241–250 of 319 posts
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I think this was around 2011-2012 timeframe.
In a tiny fraction of the schools. I hadn't even heard of them while working in a top research university at the time (this was Europe so maybe I was just missing out on a SV circle jerk).
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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.
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What the hell is a "forward deployed engineer" and "business cultivation engineer"? You mean support and sales?
A forward-deployed engineer is a fancy title for an engineer who is stationed permanently onsite at the client, usually with their own dedicated desk/office. A business cultivation engineer is basically a sales engineer responsible for interfacing with and being a technical resource for the client's technical buying team (e.g. IT department).
Not really necessary. The distinction between FDEs and product engineers is that the FDE work is focused on a single deployment, whereas a product engineer works on a single product and is once-removed from actual clients.
Where the FDE spends time and what products he works on depends on the client requirements.
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That would have been a very big assumption http://www.cnbc.com/2014/03/19/free-advice-dont-go-public-sa...
I think Palantir has been overtly committed to avoiding an IPO for a while. Yes, the "liquidity event" mentioned in the article is extremely vague. I'll reach out to my colleagues that are still at Palantir to find out what that actually meant.
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…
A few years ago I sat in on a CS course at Stanford and was able to count 4(!) identical palantir t-shirts on the same day. It was ridiculous, I probably have the picture somewhere.
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So gimmicky and shallow, can't believe this works.
McKinsey flew me and a few other fresh grads to Dubai for a week because I was helping run the entrepreneurs society. 5* hotel, mock case study for 1/3 of the time and the rest tourism. It was a holiday for the McKinsey guys running that thing as well, they appreciated being paid to go waterskiing and BBQing on the beach. For me it was luxury unlike anything I experienced until then - the rooms were so big we had to…
One wonders how a company as rich as McKinsey could have such piss-poor data management. Why not, I dunno, check that the person you're headhunting is already in your database?
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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…
What I've heard is that they pay well for incoming grads, but then no pay raises...ever...and by year 5 you're clawing at the walls for a liquidity event so you can shed your options and get out.
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In a tiny fraction of the schools. I hadn't even heard of them while working in a top research university at the time (this was Europe so maybe I was just missing out on a SV circle jerk).
In Silicon Valley, European schools aren't really considered among the top 10 engineering schools. I'm not saying that's right, just telling you what the perception is.
This article is much more interesting than its fairly predictable headline implies. While the secrecy of Palantir has served as clickbait for many years, there's actually real news in this. And the news is about the difficulties of scaling a services-heavy, on-prem software company that basically rents out forward-deployed engineers at 10s of millions of dollars per year. Especially when the software is an open-sourc…
1) Get expensive contract 2) Drop in junior (riding the fame that you only hire top engineers) 3) Train them on the job and bill the customer 4) Move trained consultant to work on internal project/high value stuff, replace with fresh blood 5) Repeat
I want to see what Palantir actually produces. Like does Coca-Cola get a monthly report that says "Hey, you guys should bring back Cherry Cola in Montana for an expected 4% increase in sales" or what? What does $1mil/month actually get you ?