Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood why nation states pay outside companies for this stuff. You need the expertise to actually evaluate what you're getting anyway. Incentives are in no way aligned. At the state level you have the scale to do it in house.
If a senior government employee can get a very expensive Palantir contract approved, they have a good chance of a much better paid job at Palantir in the future: https://www.thenational.scot/news/26055524.palantir-hired-30...
UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
161–170 of 219 posts
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good actually kind of makes sense. The £600 a day is as long as you need it and can be stopped when you don't. A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.
> A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension. Sounds like we really need to rethink this massive perk about government jobs. Having a class of people with guaranteed employed for life with no accountability on performance or value they add, always seemed absolutely insane to me.
Can you picture a company replacing 90% of their workforce every 4 or 8 years, all at once? Because that's what I think would happen if government employees could be fired as easily.
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#163Having spent time working in UK healthcare tech, I never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir. Quite apart from being obviously evil and so on, none of their solutions were actually very good. Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental. See also senior staff at N…
I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years. It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy. As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100…
They turned away from the Soviets because the Soviets only wanted them to be an agricultural nation, and wouldn't allow them to develop their own industry.
When the powers that be refuse to invest in themselves and demand that external providers must be used, it does make you wonder...
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good. Ding ding ding. This is all driven by ideological mistrust of the public sector, as you've pointed out and people are even defending in the comments.
It’s not “ideological mistrust of the public sector.” It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales. FDR, who can hardly be accused of distrusting the public sector, emphasized the importance of public control over government sector salaries: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/unions
has the inbuilt assumption that 'market forces' are the only appropriate form of external control.
which is homeomorphic to "ideological mistrust of the public sector".
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years. It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy. As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100…
The problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders. There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value. I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas…
repeated like a mantra.
As if megacorps somehow don't have inefficiencies. And how do we even measure efficiency?
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, but also a civil servant has incredible pension opportunities, and defined benefit as well, and is hard to remove if they turn out to be bad. A contractor is a fixed cost, and individuals can be rejected with far less ceremony and cost. If the civil service could shape its workforce with individualised salaries and quicker removal due to low performance I suspect it'd be a different story. I agree that consu…
Correct, the main reason why private sector is used is nothing to do with salary. Productivity hasn't increased in the public sector since 1997 due to massive overhiring and bloat, salaries are probably 20-30% higher than they should be based upon on productivity. And the main cost, which isn't factored into the above tired lobbying arguments you read from "sources" in the Guardian, is pensions. Public-sector pension…
Hmm, in the US the size of the civil service was roughly constant over 20 years, while the population it served grew enormously as well as the amount of service it was supposed to provide.
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#167The reason for Palantir at the NHS, the problem they're trying to solve is this: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388245/uk-sick-leave-fi ... Now, I get it. The UK is not exactly providing good jobs for a lot of people, so of course we're seeing this. But, getting a mental health diagnosis, be long-term-sick and avoiding unemployment while both getting paid by an employer and getting unfair advantages out of the…
Actually this is a good read on the problem they are trying to solve https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-1-Und...
Of course, the complaint from economists is long-term sick people being occupied 12+ months getting better is worsening at about 7% per year, over 40% in the 2020-2026 period ( ... and in the supposed big success cases Palantir Foundry brings 28% improvement.
Also: collecting the parts and posting here.
https://archive.ph/Hg7xN https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-1-Und...
https://archive.ph/IE9oi https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-2-Del...
https://archive.ph/zp5cU https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Inside-FDP-part-3-The...
The TLDR: because the NHS leadership has systematically refused to upgrade their IT[1], does not actually make the data they get available, their IT is considered unhelpful by hospitals and clinicians which leads to "gaps in the data" [2], and because NHS management will not either hire people to do analyses and will not learn/understand things like SQL to do it themselves, they cannot act on the data.
SO ... what Palantir brings is:
1) a quick AI-driven way to make apps to implement particular workflows. AI writes apps instead of "shadow IT". Just AI written applications shared by frontline staff on a "solution exchange".
2) a data ingestion process that makes up whatever data is missing (apparently this is called "ontology": the AI model fills missing data in with what it thinks is happening. No mention of hallucination and it's effects).
Somehow Palantir does this without any kind of change in IT at the edge. Ie. hospitals, mental health wards, ... keep all their existing IT (he mentions this means no investment is needed in it at all)
3) a way for NHS management to "cooperate", which appears to mean to query this data that does not involve any kind of actually knowing what they're doing or hiring analysts. Which apparently leads to delays (no doubt because analysts ask for clarification which management doesn't know or care about). "Plain-English analytics". Oh and in case you're wondering: he descirbes it as a POSITIVE that it is fast but inaccurate.
Apparently "somehow" a frustrating part of this is that "data extraction is frustrating" and it clashes with traditional NHS data engineering practices (translation: existing NHS analysts say that the data Palantir produces is bullshit)
It ends on a "positive" note: no worries, it'll be pushed through past these people calling bullshit. Just makes things harder and slower. No explanation as to how this statement vibes with him leaving.
[1] They still use access databases running on single machines NOT even VMs
(He comments many of those systems cost hundreds of thousands of pounds "before counting the staff needed to run them". Note that this is supposedly a source of savings of going with Palantir, but also they won't be replaced, because that costs too much ...)
[2] ie. you go to another hospital, even with a referral, often they don't know about that referral. This has caused staff at hospitals to bypass the NHS organization in many cases, and even the NHS itself acknowledges that bypassing the NHS administration is a necessity.
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#168Having spent time working in UK healthcare tech, I never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir. Quite apart from being obviously evil and so on, none of their solutions were actually very good. Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental. See also senior staff at N…
I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years. It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy. As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100…
* need the ability to stop paying the person
* have a duty-cycle lower than 83% on the contractor over the next 10 years
Paying a premium for flexibility is pretty standard business practice. I suppose I’m somewhat surprised the gap is merely 20%. With the triple-lock etc. in place I think that’s a screaming deal and I would take on as many substitutions as possible.
Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#169Re: UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good. Ding ding ding. This is all driven by ideological mistrust of the public sector, as you've pointed out and people are even defending in the comments.
And this mistrust is deliberately sewn by right-wing politicians and media figures who are directly funded by government contractors.