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Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to
by htrp 1y ago
Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
- _boffin_ 1y ago> had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place. so beautiful.
- nemothekid 1y ago>For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place. AFAIK, this is the most succinct description of Palantir I've read. A looser-fitting analogy is they come in, replace whatever the hell you were trying to use SAP for with actually competent software. Most "FDEs" can't explain what the company does because what they did was work at $CLIENT for 18 months ripping apart all their internal software with Palantir building blocks.
- gundmc 1y agoIt sounds like fundamentally SAP and Palantir target different use cases though? While SAP has OLAP functions, their bread and butter is highly domain-specific and transactional.
- utilize1808 1y agoSo it's outsourced data science?
- internetter 1y agoyes, and they also make user interfaces for killing people
- 2d520075 1y agoCloser to outsourced data engineering
- kccqzy 1y agoYes but if you don't have enough budget to pay for their engineering time, they also provide good UI to do data science. It's like a fancier version of Excel for data wrangling: imagine Excel but your data is not necessarily tabular; it may be a graph; it may contain images and multimedia, etc. I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.
- johanneskanybal 1y agoA bunch of dash boards, tools and ingestion yes. Worked for a similar company with similar clients at the time. Making the data usefull in innovative ways was a big part of it so in a way sure part of it data science related. At the same time I’d say it’s broader than that.
- mitchbob 1y agoFDE = Forward Deployed Engineer
- throwaway5752 1y agoForward Deployed Engineer = Consultant I will not allow Palantir to extend their reality distortion field to me. They are consultants. They are also engineers. Other places call them FEs. But they didn't invent some new class of engineering, they just rebranded one.
- geetee 1y agoReality distortion, or they're just using military terminology?
- throwaway5752 1y agoOne and the same. It would be like if I tried to call my product Tactical Software as a Service It would still only be software as a service, but I would just brand it in a way to make it more appealing to certain buyer personas without any actual investment or commitment on my part.
- geetee 1y agoWhat's wrong with that?
- jrvarela56 1y agoNothing, their argument is that it’s not worth adopting Palantir’s marketing wording.
- boston_clone 1y agoWhen applying strange military terminology to something clearly non-military, is that not a distortion of reality?
- 1y ago
- leobg 1y agoThey take an exorbitant fee to clean up the mess government created when they outsourced their tech infrastructure to private sector companies preying on dumb government money. That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
- jeltz 1y agoAt least in my country the reason is that the politicians force them to outsource in various ways like not letting them pay their employees market rate salaries. It is not that they believe more money will solve the problem. It is often cost cutting which makes things this expensive.
- leobg 1y agoMy take is that government is like a really lazy college student. Goimg to the library to study would be hard, and you’d need vision and motivation to do it. Instead, you take the money given to you by your parents, buy the best textbook there is on the subject, and put it on your shelf. You haven’t actually achieved anything. But you still feel a sense of accomplishment. You paid money. You bought something. That counts. Or at least so you tell yourself. And so does the government. It’s basically all Y Combinator rules, reversed.
- virgildotcodes 1y agoI think oversimplifications like this are rooted more in ideology than reality. Government has of course done, and continues to do, many vital things well for its citizens in many countries around the world (universal healthcare, for ex.). There has also, of course, been a push for generations by capital to privatize its various functions, and one of the most common approaches is to defund and degrade an aspect of the government (see current admin) and then afterwards point to the degraded entity as an example of ineffective government that must be replaced by private enterprise. If government were to infiltrate Apple, fire 80% of its staff at random, cut budgets across the board by 50-80%, put in place a CEO that has spent their entire career campaigning to rid society of the scourge of electronics, and refuse to fill necessary vacant positions for years, would it then be an intelligent assessment to say "man, private corporations like Apple really suck at making phones, they should be nationalized"?
- 2d520075 1y agoIf by "you give them your data" you mean "your data never leaves your data warehouses and never touches a Palantir server", then you're close
- samrus 1y agoTheir FDE embeds in your org yeah. Thats worth noting maybe, but not that novel
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- NalNezumi 1y agoAnother thing to add is (according to a coworker who worked with them at previous big company) that they present solutions in a way that makes it hard for the customer to use the solution outside their ecosystem. They're supposedly very aggressive on that point, so once you integrate their solution to your pipeline you're pretty much stuck with them for the foreseeable future. Many safety/mission critical companies can get really bogged in by this, with too many administrative hoops to detach. which is probably why they're focusing on that industry. My coworker liked to describe them as a parasite that creates a symbiotic relationship with their host.