https://investors.palantir.com/governance/executive-manageme... Four out of the five top executives of Palantir earned degrees from top 10 US universities.
They’re not looking for cofounders.
Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
61–70 of 126 posts
Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
#62Highly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world. Its a waste of time to make them memorize random subjects
I graduated high school and went out to the valley immediately in 1995. I did well but I eventually got to a point where the natural language and machine learning stuff I was doing required more advanced math and statistics than I had the ability to teach myself. I went back to college leaving my successful career to “memorize random subjects.”
One thing I learned in college was you learn what you put into it and I put everything into whah I was doing. I learned that learning was the most valuable thing one can do because the process of learning new “random subjects” teaches you how to understand how to learn and think. Being intelligent is perhaps necessary but it is absolutely insufficient. Not a single moment I spent studying in college was a waste of my time, none of it was “memorizing.” In fact one reason I didn’t go was I was bad at memorizing - and I learned in college I could derive equations from my understanding faster than memorizing if I really understood the subject.
I graduated summa cum laude at a top engineering computer science program and dropped out of graduate school to get into quant trading at a top shop on wall street and have since done a fairly complete tour of FAANG and adjacent as a distinguished engineer, building stuff you likely use every day.
I never would have had my career had I stayed working without an education. Knowledge and wisdom and learned through education and being taught by those who have explored things you haven’t. Ability and experience isn’t just mechanical knowledge of a technical subject or intelligence.
I’ve done both paths, and I strongly recommend people to never memorize random subjects but to dive into college and learn and understand everything in total depth, then carry that into life. There is no greater gift you will ever receive in the work world than the gift of knowledge and ability to learn and appreciate life in all its complexity you will learn in college.
Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Everyone who has had to work with printers in a enterprise/production environment knows this... I'm amazed it's an industry that hasn't been disrupted. cough
As someone who has had to support printers.....its a spectrum of pain from "god why do they do this" to "I'm pulling hair out, because no sane person would want to use this product willingly"
Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
#64https://investors.palantir.com/governance/executive-manageme... Four out of the five top executives of Palantir earned degrees from top 10 US universities.
Similar to the Apple CEO who said who needs a degree. Meantime he has an MBA from Duke, and BS in Industrial Engineering from Auburn, not an absolute top school but a very good one.
Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
#65Previously, in Palantir's opinions about young people:
Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
If "memorizing random subjects" is all college is to you, or all learning is to you, then yeah, probably is a waste of time.
Does a computer science major or engineering degree really need history or humanities classes? Sure, it might make more rounded humans but they are completely unnecessary. However, most colleges require these unnecessary classes to get a STEM degree.
I've been thinking recently about Hannah Arendt's description of Eichmann. He was good at doing his job, but had no ability to understand that he was doing a job that no human being should ever do.
I think about this in the context of the DOGE goons, who are so happy to show off their technical skills in the service of dismantling humanitarian aid to starving people.
The people that Palantir hires will have tremendous power in this world. I hope that they have the ability to think critically about the impact of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Learning the humanities helps with this.
Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
#67Basic 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…
Is it college, or is the age where many young people visit college, that the start to mature?
Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
#68Also its around the age you might start learning empathy, dont want that
This is a really important point. A lot of the "locked in" young types that I've seen in the startup ecosystem have very little experience of how the world works, combined with a tremendous arrogance about their own capabilities. They see the wealth and the power that some people have acquired in tech, and they associate that with success with goodness - or they become completely amoral. I'm not sure how much these p…
So in college you learn how the world works and in the real world you can't?
I can see how college can serve to lose one's arrogance, but why couldn't that happen while doing real work? (in general -- don't know about Palantir)
Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
#69https://investors.palantir.com/governance/executive-manageme... Four out of the five top executives of Palantir earned degrees from top 10 US universities.
Similar to the Apple CEO who said who needs a degree. Meantime he has an MBA from Duke, and BS in Industrial Engineering from Auburn, not an absolute top school but a very good one.
Steve Jobs didn't have a degree, but he seemed to very deeply value the liberal arts education that he did have.
Re: Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really important point. A lot of the "locked in" young types that I've seen in the startup ecosystem have very little experience of how the world works, combined with a tremendous arrogance about their own capabilities. They see the wealth and the power that some people have acquired in tech, and they associate that with success with goodness - or they become completely amoral. I'm not sure how much these p…
So in college you learn how the world works and in the real world you can't? I can see how college can serve to lose one's arrogance, but why couldn't that happen while doing real work? (in general -- don't know about Palantir)
I wouldn't put it that way. I'm not talking about learning "how the world works" in the sense of how, say, a corporation functions. I'm talking about learning how to think. It's a much broader perspective on humanity than you get from an open office in Sunnyvale. Understanding human history and values and accomplishments.