I know a few people who have worked for Palantir. They all agree it doesn't work. They all quit because Palantir data analysis is being used to ruin lives (throw people in jail) and they believe the whole operation to be a giant defrauding of the government.
Inside Palantir
141–150 of 319 posts
Re: Inside Palantir
#142My understanding is that Palantir is running an engineering mill/sweatshop using fresh out of school CS grads (particularly from Stanford). That much of their time is spent simply writing client-specific code that imports and cleans up data from disparate enterprise systems. That its not challenging, innovating, or exciting. Of course this is all anecdotal based on what I've heard from friends and a Palantir engineer…
So Palantir offers expensive custom-coded ETL? Awesome.
Re: Inside Palantir
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that that work doesn't require a top CS degree. Palantir could easily achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads, but because they only take Stanford/Princeton/MIT/etc, they can justify their high prices to clients. It's classic consulting - McKinsey/Bain/BCG could achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads instead of Harvard/Wharton grads at lower salaries, but you gotta wow the clients to win the jobs.
What strikes me is when the clients know this to be true, but don't actually care. They have a budget and they need to spend it! Looking forward to the day when the market catches up to them.
The way it works is like this -- consultants like these have to have a good reputation. They are effectively the sacrificial goats to absorb failure. If the project fails everyone can say "but we had the best of the best doing this, if they failed, surely nobody could have done it better". In that model it makes sense to hire the most prestigious candidates.
Also remember clients also have their own bosses, board of directors, investors and supervisors to answer to.
It seems with Palantir it worked well with CIA. If you ever sold anything to Uncle Sam, you know he loves to pay lots of money and then pretty often it ends up not being used or forgotten. Guess they tried that with a few big companies but found out that Coca-Cola is not as careless with its budget as Uncle Sam, and \had a hard time convincing them to just throw away tens of millions on some analytics thing.
Re: Inside Palantir
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I quit Palantir after 6 months in 2011; I am a CMU CS grad and I worked at Google for 5 years before Palantir. Their pitches of "We only hire the best and brightest" and "Our work truly changes the world" sold me on them.
Pretty lame pitch. Yeah help coca-cola sell more sugar water. I guess that does change the world. Also best/brightest worship needs to stop. It correlates to nothing. This coming from MIT/harvard grad.
Right. As soon as I hear mission statement bullshit from a company, I plot the mental exit strategy. Amazing how those Jedi mind tricks work on the supposedly "best and brightest". I could see it working for a cancer research or fusion energy team, but work focusing clicking on ads or spying on people as a mission is bullshit that you cant polish from my perspective.
Re: Inside Palantir
#145"The company, based in Palo Alto, California, is essentially a hybrid software and consulting firm, placing what it calls “forward deployed engineers” on-site at client offices."
This says everything about Palantir, and depending on your perspective, their valuation is (not) justified.
It's justified if you think of the equation Palantir = McKinsey + IBM. On the other hand, no consulting firm should have 20x revenue multiple.
Re: Inside Palantir
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that that work doesn't require a top CS degree. Palantir could easily achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads, but because they only take Stanford/Princeton/MIT/etc, they can justify their high prices to clients. It's classic consulting - McKinsey/Bain/BCG could achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads instead of Harvard/Wharton grads at lower salaries, but you gotta wow the clients to win the jobs.
What strikes me is when the clients know this to be true, but don't actually care. They have a budget and they need to spend it! Looking forward to the day when the market catches up to them.
It's part of the cowardice game.
How do you both take credit when you succeed and avoid blame when you fail?
You take an action that's easy to justify by external validity factors. If you succeed, you made the call, you take the credit. If you fail, you justify it using external validity factors ("they're one of SV's most valued companies! they only hire Stanford graduates!") to indicate there's no way anyone else could have done better.
Re: Inside Palantir
#147I'm actually surprised that Palatir paid below market rates. I heard they paid well above market rates, which justified their stance of never going public.
I hadn't heard that either. Their reputation in the DC area is that the generally pay market rate, although I think part of their recruitment strategy is that they're less stodgy than the other big defense contractors. (I.e. "we're a software company in the defense/intelligence space, not a defense/intelligence company that does software".) Not sure if that's really true as I've never worked there, but that's the pitch.
Re: Inside Palantir
#148I don't think this is all that surprising. If you look at their staffing numbers and their fundraises, they appear to not be sustaining business but just growing staff because that's what startups do.
> Lisa Gordon, said that “the majority of the company’s customer relationships are multiple years in length, and many are as long as 10 years.”
This is not good at all. Customer loyalty is important, but considering that they've been adding staff at a fast rate, most of their customers should be new-ish.
They've raised about $2.5b over an incredible number of rounds (multiple per year), and are currently bringing in about $420m.
Based on my understanding, they message as a software seller, but appear to make most of that revenue off of consulting and integration services tied around their software lock-in. They also message as a big-data company, but AFAIK don't provide anything that would be called "big data solutions" these days.
edit: I thought Sankar's name sounded familiar, turns out he was the guy at the very heart of Palantir's very embarrassing industrial espionage and racketeering efforts against a competitor. He was apparently punished by being promoted to company president.
http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/16/palantirs-third-black-eye-...
Re: Inside Palantir
#149Apparently they're not doing well. Good riddance. Palantir is creepy as hell. For all the snark about how startups and places like Apple are run like cults, like in The Circle, Palantir is the one outfit I know of where the stereotype is really true. And in the post-Snowden world where we know for sure just how all-devouring the US intelligence's community's desires are regarding our privacy, the last thing we need i…
Sure it's creepy, but there's also something else I've been suspecting about all this surveillance for years: it doesn't really work. Moral, ethical, and political problems aside is mass surveillance snake oil? Is there really any credible evidence that mass surveillance has stopped any significant terror attacks? Can you really find needles in haystacks reliably without drowning in false positives?
Mass surveillance isn't about being able to spy on everybody, it's about being able to spy on anybody. That's basically what companies like Palantir facilitate. If you work there, you may be a bad person, and you should probably feel bad.
I watched "All the President's Men" on Amazon last night. Through practically every scene, I couldn't help thinking, What if people like this had the technology to keep from getting caught?
It would (will) be a very different movie, to say the least.
Re: Inside Palantir
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
You hear quite a bit about Bay Area companies paying top dollar for fresh CS graduates from top ranked schools. I wonder what compels a Stanford CS grad to take a job doing non-exciting work with a company that prides itself on paying below market rate. Maybe it's the code names?
I interviewed there a few years ago. I can tell you that at least at the time the impression given during the interviews was that of a deep, intellectually enriching place. Mostly everyone I talked to went to Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, or a similarly ranked school. Many of those not straight out of school had come from Google or Facebook. The interview questions were among the hardest and most technically demandi…
Reminds me of "The Firm".