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As a person that had the opportunity to work with them and their products, seeing a post like this makes me angry and sad. I personally find the company extreme

As a person that had the opportunity to work with them and their products, seeing a post like this makes me angry and sad. I personally find the company extremely incompetent, that hires young postgrade students without any prior experience to solve big problems for the biggest companies around the world. How it ends up is technical depts and gigantic costs. Not to mention few shady things that seems normal for them - full access to their customers business data and source code. Epidemics should not be a time for business opportunities. It's not like they have any closed patented solution that will suddenly solve any problems... It's definitely not a equivalent of openai in data engineering world. They are just experts in marketing bs.

troughway 7y ago
So wait. Are they the big bad all-present panopticon, or are they incompetent, inexperienced muppets?
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  > big bad all-present panopticon, or are they incompetent, inexperienced muppets? Sadly both are possible at the same time in a large well-funded company. If they succeed in getting these contracts from scared governments, they'll be better positioned in the future for more such work. Privacy and freedom "mishaps" will be chalked up to "oh, it was an emergency, we had to do what we had to do."
- beagle3 7y ago
  No inside knowledge, but by all accounts they seem to be both, and there’s no conflict. An incompetent customer facing layer can enable a competent layer to act with full data and less visibility. The incompetent layer also helps extract finances.
- nabnob 7y ago
  If a platform involves tracking huge amounts of personal data and then making decisions off of that data, incompetence makes it more dangerous, not less. LAPD has been using Palantir to track people in poor and working class neighborhoods in LA - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel... >The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic offenders, says Craig Uchida, whose consulting firm, Justice & Security Strategies Inc., designed the Laser system. The list is distributed to patrolmen, with orders to monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets. At each contact, officers fill out a field interview card with names, addresses, vehicles, physical descriptions, any neighborhood intelligence the person offers, and the officer’s own observations on the subject. >The platform is supplemented with what sociologist Sarah Brayne calls the secondary surveillance network: the web of who is related to, friends with, or sleeping with whom. One woman in the system, for example, who wasn’t suspected of committing any crime, was identified as having multiple boyfriends within the same network of associates, says Brayne, who spent two and a half years embedded with the LAPD while researching her dissertation on big-data policing at Princeton University and who’s now an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Anybody who logs into the system can see all these intimate ties,” she says. To widen the scope of possible connections, she adds, the LAPD has also explored purchasing private data, including social media, foreclosure, and toll road information, camera feeds from hospitals, parking lots, and universities, and delivery information from Papa John’s International Inc. and Pizza Hut LLC. The LAPD have been careful not to cite information from this software in court documents so that its constitutionality cannot be challenged.
  - tristor 7y ago
    > The LAPD have been careful not to cite information from this software in court documents so that its constitutionality cannot be challenged. Parallel construction strikes again, sadly.
  - tsss 7y ago
    > stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets So organized targeted harassment of innocent people.
    - csb6 7y ago
      Yeah this is some dystopian stuff. Guarantee that people on here will (rightly) criticize non-Western countries for doing stuff like this, but will ardently defend Palantir doing similar stuff because they’re “innovative” or a “tech company”.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Competent when their interests are at stake, muppets when yours are.
- GuB-42 7y ago
  Having worked with one of their products, as far as I'm concerned, it is the latter. To the point that I am wondering if their "big bad" reputation is not just a publicity stunt to attract wannabe big brothers.
jariel 7y ago
Yes. They are Accenture or CGI, but just marketed in a different way. They have no 'special sauce', it's in many ways kind of a scam. When you grow up, you assume the authorities around you have integrity and competence, in many ways they really do, but on others, they really don't. It's weird. It's really hard to even grasp the level of bureaucratic incompetence, which is a form of fraud, because it doesn't seem possible, but it's real. This stuff is 'Developed World Corruption', it's a more sophisticated version of the same scams run in the developing world that we more obviously identify as fraud. It's hard to explain how billions magically disappear on ridiculous, overly complicated, poorly designed systems that don't work and FYI had ridiculous requirements to begin with - but it happens all the time.
- jacobush 7y ago
  When it's sufficiently complex, a majority of the workforce don't know it's a scam. That's a difference compared to poorer countries.
  - jariel 7y ago
    Semi-literate people building a power plant in a poor country don't know either, or rather, it may not be apparent when working on the project that 10% was taken off the top. But I have to feel a lot of devs making a $1B simple app have a clue that something is off.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      I think the power plant builders just by default assume they are being taken advantage of. The devs are busy gathering requirements, going to meetings, being shuffled between projects etc etc. Consultants brought in. Stuff rescheduled. Maybe, maybe not.
      - jariel 7y ago
        Yes, this is probably it. And it's scary how intelligent professionals can exist in a system of total dysfunction and in a way not recognize it. This is worth studying - how the perception reasonable authoritativeness (which is not actually authoritative) perpetuates itself in social systems, i.e. the blind leading the blind, unaware they are blind. I worked in a Fortune 50 and recommended we 'find some smart young devs' to work on this project, they thought I was crazy, it hurt my credibility. A year later, one of our interns quit and did the same thing, almost alone, with much greater success. I shamefully admit I was looking for my 'I told you so' comeuppance, shockingly, it never happened. The system was too inept and lacking in self-awareness to see what had just happened, internalize and adapt. Nope. Just a mixture of unaware, don't care, ignored, avoid. Someone at lunch somewhere might have said 'Wow, look at what that intern did'. Of course, they almost went out of business but it's not the same for other conglomerates.
luckylion 7y ago
> I personally find the company extremely incompetent, that hires young postgrade students without any prior experience to solve big problems for the biggest companies around the world. How it ends up is technical depts and gigantic costs. Isn't that literally any larger technical consulting company? I've had the same experience with Bechtle, CGI, BearingPoint and Accenture.
gazelle21 7y ago
"full access to their customers business data and source code" What? How is that possible?

troughway 7y ago

So wait. Are they the big bad all-present panopticon, or are they incompetent, inexperienced muppets?

crispyambulance 7y ago
> big bad all-present panopticon, or are they incompetent, inexperienced muppets? Sadly both are possible at the same time in a large well-funded company. If they succeed in getting these contracts from scared governments, they'll be better positioned in the future for more such work. Privacy and freedom "mishaps" will be chalked up to "oh, it was an emergency, we had to do what we had to do."
beagle3 7y ago
No inside knowledge, but by all accounts they seem to be both, and there’s no conflict. An incompetent customer facing layer can enable a competent layer to act with full data and less visibility. The incompetent layer also helps extract finances.
nabnob 7y ago
If a platform involves tracking huge amounts of personal data and then making decisions off of that data, incompetence makes it more dangerous, not less. LAPD has been using Palantir to track people in poor and working class neighborhoods in LA - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel... >The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic offenders, says Craig Uchida, whose consulting firm, Justice & Security Strategies Inc., designed the Laser system. The list is distributed to patrolmen, with orders to monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets. At each contact, officers fill out a field interview card with names, addresses, vehicles, physical descriptions, any neighborhood intelligence the person offers, and the officer’s own observations on the subject. >The platform is supplemented with what sociologist Sarah Brayne calls the secondary surveillance network: the web of who is related to, friends with, or sleeping with whom. One woman in the system, for example, who wasn’t suspected of committing any crime, was identified as having multiple boyfriends within the same network of associates, says Brayne, who spent two and a half years embedded with the LAPD while researching her dissertation on big-data policing at Princeton University and who’s now an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Anybody who logs into the system can see all these intimate ties,” she says. To widen the scope of possible connections, she adds, the LAPD has also explored purchasing private data, including social media, foreclosure, and toll road information, camera feeds from hospitals, parking lots, and universities, and delivery information from Papa John’s International Inc. and Pizza Hut LLC. The LAPD have been careful not to cite information from this software in court documents so that its constitutionality cannot be challenged.
- tristor 7y ago
  > The LAPD have been careful not to cite information from this software in court documents so that its constitutionality cannot be challenged. Parallel construction strikes again, sadly.
- tsss 7y ago
  > stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as jaywalking or fix-it tickets So organized targeted harassment of innocent people.
  - csb6 7y ago
    Yeah this is some dystopian stuff. Guarantee that people on here will (rightly) criticize non-Western countries for doing stuff like this, but will ardently defend Palantir doing similar stuff because they’re “innovative” or a “tech company”.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
whatshisface 7y ago
Competent when their interests are at stake, muppets when yours are.
GuB-42 7y ago
Having worked with one of their products, as far as I'm concerned, it is the latter. To the point that I am wondering if their "big bad" reputation is not just a publicity stunt to attract wannabe big brothers.

jariel 7y ago

Yes. They are Accenture or CGI, but just marketed in a different way. They have no 'special sauce', it's in many ways kind of a scam. When you grow up, you assume the authorities around you have integrity and competence, in many ways they really do, but on others, they really don't. It's weird. It's really hard to even grasp the level of bureaucratic incompetence, which is a form of fraud, because it doesn't seem possible, but it's real. This stuff is 'Developed World Corruption', it's a more sophisticated version of the same scams run in the developing world that we more obviously identify as fraud. It's hard to explain how billions magically disappear on ridiculous, overly complicated, poorly designed systems that don't work and FYI had ridiculous requirements to begin with - but it happens all the time.

jacobush 7y ago
When it's sufficiently complex, a majority of the workforce don't know it's a scam. That's a difference compared to poorer countries.
- jariel 7y ago
  Semi-literate people building a power plant in a poor country don't know either, or rather, it may not be apparent when working on the project that 10% was taken off the top. But I have to feel a lot of devs making a $1B simple app have a clue that something is off.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    I think the power plant builders just by default assume they are being taken advantage of. The devs are busy gathering requirements, going to meetings, being shuffled between projects etc etc. Consultants brought in. Stuff rescheduled. Maybe, maybe not.
    - jariel 7y ago
      Yes, this is probably it. And it's scary how intelligent professionals can exist in a system of total dysfunction and in a way not recognize it. This is worth studying - how the perception reasonable authoritativeness (which is not actually authoritative) perpetuates itself in social systems, i.e. the blind leading the blind, unaware they are blind. I worked in a Fortune 50 and recommended we 'find some smart young devs' to work on this project, they thought I was crazy, it hurt my credibility. A year later, one of our interns quit and did the same thing, almost alone, with much greater success. I shamefully admit I was looking for my 'I told you so' comeuppance, shockingly, it never happened. The system was too inept and lacking in self-awareness to see what had just happened, internalize and adapt. Nope. Just a mixture of unaware, don't care, ignored, avoid. Someone at lunch somewhere might have said 'Wow, look at what that intern did'. Of course, they almost went out of business but it's not the same for other conglomerates.

luckylion 7y ago

> I personally find the company extremely incompetent, that hires young postgrade students without any prior experience to solve big problems for the biggest companies around the world. How it ends up is technical depts and gigantic costs. Isn't that literally any larger technical consulting company? I've had the same experience with Bechtle, CGI, BearingPoint and Accenture.

gazelle21 7y ago

"full access to their customers business data and source code" What? How is that possible?