you.