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Inside Palantir

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Re: Inside Palantir

#171

Post by sgnelson »

desdiv wrote: post #151
huac wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that that work doesn't require a top CS degree. Palantir could easily achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads, but because they only take Stanford/Princeton/MIT/etc, they can justify their high prices to clients. It's classic consulting - McKinsey/Bain/BCG could achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads instead of Harvard/Wharton grads at lower salaries, but you gotta wow the clients to win the jobs.

>Palantir could easily achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads, but because they only take Stanford/Princeton/MIT/etc, they can justify their high prices to clients. Do we actually have any data on Palantir's hiring practices? Because my personal anecdata is that I have a friend working there and he's from a tier 2 school (University of Toronto, maybe even tier 3?).

Does anyone else find it a bit ironic that the same guy who wants to pay people to drop out of college is also the guy who only wants to hire from the "Top schools."

I'm old enough now to know where you went to school doesn't correlate to who you are as a person and your level of intelligence (however you may wish to define the different types of intelligence). That and I've met way too many people from "Top Schools" who are just this side of morons, and too many people who have zero or little education who are quite intelligent/innovative/great "engineers"/etc. Still, it's all about that brand.

Re: Inside Palantir

#172

Post by laxatives »

nilkn wrote: post #89
freyr wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hear quite a bit about Bay Area companies paying top dollar for fresh CS graduates from top ranked schools. I wonder what compels a Stanford CS grad to take a job doing non-exciting work with a company that prides itself on paying below market rate. Maybe it's the code names?

I interviewed there a few years ago. I can tell you that at least at the time the impression given during the interviews was that of a deep, intellectually enriching place. Mostly everyone I talked to went to Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, or a similarly ranked school. Many of those not straight out of school had come from Google or Facebook. The interview questions were among the hardest and most technically demandi…

I agree they they spent a ton of money on recruiting, but many of my interview questions were absolutely terrible trivia questions. They were strictly questions that had a single answers regarding knowledge of shell command line functions. Not familiarity with usage, like when to use grep or ps aux, but things like how do you unzip and search with 5 keystrokes (zgrep)? For a new grad, it was a complete waste of time.

Re: Inside Palantir

#173

Post by laxatives »

spacehome wrote: post #169
laxatives wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow, that's nuts. My gmail account is the gateway to password resetting a bunch of different accounts, not to mention all the private correspondences. It would have to be quite the value proposition to make me give up the keys. And these idiots give it away for nothing at all?

Yes. We had numerous SSN and bank account details, basically anything you might find in a personal or professional email inbox. Obviously we weren't making use of any of this, but if we had one malicious engineer, things could have gone very poorly. One automated tool inadvertently posted an individual's SSN on the paid version of our site was very angry. The level of access was something we were always discouraged from discussing with sales folks and management always kept things very vague.

Re: Inside Palantir

#174

Post by MattLaroche »

askafriend wrote: post #108
MattLaroche wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit Palantir after 6 months in 2011; I am a CMU CS grad and I worked at Google for 5 years before Palantir. Their pitches of "We only hire the best and brightest" and "Our work truly changes the world" sold me on them.

Why did you quit? I'm curious what your observations were as an insider.

Bunch of reasons:

* Making hedge funds richer didn't actually feel like changing the world.

* I never really clicked on the codebase, didn't understand what was going on in the code, and didn't contribute much. (I don't think the code was easy to understand, and my mentor wasn't much help)

* I wasn't interested in making Palantir my full life, and there was a lot of pressure to have work be life. One of the leaders in my group basically said "yeah, I don't spend time with my pre-Palantir friends anymore."

* I also didn't click with my coworkers. I was about 27, and felt like an old guy. There were a bunch of other things socially that didn't work out. Strong culture that I didn't jive with.

* I got the signal that my 9-7 schedule wasn't enough.

The Government group may have been a better fit for me, I'm not sure.

Re: Inside Palantir

#175

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

desdiv wrote: post #151
huac wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that that work doesn't require a top CS degree. Palantir could easily achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads, but because they only take Stanford/Princeton/MIT/etc, they can justify their high prices to clients. It's classic consulting - McKinsey/Bain/BCG could achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads instead of Harvard/Wharton grads at lower salaries, but you gotta wow the clients to win the jobs.

>Palantir could easily achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads, but because they only take Stanford/Princeton/MIT/etc, they can justify their high prices to clients. Do we actually have any data on Palantir's hiring practices? Because my personal anecdata is that I have a friend working there and he's from a tier 2 school (University of Toronto, maybe even tier 3?).

How can I determine which school belongs to which tier? I always thought of University of Toronto as a top school based on the fact that it employs some of the best computer scientists in the world (Geoff Hinton is practically a celebrity nowadays). Apparently they were a third-world diploma mill all along and I never knew.

Re: Inside Palantir

#176

Post by dccoolgai »

Interviewed with them once: took like 2 months and it was a horrible experience. Weirdest thing was I randomly ran into this guy onsite that was a friend-of-a-friend.. and enough of an acquaintance that we had each others' numbers and went drinking a couple times... saw him there wearing the same Palantir t-shirt as everyone else (which was weird) and he barely acknowledged me... like I wasn't "one of them" yet... it was creepy enough that I was glad I didn't get an offer.

Re: Inside Palantir

#177

Post by ruraljuror »

ruraljuror wrote: post #90
DasIch wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buzzfeed is shaping up to be the one of the best sources for investigative journalism. Who would have thought?

I believe the New Yorker did a piece about building up their news department, which included hiring a couple of Pulitzer winners to the staff, but I don't seem to be able to find the article.

Found it. It was a third New York titled publication, nyrb:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/06/25/digital-journalis...

Re: Inside Palantir

#178

Post by sgnelson »

jbob2000 wrote: post #25
trhway wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I want to see what Palantir actually produces. SAR. Suspicious Activity Report. If you don't know what "fusion center" is - https://www.palantir.com/wp-assets/media/capabilities-perspe...

Huh. Kind of looks like ArcGIS.

It looks like exactly the same sort of data you would get from a customized ArcGIS system or one of the BI (with GIS) software packages (such as Alteryx and the like).

But why pay $250,000 for software and also hire a good consulting firm when you can pay $18 million a year for the same thing. (I have just realized that I have been grossly underpaid.)

And I'm sure all those engineers they hire make excellent geographic analysts.

Re: Inside Palantir

#179

Post by pinwale »

jnpatel wrote: post #64
ethanbond wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note the timestamp on the video... their products look sweet now.

Do you have any recent pictures of the products?

Here is a live version of a [Palantir product for the Carter Center](http://www.cartercenter.org/syria-conflict-map/). I'd say it looks quite nice for a digital map.

Re: Inside Palantir

#180

Post by jethro_tell »

aswanson wrote: post #144
untilHellbanned wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty lame pitch. Yeah help coca-cola sell more sugar water. I guess that does change the world. Also best/brightest worship needs to stop. It correlates to nothing. This coming from MIT/harvard grad.

Right. As soon as I hear mission statement bullshit from a company, I plot the mental exit strategy. Amazing how those Jedi mind tricks work on the supposedly "best and brightest". I could see it working for a cancer research or fusion energy team, but work focusing clicking on ads or spying on people as a mission is bullshit that you cant polish from my perspective.

I got a pitch a couple weeks ago from unity inviting me to 'change the world innovating the best game development tool/ecosystem'

It's so tone deaf it blows my mind.

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