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NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

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Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#21

Post by nitrogen »

svendisnigh wrote: post #13

Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing). Their genius lied in creating "mythical image" and cleverly overselling it to the less proficient government agencies (apparently NSA was smart enough to see through the ruse). And then in turn sell the "spooky/mysterious" image to bunch of naive Stanford/Berkeley undergrads and convince them to work for peanuts. Sadly in 2017, their tech stack is falling apart, t…

Swing isn't actually bad if you have a good look-and-feel. Easier to design a Swing UI than a webapp with similar functionality.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#22

Post by kendallpark »

Latty wrote: post #20
kendallpark wrote: post #14

> The department has created a new system to replace Palantir. > The new system, named Cobalt, is a group of IBM products tied together with NYPD-created software. You really have to wonder about the quality of this internal product. From what I've gleaned about Palantir over the years, they supposedly have one of the hardest dev interview processes. People that work there are on top of their game. My gut feel is tha…

> From what I've gleaned about Palantir over the years, they supposedly have one of the hardest dev interview processes. I was working for a competitor when they tried to get me on board as one of their "forward deployed software engineers" - which appeared to be a lot of big talk for hiring a bunch of recent grads and burning them out pumping out menial interfaces for customers so they would feel they were getting v…

From what I've heard, the "forward deployed software engineers" is a misleading position that gets software devs to work not software dev jobs.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#23

Post by jasonkolb »

tp3z4u wrote: post #10

Wouldn't it be hilarious if their secret sauce analysis turns out to be a secret backchannel to the CIA/NSA and not some fancy algorithm.

Don't know why you're being downvoted for this, it's actually pretty smart. Like leaking an unsubstantiated rumor to a reporter but probably with more legal ramifications.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#24

Post by Zigurd »

nitrogen wrote: post #21
svendisnigh wrote: post #13

Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing). Their genius lied in creating "mythical image" and cleverly overselling it to the less proficient government agencies (apparently NSA was smart enough to see through the ruse). And then in turn sell the "spooky/mysterious" image to bunch of naive Stanford/Berkeley undergrads and convince them to work for peanuts. Sadly in 2017, their tech stack is falling apart, t…

Swing isn't actually bad if you have a good look-and-feel. Easier to design a Swing UI than a webapp with similar functionality.

The problem with Swing is that everything in Swing looks like a dog's breakfast and nobody under 40 knows how to use it.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#25

Post by winter_blue »

svendisnigh wrote: post #13

Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing). Their genius lied in creating "mythical image" and cleverly overselling it to the less proficient government agencies (apparently NSA was smart enough to see through the ruse). And then in turn sell the "spooky/mysterious" image to bunch of naive Stanford/Berkeley undergrads and convince them to work for peanuts. Sadly in 2017, their tech stack is falling apart, t…

What's outdated about Java/Swing? Java 8 is a fairly decent language, and Swing isn't bad. In fact the entire suite of JetBrains IDEs (WebStorm, PyCharm, IntelliJ, Android Studio, ReSharper, etc) have their UI implemented in Swing.

I suppose they could have used Kotlin, Scala, Haskell, or some other more language with a more advanced type system. But it would have been truly horrible had they written their back-end in an awful (dynamically typed) language like JavaScript or something.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#26

Post by freehunter »

svendisnigh wrote: post #16
kendallpark wrote: post #14

> The department has created a new system to replace Palantir. > The new system, named Cobalt, is a group of IBM products tied together with NYPD-created software. You really have to wonder about the quality of this internal product. From what I've gleaned about Palantir over the years, they supposedly have one of the hardest dev interview processes. People that work there are on top of their game. My gut feel is tha…

Anyone can have hardest dev interview process, but that's a poor measure of ability to develop software. Palantir is just another Theranos in disguise, it essentially sells an under-performing graph database with outdated visualization tools while making money providing consulting services using "Forward Deployed (OMG!! You mean like soldiers! /s) Software Engineers".

Often a hard dev interview process is designed to week out undesirable employees, like ones who will demand vacation, time off, normal working hours, etc. I interviewed at a software place in a big engineering college town and their interview was built like a college exam and asked questions that senior-level students would know, but you'd have forgotten within a few years because you'd never use that information in the real world. It was obvious they wanted to hire people who are used to sleeping in dorms/libraries/desks, used to staying up all night, motivated by an authority figure telling them something is important, people who didn't have families or high expectation on salaries. You know: college students.

It's a hard interview for us because it's built like a college exam, and how many years has it been since we've taken a college exam? But their target audience, well they just finished midterms.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#27

Post by Maxious »

kendallpark wrote: post #14

> The department has created a new system to replace Palantir. > The new system, named Cobalt, is a group of IBM products tied together with NYPD-created software. You really have to wonder about the quality of this internal product. From what I've gleaned about Palantir over the years, they supposedly have one of the hardest dev interview processes. People that work there are on top of their game. My gut feel is tha…

IBM acquired a company called i2 in 2011 that already was a competitor to Palantir for defence/law enforcement analysis https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35255.wss

Even if you don't have the roughest and toughest devs in the market, surely spending more time with NYPD than the Palantir FDEs (are engineers part of the skeleton staff mentioned in the article?) would get a more valuable result?

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#29

Post by svendisnigh »

winter_blue wrote: post #25
svendisnigh wrote: post #13

Palantir has an outdated software stack (Java/Swing). Their genius lied in creating "mythical image" and cleverly overselling it to the less proficient government agencies (apparently NSA was smart enough to see through the ruse). And then in turn sell the "spooky/mysterious" image to bunch of naive Stanford/Berkeley undergrads and convince them to work for peanuts. Sadly in 2017, their tech stack is falling apart, t…

What's outdated about Java/Swing? Java 8 is a fairly decent language, and Swing isn't bad. In fact the entire suite of JetBrains IDEs (WebStorm, PyCharm, IntelliJ, Android Studio, ReSharper, etc) have their UI implemented in Swing. I suppose they could have used Kotlin, Scala, Haskell, or some other more language with a more advanced type system. But it would have been truly horrible had they written their back-end i…

The issue with Java/Swing is that it limits development velocity and makes job less appealing for current employees.

While HTML5/JS is not without its own problem. Yet using it over a native framework like Swing, enables the development process to leverage external knowledge (Open Source libraries, etc.). This problem is further worsened when your competitors in enterprise Business Intelligence space can leverage those tools, while you are stuck with maintaining the old stack for government customers.

Re: NYPD is canceling its Palantir contract

#30

Post by jackmott »

svendisnigh wrote: post #29
winter_blue wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's outdated about Java/Swing? Java 8 is a fairly decent language, and Swing isn't bad. In fact the entire suite of JetBrains IDEs (WebStorm, PyCharm, IntelliJ, Android Studio, ReSharper, etc) have their UI implemented in Swing. I suppose they could have used Kotlin, Scala, Haskell, or some other more language with a more advanced type system. But it would have been truly horrible had they written their back-end i…

The issue with Java/Swing is that it limits development velocity and makes job less appealing for current employees. While HTML5/JS is not without its own problem. Yet using it over a native framework like Swing, enables the development process to leverage external knowledge (Open Source libraries, etc.). This problem is further worsened when your competitors in enterprise Business Intelligence space can leverage tho…

nonsense
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