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Wasn't there a blog post on HN a while back from someone who worked there early on in their career, where they traveled around and built a bunch of tools to hel

Wasn't there a blog post on HN a while back from someone who worked there early on in their career, where they traveled around and built a bunch of tools to help manage data etc.? I thought it was an interesting lens to look through. Can't recall the post, though.

asveikau 1y ago
It made it sound like what they did is drop ship into a company, destroy all their existing procedures, and rush through a half assed piece of software to replace them. It sounded a lot like the DOGE playbook. From that vantage point I became skeptical that they did anything good for their clients. It's like "douchebag outsourcing consultant as a service".
- Temporary_31337 1y ago
  FWIW, I am in a project like this where we a re given free will to use whatever it takes to deliver quickly and ignore the company internal procedures etc - we're using agile as it should be done (principles not just verbiage) so for example we don't have meetings unless needed etc. Needless to say we've shipped our first product a few months back and now it's v2 and now some of the team is moving on to other areas. Disruption can be good you know....
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - asveikau 1y ago
    Probably a case where you don't understand what it is you broke. Seen this too much to have any other sort of reaction. People come in without fully understanding what the existing solution does. They get overconfident that they can solve it better. They throw out the thing that is fulfilling the needs of many people. Their rewrite breaks a bunch of stuff they don't know about. But they also set the metrics for success so they've judged themselves to be successful. If the people affected by their breakage ever manage to get back in touch, the guy that broke them is already long gone.
FergusArgyll 1y ago
This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44785708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44785708
- kherud 1y ago
  It's probably "Reflections on Palantir" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006
  - jihadjihad 1y ago
    Nice find, that’s it.
xdfgh1112 1y ago
I know someone who worked there and their job was helping customers load their data into it, often with strict security. It was pretty boring and then palantir just exposed a UI that joined that data and made it analysable and mappable.
mieubrisse 1y ago
I think you're looking for this: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir I worked there for 7y, and can confirm Nabeel's post is very accurate. The general public thinks Palantir's a bunch of moral-less folks grinning over godlike power & privacy violations but in actuality it's a mashup of smart Silicon Valley + military folks trying to make data pipelines & analysis work around the globe, often in achingly bureaucratic organizations.

asveikau 1y ago

It made it sound like what they did is drop ship into a company, destroy all their existing procedures, and rush through a half assed piece of software to replace them. It sounded a lot like the DOGE playbook. From that vantage point I became skeptical that they did anything good for their clients. It's like "douchebag outsourcing consultant as a service".

Temporary_31337 1y ago
FWIW, I am in a project like this where we a re given free will to use whatever it takes to deliver quickly and ignore the company internal procedures etc - we're using agile as it should be done (principles not just verbiage) so for example we don't have meetings unless needed etc. Needless to say we've shipped our first product a few months back and now it's v2 and now some of the team is moving on to other areas. Disruption can be good you know....
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- asveikau 1y ago
  Probably a case where you don't understand what it is you broke. Seen this too much to have any other sort of reaction. People come in without fully understanding what the existing solution does. They get overconfident that they can solve it better. They throw out the thing that is fulfilling the needs of many people. Their rewrite breaks a bunch of stuff they don't know about. But they also set the metrics for success so they've judged themselves to be successful. If the people affected by their breakage ever manage to get back in touch, the guy that broke them is already long gone.

FergusArgyll 1y ago

This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44785708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44785708

kherud 1y ago
It's probably "Reflections on Palantir" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41855006
- jihadjihad 1y ago
  Nice find, that’s it.

xdfgh1112 1y ago

I know someone who worked there and their job was helping customers load their data into it, often with strict security. It was pretty boring and then palantir just exposed a UI that joined that data and made it analysable and mappable.

mieubrisse 1y ago

I think you're looking for this: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/reflections-on-palantir I worked there for 7y, and can confirm Nabeel's post is very accurate. The general public thinks Palantir's a bunch of moral-less folks grinning over godlike power & privacy violations but in actuality it's a mashup of smart Silicon Valley + military folks trying to make data pipelines & analysis work around the globe, often in achingly bureaucratic organizations.