Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads • Hacker News Board

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#11

Post by TSiege » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

A corporation, founded by a Stanford grad who’s been giving talks on the Antichrist, who’s business is to spy on everyone and create a panopticon, is offering a four week indoctrination scheme to susceptible teens.

Idk how our society gets out of this mess but the elites in charge are deranged and focused on destroying one of the west’s great institutions liberal arts colleges. STEM is great but liberal arts flesh out your mind and teach you to think critically and engage with the world. Something sorely missed in today’s age

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#12

Post by foobarian » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 4:39 PM UTC

bearjaws wrote: post #7

I look back at myself at 18 and damn I was dumb as rocks. I'm amazed I even had an internship working on drivers, the risk is too high.

> dumb as rocks

> working on drivers

Yup, checks out :-D

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#13

Post by tamimio » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

And in 2 years they will be called “senior engineers” too, because the term engineer has no meaning nowadays, thanks to the engineers themselves.

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#14

Post by deepanwadhwa » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

Not for any serious positions I bet. Only where they want to do dirty stuff like killing or stalking other humans. It's like recruiting for army- you get them before they learn how to use their brains.

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#15

Post by johnebgd » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 4:41 PM UTC

chuckadams wrote: post #3

Best to recruit kids before they get exposed to dangerous ideas like the right to vote.

[flagged]

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#16

Post by mikert89 » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 4:44 PM UTC

Highly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world. Its a waste of time to make them memorize random subjects

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#17

Post by vasilzhigilei » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

There really needs to be a trade school for software engineering. Not just a short boot camp, either. A rigorous 4 year degree that focuses on industry relevant skills and hands-on projects.

The biggest reason I got my 1st job out of college at Cloudflare was because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend. These things were not, or barely covered in my CS degree. No wonder new grads nowadays are struggling to get jobs. Schools aren't preparing them well for jobs.

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#18

Post by alephnerd » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

It's an Alex Karp pet project that is less of an apprenticeship or professional skills program and more of a mini-uATX [0] style "great books" program [1].

Apprenticeship programs have value, but how this Palantir program is structured clearly isn't providing the technical chops needed, and is just an ideological bootcamp

Finally, if Palantir wanted, they could always just recruit from a more diverse set of universities or create a hiring pipeline out of community colleges. Yet Palantir is notorious about only interviewing and hiring candidates from high prestige programs.

[0] - https://uatx.substack.com/p/this-is-why-we-built-uatx

[1] - https://americanmind.org/salvo/great-books-is-for-losers/

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#19

Post by cjbgkagh » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 4:46 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #12

bearjaws wrote: post #7

I look back at myself at 18 and damn I was dumb as rocks. I'm amazed I even had an internship working on drivers, the risk is too high.

> dumb as rocks > working on drivers Yup, checks out :-D

In defense of foobarian AFAIK driver code is famously the lowest quality code of just about any domain, even worse than academic code. The software is written by cost cutting hardware companies.

Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads

#20

Post by rimbo789 » Sun, Nov 02, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #2

Basic anti-intellectualism framed as if it's something revolutionary, but really for the purposes of finding easily-moldable loyal cogs for the coming corporate-totalitarian society. High schoolers have had one class of "Civics" at best, for which they likely just memorized the answers and don't really get the hard-won ideals at play. College is where students start to mature from having to manage their own independe…

Yes this is about hiring folks for low wages and limited ability to leave because they have less transferable skills