Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside Palantir

buzzfeed.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 319 posts

Re: Inside Palantir

#301

Post by blahblah12 »

hirsin wrote: post #280
criddell wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can I determine which school belongs to which tier? Just out of curiosity, what is it that you do that you need to know this?

It helps with reading comments on HN that discuss tiers of schools. Shared context and all, even if the tiers themselves are meaningless (see Big 3 CS companies etc).

What ar the big 3? This seems like a meaningless distinction. I always see Big 4 on Reddit. I don't think anyone has ever said Bi4 4. And even Big 4 makes no sense. It should be Big 5. Wait or Big 10? Isn't that a football conference?

Re: Inside Palantir

#302

Post by huac »

blahblah12 wrote: post #301
hirsin wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps with reading comments on HN that discuss tiers of schools. Shared context and all, even if the tiers themselves are meaningless (see Big 3 CS companies etc).

What ar the big 3? This seems like a meaningless distinction. I always see Big 4 on Reddit. I don't think anyone has ever said Bi4 4. And even Big 4 makes no sense. It should be Big 5. Wait or Big 10? Isn't that a football conference?

Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon have prestige, but more importantly, recruit and hire the most heavily out of college.

Re: Inside Palantir

#303

Post by heinrichf »

jonathankoren wrote: post #295
santaclaus wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhhh what? ETH Zürich puts out some of the best CS grads in the world.

True, but the number of non-us schools that any American in computer science can name tops out at like 20, and that's only if they've been grad school or recruiting long enough. Let's see how I can do at naming perceived good foriegn schools. I'm not going to google anything, so the any misnaming is an accurate representation of the data in my head. These are listed in no particular order. North America and the Carib…

ETH Zurich is in Switzerland, not Austria, and "the one in Lausanne with the french name" is Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the other Swiss federal institute of technology.

Re: Inside Palantir

#304

Post by drmattyg »

linkregister wrote: post #122
rdtsc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also like to recruit from around Washington DC area schools (Univ. of Maryland for example). Saw them at career fairs while also recruiting there. They all wear cool hoodies and project this agile young startup image. It seems to work, there is a decent size line of young hopeful grads wanted to work there.

It doesn't hurt that Palantir's offices in McLean are reminiscent of the GooglePlex while the top defense contractors' offices look like those in Office Space.

The office isn't in McLean anymore, it's been moved to Georgetown. Much hipper.

Re: Inside Palantir

#305

Post by criddell »

huac wrote: post #302
blahblah12 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What ar the big 3? This seems like a meaningless distinction. I always see Big 4 on Reddit. I don't think anyone has ever said Bi4 4. And even Big 4 makes no sense. It should be Big 5. Wait or Big 10? Isn't that a football conference?

Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon have prestige, but more importantly, recruit and hire the most heavily out of college.

These days, I think the big 3 are Google, Apple, and Facebook.

Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc... are all great places to work, but are definitely on the backup-list of the best college grads.

Re: Inside Palantir

#306

Post by morgante »

freyr wrote: post #76
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…

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?

Palantir has great marketing.

Several friends turned down offers from Facebook/Google/etc. for (much) more money to join Palantir because they "didn't want to sell ads" and somehow thought that Palantir's work would be more fulfilling. The government and NGO work certainly sounds compelling (you're going to be finding terrorists and improving public health) until you realize it's a soul-crushing job mostly pushing low-level data around.

Re: Inside Palantir

#307

Post by morgante »

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.

It helps that their primary competitors are explicitly about selling ads.

Palantir can at least pretend that your work will be "changing the world" since they do have some government and NGO projects with real impacts. Of course, only a very small select few will work on those projects—not that they mention that in recruiting.

Re: Inside Palantir

#308

Post by morgante »

spydum wrote: post #250
jbob2000 wrote: post #10

I want to see what Palantir actually produces. Like does Coca-Cola get a monthly report that says "Hey, you guys should bring back Cherry Cola in Montana for an expected 4% increase in sales" or what? What does $1mil/month actually get you ?

For what's it's worth, this type of analytics and market research is what Nielsen (NLSN) has been doing for several decades.. Indeed they were the first real BigData company. They just don't charge monthly.. You buy access to a set of data (markets, products hierarchies) and often some level of custom reporting and scheduled updates on the data.

Palantir is much closer to Accenture than Nielsen.

For the most part, Palantir is helping you analyze data you already have, not providing you with new data.

Re: Inside Palantir

#309

Post by KingMob »

morgante wrote: post #306
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?

Palantir has great marketing. Several friends turned down offers from Facebook/Google/etc. for (much) more money to join Palantir because they "didn't want to sell ads" and somehow thought that Palantir's work would be more fulfilling. The government and NGO work certainly sounds compelling (you're going to be finding terrorists and improving public health) until you realize it's a soul-crushing job mostly pushing lo…

Ironic, considering Palantir's involved in the ad world, too. I believe their NYC office does quite a bit of advertising/marketing analysis.

Re: Inside Palantir

#310

Post by huac »

criddell wrote: post #305
huac wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon have prestige, but more importantly, recruit and hire the most heavily out of college.

These days, I think the big 3 are Google, Apple, and Facebook. Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc... are all great places to work, but are definitely on the backup-list of the best college grads.

I don't think Apple recruits as many SWE out of college as my original 4.

If we're talking about where college seniors want to work, it'd look more like a list of unicorn startups (Airbnb, Uber, and yes, Palantir) - reasoning is you actually get to build something instead of end up a cog in Google. But necessarily these places hire fewer college grads.

Post reply on HN