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Inside Palantir

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Re: Inside Palantir

#211

Post by hkmurakami »

bane wrote: post #148

I 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 tha…

They hire like a consultancy. Your topline scales linearly with the staff you can ship out to client sites.

Re: Inside Palantir

#212

Post by ParanoidSP »

hkmurakami wrote: post #208
arkades wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a budgetary issue. Generally the consultants are brought in to bring about a conclusion that the managerial team already decided upon. The expense and prestige of the consulting firm now backs this conclusion with sunk cost fallacy, and the managerial team has political leverage to push forward with their plan. And, if it fails, political cover.

And to that end, the elite degrees confer a sense of authority and prestige. Additionally, "sounding smart" is a skill that such students have cultivated over the years in addition to but independent of possibly also being smart.

Huh, that got a bit convoluted near the end.

Re: Inside Palantir

#213

Post by _tpzm »

callmeed wrote: post #60

My 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…

Yes, it's consulting. Palantir has done an amazing job branding itself as a product company even tho it's mostly not, and for a long time, up to ~1000 employees in 2012, branding itself as a startup. A surprising number of my friends and classmates (Stanford '12/'13) ended up working there.

Stanford emails out a jobs summary for each graduating class. For 2013 graduates the #1 most common job title was Forward Deployed Engineer lol

--

Calling Palantir a "sweatshop" when the starting salaries are six figures is ridiculous.

There are 8 billion people in the world, and a lot of them actually do work long hours for a few USD a day with next to no rights.

Say you took a job at Palantir because you bought into the hype about fixing government. Now you work with some smart people and the pay and perks are pretty strong, but you find yourself doing consulting type work and feel unfulfilled. Maybe youre helping some large fund manager migrate off of Oracle DB or something.

The solution is to find more important work. Something you really care about. Something that directly helps at least a few of the 7.9b people out there who are less lucky than you.

Re: Inside Palantir

#214

Post by jonathankoren »

dbt00 wrote: post #203
forrestthewoods wrote: post #141

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.

I worked at Palantir for over 7 years, and that doesn't sound like any of the projects I knew about or any of the people that I worked with.

While I'll defer to you about what people you know, I don't understand how that doesn't sound like any Palantir product you know. It's the core product. When it's sold commercially it's used to find people committing fraud, and those people could be arrested, put on trial, and if found by a jury of their peers to have committed the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, thrown in jail for a number of years. When it's sold to militaries and intelligence agencies it's used to make kill lists.[0] Don't delude yourself into thinking that it's founding wasn't to algorithmically create kill lists, because it founded in 2004 with funding from the CIA specifically to bring "big data analysis" to the "War on Terror".

It's a scummy company. And if there's any doubt don't forget, they were implicated with HBGary in a dirty tricks plot against Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald after the the scope of NSA mass surveillance was starting to be uncovered.[1][2]

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveals...

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-wikileaks-apology-20... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-wikileaks-2011-2?op=...

Re: Inside Palantir

#215

Post by puranjay »

DasIch wrote: post #86
sharkweek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm sure plenty of people might disagree with my sentiment, I feel Gawker had a shot at this back in the day when they had Neetzan Zimmerman writing all the "viral" articles and bringing in some majority percentage of the daily PVs. This then gave room for others to do some great/interesting journalism.

Buzzfeed can credibly do investigative journalism because despite all the clickbait, they maintain a good reputation. Gawker on the other hand is the Trump of journalism, absolutely shameless, willing to do and say anything for clicks. No amount of investigative journalism will ever allow them to free themselves of the hole they dug themselves into.

Yeah because for all the flak it gets, Buzzfeed's "trash" content is very benign. Cat GIFs might be annoying, but they are nowhere near harmful, unlike the kind of crap Gawker pulls off

Re: Inside Palantir

#216

Post by palandick »

There seems to be a lot of confusion here so let me clear up some things from my former several years at Palantir.

1) Palantir's product is a legitimate product that works quite well for many graph analysis use cases. If you can model your problem as a graph, chances are that Palantir will help you find some solid insights (if there are insights to be found) across your 15 disparate datasets. Software Engineers build the core platform.

2) Forward Deployed Engineers customize and extend the platform for specific client use cases and get client data into Palantir. If these customizations end up being useful, they get rolled into the core platform(ideally).

3) Palantir works their engineers very hard and the performance bar is very high. Calling it an engineering mill/sweatshop is a bit much considering you get 3 meals/day, massages, chiropractic, nap rooms, excellent events, laundry, etc and 6 figure salaries or massive stock or both.

4) Lots of people have been leaving. Part of this is because lots of oldies are hitting their 10 year marks and part of it is because Palantir went through a massive growth spurt over the last 4 years or so and now the fat is being trimmed/people are leaving after concluding that it wasn't a good fit/they don't want to work that much. If you can get into Palantir, you can get into Google: Why not go to Google?

5) If you want to see the actual product, just look around. Here are like 150 examples: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCA98B156F7EFD6A0

6) The bookings vs revenue thing is pretty deceptive but everyone knows that the money isn't real until its in your bank account or there's a signed contract for it to be in your account.

Re: Inside Palantir

#217

Post by triplesec »

palandick wrote: post #216

There seems to be a lot of confusion here so let me clear up some things from my former several years at Palantir. 1) Palantir's product is a legitimate product that works quite well for many graph analysis use cases. If you can model your problem as a graph, chances are that Palantir will help you find some solid insights (if there are insights to be found) across your 15 disparate datasets. Software Engineers build…

From your description, this is a classic Accenture-style (and Bain and other strategic) consulting and systems integration business model, though possibly with higher quality work, based on that latest management buzzphrase Big Data. Whether it can provide the perceived value of a BCG of McKinsey is another matter.

Re: Inside Palantir

#218

Post by gaius »

hueving wrote: post #202
callmeed wrote: post #60

My 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…

This is essentially a consulting company, which are heavy on name recognition and having pedigreed talent. It's pretty antithetical to the spirit of silicon valley IMO and is something much more typical of NY.

Or DC or Boston.

Re: Inside Palantir

#219

Post by triplesec »

laxatives wrote: post #83
twoodfin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not clear exactly what that old company of yours did, and its putative value proposition for clients. Remove a button, where for what? Very curious!

Re: Inside Palantir

#220

Post by gaius »

bkjelden wrote: post #124

20% annualized turnover does not seem alarming for a company in the valley that hires mostly fresh college grads. That implies an average length of tenure of 5 years. Very few college grads that I know stay at their first job for 5 years.

The average doesn't tell the true story tho'. If you have a few old-timers in management but a majority of engineers churning in a year, then your product is mainly being worked on by people who never get fully up to speed on your codebase, supervised by people who haven't programmed in years.
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