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Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads
- mindslight 11mo agoBasic anti-intellectualism framed as if it's something revolutionary, but really for the purposes of finding easily-moldable loyal cogs for the coming corporate-totalitarian society. High schoolers have had one class of "Civics" at best, for which they likely just memorized the answers and don't really get the hard-won ideals at play. College is where students start to mature from having to manage their own independence, and have time to reflect on things like morals and society (albeit going a bit idealistically overboard). Can't have the latter gumming up the works!
- rimbo789 11mo agoYes this is about hiring folks for low wages and limited ability to leave because they have less transferable skills
- johnneville 11mo agothe lack of a college degree as a credential may also prove to be a barrier to leaving the company over time
- constantius 11mo agoIndeed, this might have been laudable if a lifestyle company that makes CRMs did this, but some sectors and companies are, for lack of a better word, nefarious to society, and some of the most insidiously nefarious are also adept at hiding it. How many on HN/in hacker communities boycott Meta products vs the general population, how many despise OpenAI?
- jstimpfle 11mo agoIs it college, or is the age where many young people visit college, that the start to mature?
- mindslight 11mo agoIt's both. Starting to mature at that age, independence of living on your own, and applying yourself to some kind of real work, but without all of that being colored by unrelenting abuse by the financial treadmill. One could probably replicate that kind of slack outside the university environment, but you still need some kind of direction to be learning rather than merely hanging around and playing video games, so such an environment would be halfway to higher education regardless.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- jstimpfle 11mo agoWork has provided me with plenty opportunity to learn, at a foundational level even. It's also a question of how you approach work. Sometimes it's as easy as asking for a little bit of extra time or loudly considering a little side project as promising the insight that's required for the next task. Work has grounded me in such a way that in hindsight I regret staying around uni as long as I did instead of entering the workforce as early as possible. While I was less than a brilliant student, I wouldn't go as far as saying that uni was a waste for me. There are some things that I might never have learned otherwise. But I would love to know the other paths I could have taken in my profession.
- mindslight 11mo agoTalking about tech we can actually put this in very concrete terms. What shapes of technologies have you been paid to learn? Do they promote decentralized individual liberty like secure p2p communications? Or are they top-down-control corporate-empowering centralizing technologies like webapps and bitcoin? I'd say there is a prominent skew for the types of things you can get paid to work on, because software that creates individual freedom intrinsically means creating distributed wealth that can't be easily collected to pay returns on investment. And if you don't even have a general understanding of the whole gamut of what is possible, you likely won't even know what you are missing.
- chuckadams 11mo agoBest to recruit kids before they get exposed to dangerous ideas like the right to vote.
- johnebgd 11mo ago[flagged]
- michtzik 11mo agoOf course this is just a snide remark that doesn't contribute to the conversation, but it can be interesting to dive deeper: For example, why don't the kids themselves have the right to vote?
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> why don't the kids themselves have the right to vote? "Cortical white matter increases from childhood (~9 years) to adolescence (~14 years)," while "cortical grey matter development peaks at ~12 years of age in the frontal and parietal cortices, and 14–16 years in the temporal lobes" [1]. The latter processes emotions and language [2]. Its myelination continues significantly through at least 17 years old [3], through one's mid twenties. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain_development_timeline#Childhood_and_adolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain_development_timeli... [2] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/16799-temporal-lobe https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/16799-temporal-lo... [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33359342/#&gid=article-figures&pid=fig-3-uid-2 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33359342/#&gid=article-figur...
- michtzik 11mo agoPreviously in the United States, schools taught "all men are created equal" to people that could see that they weren't being treated that way. Similarly, today we teach the importance of "universal suffrage" to kids, an entirely disenfranchised class. Apparently you think there are some characteristics of children that should disqualify them from voting. Others think similarly of other groups.
- oa335 11mo agohttps://investors.palantir.com/governance/executive-management https://investors.palantir.com/governance/executive-manageme... Four out of the five top executives of Palantir earned degrees from top 10 US universities.
- jordanb 11mo agoAnd they list their credentials on the company bio page...
- fma 11mo agoThe only person who doesn't have a degree listed is co-founder/CEO Alexander Karp. He has a BS, JD and a PhD.
- Arubis 11mo agoThey’re not looking for cofounders.
- bdangubic 11mo agothey are looking for cheapest labor they can squeeze out. I am highly educated with 30 years in, won’t answer an email under $250/hr. my neighbour coming out of HS will work for $20/hr
- galangalalgol 11mo agoKnowing that they are giving them civics education makes it obvious they are indoctrinating people to accept what are almost certainly unconstitutional endeavors in partnership with the rising authoritarian faction in the US. It won't have a complete success rate, so watch for whistleblowers to be punished or disappeared. If that seems like hyperbole, it shouldn't. We are already there, just in time for Nov 5th. Notably Guy Fawkes' turning to violence to fight the oppression of Catholics caused that oppression to solidify for another two centuries. So don't go blowing up parliament.
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- beefnugs 11mo agoAlso its around the age you might start learning empathy, dont want that
- apical_dendrite 11mo agoThis is a really important point. A lot of the "locked in" young types that I've seen in the startup ecosystem have very little experience of how the world works, combined with a tremendous arrogance about their own capabilities. They see the wealth and the power that some people have acquired in tech, and they associate that with success with goodness - or they become completely amoral. I'm not sure how much these people would actually learn in college, but the idea is that some exposure to the humanities and the arts and to people who have different aspirations and life experiences would give them some interest in considering the consequences and moral worth of their actions. Maybe that doesn't actually happen and these people will always be amoral. But that's the hope.
- jstimpfle 11mo agoSo in college you learn how the world works and in the real world you can't? I can see how college can serve to lose one's arrogance, but why couldn't that happen while doing real work? (in general -- don't know about Palantir)
- apical_dendrite 11mo agoI wouldn't put it that way. I'm not talking about learning "how the world works" in the sense of how, say, a corporation functions. I'm talking about learning how to think. It's a much broader perspective on humanity than you get from an open office in Sunnyvale. Understanding human history and values and accomplishments.
- kloop 11mo agoYou can't bank on college making you more moral than MBAs. All of those people went through college
- JKCalhoun 11mo agoInteresting. I wonder if this acts as a big banner saying, "College grads need not apply"?
- bearjaws 11mo agoI look back at myself at 18 and damn I was dumb as rocks. I'm amazed I even had an internship working on drivers, the risk is too high.
- foobarian 11mo ago> dumb as rocks > working on drivers Yup, checks out :-D
- cjbgkagh 11mo agoIn defense of foobarian AFAIK driver code is famously the lowest quality code of just about any domain, even worse than academic code. The software is written by cost cutting hardware companies.
- Avicebron 11mo agoEveryone who has had to work with printers in a enterprise/production environment knows this... I'm amazed it's an industry that hasn't been disrupted. cough
- tonetegeatinst 11mo agoAs someone who has had to support printers.....its a spectrum of pain from "god why do they do this" to "I'm pulling hair out, because no sane person would want to use this product willingly"
- dlcarrier 11mo agoI had an internship at HP when I was 16. I probably wasn't particularly useful, but I learned a lot about how the corporate world works. I'm glad I didn't have to wait until I was 18 to figure that out, and get on the right course for my education and career. One of my high-school friends went to college for a teaching credential, only to learn at the end that he didn't like teaching. College or not, it's extremely useful to be exposed to a field of work for at least a few months, before dedicating years if your life to it.
- simonsarris 11mo agoMy company has exclusively hired interns out of high school, including myself, since the mid 2000s. Every single hire was an intern first, either as a junior or senior in HS. The board is now 2/3rds former interns (I'm one of them), 1/3rds original founders. It works extremely well. Any high school AP CS teacher we ask is delighted to send us their best students. We basically get to interview for 3-5 years during summers while they're at college and then hire (if we have a spot, we are a "lifestyle" company) when they graduate. Of course this means we don't hire seniors, which probably gives us some blind spots, and it means we can't silicon-valley-scale up, but we're very happy with growing software engineers vs hiring them.
- flufluflufluffy 11mo agoSo you get 3-5 years of unpaid labor out of every employee first? Radical man
- master-lincoln 11mo agoYou don't pay interns fairly? Radical man...
- simonsarris 11mo agoWe pay the interns. Is that not usual where you are?
- flufluflufluffy 11mo agoA lot are unpaid but I admit I haven’t looked around the internship space in quite a while. That’s good they are paid
- rimbo789 11mo agoWhy would anyone accept such a terrible deal
- simonsarris 11mo ago
- TSiege 11mo agoA corporation, founded by a Stanford grad who’s been giving talks on the Antichrist, who’s business is to spy on everyone and create a panopticon, is offering a four week indoctrination scheme to susceptible teens. Idk how our society gets out of this mess but the elites in charge are deranged and focused on destroying one of the west’s great institutions liberal arts colleges. STEM is great but liberal arts flesh out your mind and teach you to think critically and engage with the world. Something sorely missed in today’s age
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- tamimio 11mo agoAnd in 2 years they will be called “senior engineers” too, because the term engineer has no meaning nowadays, thanks to the engineers themselves.
- deepanwadhwa 11mo agoNot for any serious positions I bet. Only where they want to do dirty stuff like killing or stalking other humans. It's like recruiting for army- you get them before they learn how to use their brains.
- mikert89 11mo agoHighly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world. Its a waste of time to make them memorize random subjects
- miltonlost 11mo agoIf "memorizing random subjects" is all college is to you, or all learning is to you, then yeah, probably is a waste of time.
- tastyfreeze 11mo agoDoes a computer science major or engineering degree really need history or humanities classes? Sure, it might make more rounded humans but they are completely unnecessary. However, most colleges require these unnecessary classes to get a STEM degree.
- 8note 11mo agoa acredited canadian engineering degree requires a technical writing class, law class, and stats. otherwise, you get to pick one non-engineering course out of the whole degree. i did a CS degree on top of a mech one, and all i had to do was the math and CS courses.
- apical_dendrite 11mo agoI've been thinking recently about Hannah Arendt's description of Eichmann. He was good at doing his job, but had no ability to understand that he was doing a job that no human being should ever do. I think about this in the context of the DOGE goons, who are so happy to show off their technical skills in the service of dismantling humanitarian aid to starving people. The people that Palantir hires will have tremendous power in this world. I hope that they have the ability to think critically about the impact of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Learning the humanities helps with this.
- phba 11mo ago
- vasilzhigilei 11mo agoThere really needs to be a trade school for software engineering. Not just a short boot camp, either. A rigorous 4 year degree that focuses on industry relevant skills and hands-on projects. The biggest reason I got my 1st job out of college at Cloudflare was because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend. These things were not, or barely covered in my CS degree. No wonder new grads nowadays are struggling to get jobs. Schools aren't preparing them well for jobs.
- mulmen 11mo agoAre trade schools four years now? When I was pursuing auto tech it was a two year program. I thought the benefit of vocational programs was the ability to be compressed because they don’t include the breadth of topics of a full undergraduate degree.
- CommonGuy 11mo agoSwitzerland has this and for basically every other job as well. Apprenticeships are very common here, I did mine as a "programmer"
- rtaylorgarlock 11mo agoI further like how much diversity is packed into compsci programs in CH, e.g. time at the Paul Scherrer Institute
- Jcowell 11mo agoIt would depend on the course load. Learning languages and how to use them can easily be encapsulated in capstone, software engineering projects, & internships. The goal of a CS degree, as opposed to a bootcamp, is for students to fully understand in intimate detail the background , history, ethics, & the 5 whys of the tool that they’re using. The way I would design a CS degree is: 1. for the first two years to be about general computing with an intro to programming via Java, Typescript, Python, & Go. 2. by the end of the 2nd year Data Structures and Algorithms should be mastered 3. Third year is for tracks , whether frontend, backend, full stack, Theory. 4. Fourth year is capstone project or internship
- alephnerd 11mo agoIt's an Alex Karp pet project that is less of an apprenticeship or professional skills program and more of a mini-uATX [0] style "great books" program [1]. Apprenticeship programs have value, but how this Palantir program is structured clearly isn't providing the technical chops needed, and is just an ideological bootcamp Finally, if Palantir wanted, they could always just recruit from a more diverse set of universities or create a hiring pipeline out of community colleges. Yet Palantir is notorious about only interviewing and hiring candidates from high prestige programs. [0] - https://uatx.substack.com/p/this-is-why-we-built-uatx https://uatx.substack.com/p/this-is-why-we-built-uatx [1] - https://americanmind.org/salvo/great-books-is-for-losers/ https://americanmind.org/salvo/great-books-is-for-losers/
- jupp0r 11mo agohttps://archive.ph/https://www.wsj.com/business/palantir-thinks-college-might-be-a-waste-so-its-hiring-high-school-grads-aed267d5 https://archive.ph/https://www.wsj.com/business/palantir-thi...
- therealmarv 11mo agoI thought that works but I only see "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker" It's not the same source but this works https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/palantir-ceo-says-gen-z-can-either-have-a-social-life-at-age-20-or-be-successful-but-they-can-t-do-both/ar-AA1N8ZCX https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/palantir...
- frm88 11mo agoYour's doesn't work for non-countries. MSN switches to the country you live in, location off or no.
- CuriouslyC 11mo agoThis is basically taking options on human beings.
- dlcarrier 11mo agoEmployees are far more like goods in a commodities exchange than anyone seems to want to admit. Hiring/layoff cycles follow the market value of an employee, not the growth/stagnation of the employer.
- standardUser 11mo agoNot requiring a degree is one thing. Not requiring any basic socialization or life experience is bizarre, maybe cultish, and sounds a little like non-sexual grooming. Hire adults, weirdos.
- grg0 11mo agoNext: Palantir thinks high school might be a waste of time, so they are hiring middle schoolers. Wait...
- evmar 11mo agoMy first job was a dotcom startup who heard via social connections I was a bright high school student who could program. I think I was paid $15/hr to write Windows GUI code. In retrospect I think they were just happy for the cheap labor and I didn’t know any better. There was no mentorship or any other useful growth to make up for the low pay.
- raddan 11mo agoOn the other hand, you were probably also learning on the job, which meant they were paying you to learn. Not a bad arrangement, especially if they did not demand senior-level code from you. I was also fortunate to get paid to learn web development in the 90s. This was a work-study job so I was barely paid anything (I think it was something like $100/wk). But I was thrilled to be given a computer in an air-conditioned office. The alternative was to do some other dumb work-study job like making sure students swiped their meal plan cards when they walked into the cafeteria. Although it took me awhile, that job is what set me on the path I’m still on now.
- grg0 11mo ago[flagged]
- skopje 11mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_soldiers_in_Cambodia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_soldiers_in_Cambodia Visit Phnom Penh (its not pleasant), visit the killing fields and the prisons. There are pictures of the child soldiers that were authorities at prisons, encouraged to report on adults and punish.
- CamelCaseName 11mo agoWhat does this have to do with the post?
- mulmen 11mo agoIt's literally the thing Palantir is for.
- stephenlf 11mo agoBetter to hire kids that won’t ask questions
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- JJMcJ 11mo agoI don't know if I agree. Don't you need a 4.0 from MIT to change the button color from Aqua to Electric Blue? /s <- just in case
- 12_throw_away 11mo agoPreviously, in Palantir's opinions about young people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12211296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12211296
- nis0s 11mo agoHigh school kids have less developed brains, more impressionable at the least.
- ModernMech 11mo agoI teach freshmen through seniors in college. Let me just say good luck with that -- last week I had to explain to a freshman what a "colon" was and where to find it on the keyboard. This person graduated near the top of their HS class. I also had to explain to a Master's student who graduated with an "IT" degree what a "compiler" was. So yeah, Palantir isn't ready for what they're suggesting. The consequence of "everyone" getting a bachelor's degree is that high schools outsource their work to colleges. Especially since COVID have things gotten worse; the students I'm teaching now were middle schoolers 5 years ago. I will say that the kids are great, but they are severely lacking in fundamentals in a way students even 5 years ago were not.