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This article is much more interesting than its fairly predictable headline implies. While the secrecy of Palantir has served as clickbait for many years, there'
by vonnik 10y ago
This article is much more interesting than its fairly predictable headline implies. While the secrecy of Palantir has served as clickbait for many years, there's actually real news in this.
And the news is about the difficulties of scaling a services-heavy, on-prem software company that basically rents out forward-deployed engineers at 10s of millions of dollars per year. Especially when the software is an open-source stack, and the engineers are increasingly junior as the companies grows. That said, it's still great at sales. Big numbers there...
- dang 10y agoWe took the questionable baity bit out of the title.
- openplatypus 10y agoIt seems to be perfect (and unfair to clients) business model. Same was described by Zed Shaw about ThoughtWorks. 1) Get expensive contract 2) Drop in junior (riding the fame that you only hire top engineers) 3) Train them on the job and bill the customer 4) Move trained consultant to work on internal project/high value stuff, replace with fresh blood 5) Repeat
- amiraliakbari 10y ago> Especially when the software is an open-source stack Is there specific information about stack used by Palantir? I just saw a few videos presenting their products.
- vonnik 10y agoApache Hadoop, Hive and Pig, among others. https://www.palantir.com/wp-assets/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Palantir-Solution-Overview-Cyber-long.pdf https://www.palantir.com/wp-assets/wp-content/uploads/2013/1... And actually, it's usually an enterprise distro such as Cloudera's CDH rather than Apache Hadoop itself, which is kind of a nightmare.