161–170 of 319 posts
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Do you have any recent pictures of the products?
You can find some public stuff here: https://dribbble.com/palantir I don't have anything else to point you to unfortunately.
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So gimmicky and shallow, can't believe this works.
Yeah but I was a Sophomore or Junior in college and I remember feeling super awesome and important. These kinds of things play with your ego especially if you're not mature enough to have ever experienced something like it before.
I'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 pit…
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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.
[1] NMP: Not My Problem
[2] CYA: Cover Your Ass
[3] OPM: Other Peoples' Money
[4] Profit!
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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.
>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. Do we actually have any data on Palantir's hiring practices? Because my personal anecdata is that I have a friend working there and he's from a tier 2 school (University of Toronto, maybe even tier 3?).
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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.
>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. Do we actually have any data on Palantir's hiring practices? Because my personal anecdata is that I have a friend working there and he's from a tier 2 school (University of Toronto, maybe even tier 3?).
[1] https://www.paysa.com/company-rank#!companies=Google:::Airbn...
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In addition to building dashboards, integrating data and maintaining a data pipeline made up most of what I did as a commercial Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) intern. From what I've seen, this is what most FDEs do. Software engineers, business cultivation engineers, and people in other positions do other things, and I don't know what FDEs outside of the commercial umbrella do. I think your assessment is correct,…
My understanding is that the userfacing tool is still the ancient Java tool Palantir's been hawking since what, 2006? and that the several HTML5 rewrites haven't worked well [1]. Am I hopelessly out of date? 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cajoFN6yjB0
Most BI tools are based around tabular data and charting (i.e. Tableau). But Gotham is the best tool I've seen for exploring graphical (i.e. nodes + edges) data.
The only other thing in the space worth using is IBM's Analyst's Notebook. That's why Palantir (including Shyam Sankar, quoted in the OP) used some dirty tricks [0] to undercut i2, the company (later acquired by IBM) that developed Analyst's Notebook.
[0] - http://documents.jdsupra.com/3d375dfd-be30-471c-b346-bf434f8...
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AFAIK, that was always the plan. You need a huge audience to have the revenue to do great journalism online, and one of the few proven ways to build that audience is with clickbait and listicles. So while it may seem like Buzzfeed has a split personality, it's very much intentional.
Its not a crazy business model. My early stage company gets nearly all of its revenue from a product no one in engineering has touched in over a year, which funds some more intensive and risky product development. Similarly, DuoLingo has a foundation in teaching languages while building up a large supervised data set for machine translation. A lot of companies are basically fronts for getting average folks to either…
The problem with Palantir is the following: Three letter agencies are paying and will continue to pay for Palantir consulting and products. However Palantir has been unable to fully productize their solution (it is still pretty much consulting). Thus they have hard time convincing Fortune 500 companies to pay due to the costs and depending too much on human interaction.
> unable to fully productize their solution In my experience with this type of problem, it happens due to a failure of vision and leadership. The software company focuses a vast majority of resources on POCs and "consulting" revenue (really, rent-a-coder revenues) and these "consultants" end up failing as product innovators (i.e. they contribute practically nothing to the productization or even harnessing of institut…
You hit the nail on the head, though I would also highlight this from the article:
>But Kimberly-Clark was getting cold feet by early 2016. In January, a year after the initial pilot, Kimberly-Clark executive Anthony J. Palmer said he still wasn’t ready to sign a binding contract, meeting notes show. Palmer also “confirmed our suspicion” that a primary reason Kimberly-Clark had not moved forward was that “they wanted to see if they could do it cheaper themselves,” Kelt told colleagues in January.
My own experience (small, not a big-5 at all) with Management Consulting, and following the sales and execution process, was many times this issue. Providing enough information and value to get FURTHER engagements, with many clients seeing "20% increase in savings is better then $xM a year to $firm" (our little firm).
Additionally, our company was used as a cudgel against procurement contracts, such as telecom, wherein, if we are brought in, perhaps the 5 year $30M telecom deal would create a cost decrease of 45-55%, so, the incumbent immediately shaved 20% off of the renewal contract, and the company did not engage with our firm further.
telecom and IT procurement savings normally dealing with CFO's/CIO's at $1b-$5b companies. Engagements from 3-8 months standard, with a few at several years. Every contract was a big fight of the above push and pull.