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Inside Palantir

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Re: Inside Palantir

#201

Post by linkregister »

gaius wrote: post #191
linkregister wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The offer letter includes the stock/salary options based off of the current and projected valuation of the company. It's hard not to be impressed when you see the eye-popping values of stock options after they vest (4 or 5 years). At least that was my experience in 2011. Had I taken the offer I would have had no problem affording a Bay Area house today, given Palantir's current valuation. That also assumes a liquidit…

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.

Re: Inside Palantir

#202

Post by hueving »

callmeed wrote: post #60

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…

This is essentially a consulting company, which are heavy on name recognition and having pedigreed talent. It's pretty antithetical to the spirit of silicon valley IMO and is something much more typical of NY.

Re: Inside Palantir

#203

Post by dbt00 »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #141

I know a few people who have worked for Palantir. They all agree it doesn't work. They all quit because Palantir data analysis is being used to ruin lives (throw people in jail) and they believe the whole operation to be a giant defrauding of the government.

I worked at Palantir for over 7 years, and that doesn't sound like any of the projects I knew about or any of the people that I worked with.

Re: Inside Palantir

#204

Post by hueving »

askafriend wrote: post #107
lotso wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a point where Palantir became the most prestigious place to work out of school.

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).

Re: Inside Palantir

#205

Post by dbt00 »

[deleted] wrote: post #181
sgnelson wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

[deleted]

I was a CS dropout who didn't work anywhere near SV when I was hired. The filter (and recruiting pipeline, given the proximity and deep connections to Stanford) tends to correlate with "top CS schools", but I promise you that they're not discarding resumes based on school.

Re: Inside Palantir

#206

Post by dbt00 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #149
api wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it's creepy, but there's also something else I've been suspecting about all this surveillance for years: it doesn't really work. Moral, ethical, and political problems aside is mass surveillance snake oil? Is there really any credible evidence that mass surveillance has stopped any significant terror attacks? Can you really find needles in haystacks reliably without drowning in false positives?

Mass surveillance isn't about being able to spy on everybody, it's about being able to spy on anybody. That's basically what companies like Palantir facilitate. If you work there, you may be a bad person, and you should probably feel bad. I watched "All the President's Men" on Amazon last night. Through practically every scene, I couldn't help thinking, What if people like this had the technology to keep from getting…

I worked there for 7+ years, I'm not a bad person, and I don't feel bad.

If you're opposed to a surveillance state, you should care deeply about preventing future terrorist attacks. I was someone who spent a lot of time thinking and caring about privacy and overreaching law enforcement in the '90s. When the original PATRIOT act was passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, they weren't based on a deeply nuanced understanding of the intelligence failures that lead up to that event. They were a laundry list of things that the FBI (and others) had been proposing for years that they immediately dusted off and rammed through a congress terrified to say no.

If you want to roll back the surveillance state, you have to actually empower people carrying out anti-terrorism to intelligently correlate data gathered through lawful and privacy-respecting means to succeed in their mission so that lawmakers and voters trust their own safety to allow that to happen -- and prevent as many massive terrorist attacks as possible, because every one that succeeds will lead to more demands for more data and whatever it takes.

Palantir was specifically founded to give the authorities the right tools to solve anti-terrorism based on a focused dataset. The tools aren't designed around mass surveillance nor is anyone I know who works there interested in or motivated to solve that particular problem.

Re: Inside Palantir

#207

Post by dbt00 »

taytus wrote: post #166

"Although the company is not profitable"... Excuse me but, you have to be fucking kidding me!!

Nope. Pretty much any nonpublic silicon valley companies aren't -- some public ones too. They are spending more money then they have, in the short term, in order to become bigger and more successful in the long term. That's why the venture ('building something') capital ('with money') industry exists.

Re: Inside Palantir

#208

Post by hkmurakami »

arkades wrote: post #186
jrbapna wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What strikes me is when the clients know this to be true, but don't actually care. They have a budget and they need to spend it! Looking forward to the day when the market catches up to them.

It's not a budgetary issue. Generally the consultants are brought in to bring about a conclusion that the managerial team already decided upon. The expense and prestige of the consulting firm now backs this conclusion with sunk cost fallacy, and the managerial team has political leverage to push forward with their plan. And, if it fails, political cover.

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.

Re: Inside Palantir

#209

Post by dschiptsov »

SAP-like scam. Highly refined, Oxford-educated sales and execs, selling with high-status deceptive techniques grossly overpriced, lovest quality outdated by a decade crap, for support and maintenance of which they are billing their victims for each hour spend by expensive suit wearing nonsense talking consultants.

BTW, the guys who went there for sweatshop positions are those who barely managed to graduate. But in sales there are top tier liberal arts guys, with refined speech and behavior.

These kind of enterprises is a classic social pyramid, modeled after an organized religion, especially Catholic Church, with exactly the same deceptions, dogmas and loyalty for lower ranks.

Re: Inside Palantir

#210

Post by jonathankoren »

[deleted] wrote: post #181
sgnelson wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

[deleted]

You can justify any biases with that attitude.
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