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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 t
by callmeed 10y ago
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 I met at bar.
Anyone with more insight know if this is accurate?
- rdtsc 10y agoThey 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.
- callmeed 10y agoThat's interesting. I forgot to also mention that, from what I've heard, if you are going to work for Palantir, their NYC office is where you want to be. That the team(s) there more direct interaction with clients and influence on solutions/architecture.
- linkregister 10y agoIt 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.
- rdtsc 10y agoYap, I agree. They are doing everything right recruiting-wise. I think only Google and Facebook had lines longer than them amongst maybe 50 companies or so.
- drmattyg 10y agoThe office isn't in McLean anymore, it's been moved to Georgetown. Much hipper.
- linkregister 10y agoThat sounds like a nightmare, traffic-wise.
- tmpanon1234acct 10y agoMore or less. Alden will likely have a very juicy part 2 in another month.
- freyr 10y agoYou 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?
- deprave 10y agoMy guess is the hype created through secrecy.
- fullshark 10y agoThe stock options and perceived prestige.
- lotso 10y agoThere was a point where Palantir became the most prestigious place to work out of school.
- askafriend 10y agoI think this was around 2011-2012 timeframe.
- hueving 10y agoIn 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).
- argonaut 10y agoIn Silicon Valley, European schools aren't really considered among the top 10 engineering schools. I'm not saying that's right, just telling you what the perception is.
- 10y ago
- batbomb 10y agoA few years ago I sat in on a CS course at Stanford and was able to count 4(!) identical palantir t-shirts on the same day. It was ridiculous, I probably have the picture somewhere.
- mulcahey 10y agoMaybe because they recently had a recruiting event and handed out shirts?
- highsea 10y agoI got a tshirt at the techto meetup here in Toronto a few months ago.
- Lxr 10y agoPalantir tshirts are very popular on Australian university campuses too in my experience, from recruiting events they run.
- Anderkent 10y agoPalantir T-shirts are super convenient. I don't care at all that someone else is wearing the same t-shirt, if it means I don't have to go clothes shopping.
- cowsandmilk 10y agoThis would jive with a talk I heard at a conference from someone working on a collaboration at GSK with them; although that talk made it sound like there was some machine learning magic that was helping them structure their unstructured data; some of which is currently in the form of non-standardized handwritten logs at manufacturing plants that are just scanned into PDFs before being handed off to Palantir. On a side note, the code name mentioned in the talk I saw for the project at GSK was definitely not Ribo (as stated in the article). I don't know if this is a case of GSK having a different internal code name than Palantir's internal code name, but GSK's code name was also based on Tolkien.
- palantir_intern 10y agoIn addition to building dashboards, integrating data and maintaining a data pipeline made up most of what I did as a commercial Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) intern. From what I've seen, this is what most FDEs do. Software engineers, business cultivation engineers, and people in other positions do other things, and I don't know what FDEs outside of the commercial umbrella do. I think your assessment is correct, though most people I worked with really enjoyed doing that kind of work for many hours a week. It's not for everyone though, and it wasn't exactly what I was expecting when I accepted the offer. For example, I was expecting that FDEs would be doing more analysis on the data.
- Cacti 10y agoWhat the hell is a "forward deployed engineer" and "business cultivation engineer"? You mean support and sales?
- h1srf 10y agoMy guess: forward deployed engineer = implement the system at a client, business cultivation engineer = sales
- enraged_camel 10y agoA forward-deployed engineer is a fancy title for an engineer who is stationed permanently onsite at the client, usually with their own dedicated desk/office. A business cultivation engineer is basically a sales engineer responsible for interfacing with and being a technical resource for the client's technical buying team (e.g. IT department).
- Anderkent 10y ago> who is stationed permanently onsite at the client Not really necessary. The distinction between FDEs and product engineers is that the FDE work is focused on a single deployment, whereas a product engineer works on a single product and is once-removed from actual clients. Where the FDE spends time and what products he works on depends on the client requirements.
- KKKKkkkk1 10y agoIs Stanford CS grads working in sweatshops really a thing? Glad I didn't go to Stanford!
- rboyd 10y agoWe really dodged a bullet.
- huac 10y agoNote 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.
- jrbapna 10y agoWhat 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.
- beachstartup 10y agoah yes, a textbook NMP [1], CYA [2], OPM [3] scenario. [4] [1] NMP: Not My Problem [2] CYA: Cover Your Ass [3] OPM: Other Peoples' Money [4] Profit!
- rdtsc 10y agoThe way it works is like this -- consultants like these have to have a good reputation. They are effectively the sacrificial goats to absorb failure. If the project fails everyone can say "but we had the best of the best doing this, if they failed, surely nobody could have done it better". In that model it makes sense to hire the most prestigious candidates. Also remember clients also have their own bosses, board of directors, investors and supervisors to answer to. It seems with Palantir it worked well with CIA. If you ever sold anything to Uncle Sam, you know he loves to pay lots of money and then pretty often it ends up not being used or forgotten. Guess they tried that with a few big companies but found out that Coca-Cola is not as careless with its budget as Uncle Sam, and \had a hard time convincing them to just throw away tens of millions on some analytics thing.
- deprave 10y agoIt's part of the cowardice game. How do you both take credit when you succeed and avoid blame when you fail? You take an action that's easy to justify by external validity factors. If you succeed, you made the call, you take the credit. If you fail, you justify it using external validity factors ("they're one of SV's most valued companies! they only hire Stanford graduates!") to indicate there's no way anyone else could have done better.
- meritt 10y agoSo Palantir offers expensive custom-coded ETL? Awesome.
- raverbashing 10y agoI'm sure it's awesome (not) to be a recent-graduate from a top university doing tons of mydata.this = theirdata.that, etc
- dbt00 10y agoI'm in kind of an odd position, because I worked there for many years with no CS degree at all and I was a lot older than most (not all). They do hire people who are great at CS things, and that often translates into mostly people from higher tier CS programs, but the filter that is applied during hiring is not that. "If you can do the job, we don't care what's on your resume. If you can't do the job... we don't care what's on your resume."
- hueving 10y agoThis 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.
- gaius 10y agoOr DC or Boston.
- dcposch 10y agoYes, it's consulting. Palantir has done an amazing job branding itself as a product company even tho it's mostly not, and for a long time, up to ~1000 employees in 2012, branding itself as a startup. A surprising number of my friends and classmates (Stanford '12/'13) ended up working there. Stanford emails out a jobs summary for each graduating class. For 2013 graduates the #1 most common job title was Forward Deployed Engineer lol -- Calling Palantir a "sweatshop" when the starting salaries are six figures is ridiculous. There are 8 billion people in the world, and a lot of them actually do work long hours for a few USD a day with next to no rights. Say you took a job at Palantir because you bought into the hype about fixing government. Now you work with some smart people and the pay and perks are pretty strong, but you find yourself doing consulting type work and feel unfulfilled. Maybe youre helping some large fund manager migrate off of Oracle DB or something. The solution is to find more important work. Something you really care about. Something that directly helps at least a few of the 7.9b people out there who are less lucky than you.
- nolite 10y agoOmg thank you for writing this. This industry needs to stop being so insular
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago> Calling Palantir a "sweatshop" when the starting salaries are six figures is ridiculous. Why does the salary matter? The labor in those firms are treated like fungible slaves, worked for illegal hours and disposed off uncerimoniously after a few years, to be replaced by fresh bodies. "Sweatshop" is a mild term.
- deprave 10y agoOn one hand I agree with you that borrowing a term like "sweatshop" to describe Palantir is ridiculous. The abuse of language not just in this instance, but overall, is ridiculous to both extremes. Having said that, I think the intention was to describe Palantir in relative terms compared to other companies in SV. With that in mind, then yes, Palantir is one of the worst places to work at among companies of the same type: well-funded startups with a rather convenient revenue stream.
- andrewthornton 10y agoThis is 100% what they are doing.
- nvarsj 10y agoI know someone whose partner works at Palantir London. I've heard similar about the London office. Second hand though. What I've heard is, there is very little in the way of basic engineering practices or organization. People hacking stuff together all over the place, very poor test practices, stuff is broken all the time. Hero coding to get things working. And cult vibe through the roof. They weren't happy there.
- s_q_b 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10980506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10980506 This was my guess. The government is disentangling itself from the company, because IAD guys are starting to realize that Palantir is just another consulting firm. Moreover, they're a consulting firm that failed to deliver on their promises. I'm not sure if they'll be audited and put to sleep, or if they have enough government patrons. FinTech has realized Palantir's tech is pretty pictures and the rest is just a datalake setup. To negotiate and buy it is hard, even when it was the new hot company. Then to actually run the software be prepared to pay high rates for their "forward deployed engineers", which the rest of us just call "software consultants." Their branding is excellent, in that they managed to offer a more "West Coast mentality," as I've heard sneered by government clients. Having worked and lived with devs from the Bay Area, I can say that the the government could use a lot of help from Silicon Valley. But Palantir is not the help they need.
- yyin 10y agoQuestions: What language are they using for cleaning up the data for import? Is there a market for a middleman (i.e., something as a service) that cleans up enterprise data, using customized solutions if necessary, for import into different databases? If this type of company already exists who are some examples? This is very unsexy work which I happen to enjoy. Its the phase that routinely comprises 80% or more of any so-called "Big Data" project.
- pbreit 10y agoIt's sorta Accenture-style consulting but with a lot of pre-built proprietary tech to achieve a high degree of leverage.
- curiouscat321 10y agoI feel like a similar argument can be said for any major engineering company. Most new grads heading to Facebook, Google and the like are doing grunt work. Unless you're working at a true startup, where you know everybody's name, you'll be doing some degree of grunt work.