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Having spent time working in UK healthcare tech, I never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir. Quite apart from being obv

Having spent time working in UK healthcare tech, I never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir. Quite apart from being obviously evil and so on, none of their solutions were actually very good. Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental. See also senior staff at NHS England (or Digitial? can't remember) handing massive NHS compute contracts to AWS, and then leaving the civil service to become... an AWS employee.

omcnoe 5mo ago
They’ve built a platform and sales pipeline optimized for selling data consulting into highly bureaucratic tech hostile orgs with data privacy concerns. All these factors apply equally to public health programs and the military, so it’s no surprise that they see success in both areas.
zipy124 5mo ago
The revolving door as it's known. That's part of it. Another is simply the lack of in-house talent, largely due to poor pay and conditions. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to a certain extent. I'd love to work for NHS digital and make a difference, but all the interesting work is contracted out, so they can't keep the staff who are capable of building themselves. Also the recruitment process is terrible. Take a look at this job posting for example: https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/C9175-26-0093 https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/C9175-26-0093 . The role is more aligned with IT/Data as obvious by the fact that the main skill requirement is SQL.
- mytailorisrich 5mo ago
  The internal organisation and management of the NHS is horrible. It is horrible to work for them and in fact in consulting as soon as you hear that the project is for the NHS people run and hide not to be assigned.
- dust-jacket 5mo ago
  Yeah having worked _with_ NHSDigital quite a lot over the years, I would not love to work there! That said, I don't think there's that much wrong with that job description - I've been a software dev/eng for 15yrs and every role has had SQL at its centre. And its much easier to get someone new up to speed on some swanky new UI or scripting tool than it is with SQL IME, so prioritising people who are comfortable with the hard bits sounds fine to me. No, wait, I've read it a bit more closely. It's all about Data warehousing. OK yeah, that's a data job.
- regularfry 5mo ago
  One of the more confusing things is the branding. That job posting isn't for NHS England. Or NHS Digital, which doesn't exist any more.
  - zipy124 5mo ago
    Yeh, the structure is very very very confusing. Largely because you have the Hospital's themselves, then the trusts, then NHS England, or I guess now just the DHSC? And then occasionally even more layers in-between like health boards.
    - dust-jacket 5mo ago
      That and the fact that they rip it up and shake it all about every few years just to seem like they're doing something different.
    - regularfry 5mo ago
      NHSE isn't merged into DHSC yet. Nobody knows what that's going to look like, or when we're going to know. There's every chance the new health secretary will have different ideas.
- Silhouette 5mo ago
  Look at the salary on offer. This is for a dev/data job in Cambridge. The market rate for a senior developer here was around that level in the early 2000s. Today that would be a big pay cut for almost anyone with even the "essential" skills and experience. The British government and public sector are constantly limiting themselves by being unwilling to pay market rates for the skills they need. Then they contract out needs like tech to work around the bureaucracy - but they demand so many strings attached that the little guys who are more cost effective don't want anything to do with it. And so they mostly outsource to large firms or sometimes specialist agencies who have jumped through the hoops to get all the right certifications. Naturally those suppliers are in a position to charge premium rates even for relatively simple work. If the Civil Service built up a capable IT function staffed by properly qualified and experienced people that would surely save billions in budget and years in timescales for some of the (in)famous government IT projects and probably significantly increase the odds of successfully delivering something usable at the end of them. But as anyone who's working in our Civil Service can tell you the emphasis on ranks and pay scales and other very specific rules about career advancement are unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. Even if they did the culture of people moving around the Civil Service like interchangeable parts instead of building up deep expertise in specific areas would still be a problem.
  - zipy124 5mo ago
    The salary isn't that out of line for a mid-level developer nationwide, but yes I would expect it to be higher for the southern location. They could justify the salary if it was fully remote. Bear in mind there is a 23.7% pension contribution from the employer, so it's a roughly £62-70k total comp for a mid-level role. Edit: Actually though, in reality I would expect a salary bump to work in the public sector to encourage one to put up with the terrible working enviornment with all the bureaucracy.
    - bfmalky 5mo ago
      As someone who has recently joined the civil service as a software developer I have to say the working environment in the organisation I joined is pretty great. Salary is not high, but pension, holidays, working hours and flexibility are all very good.
Havoc 5mo ago
> never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir. Same reason the US political system is falling apart - buyable businessmen eh I mean politicians in power. „Lobbying“
cryo32 5mo ago
The people buying them genuinely don’t know what good is.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
robertkoss 5mo ago
Not sure if you have actually used Foundry, but I consider it insanely powerful and well built.
RobotToaster 5mo ago
> Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental. I get the same feeling every time I see oracle chosen for anything.
whywhywhywhy 5mo ago
> why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir Because where they are in their career at that point isn't the endgame and being the person that does the deal and throws the money around is how you get the board position where you broker those deals with governments, the NGO think tank position, essentially all the actually high paying roles.
bko 5mo ago
How are they "obviously evil"?
stevesimmons 5mo ago
There was an article in the FT back in March [1] with the headline "NHS official pushed to add patient data to Palantir platform while also advising company". Amusingly, the person concerned has the surname "Swindells"... [1] https://www.ft.com/content/6c548670-0f3e-45f1-ba08-8bb6dd152af5 https://www.ft.com/content/6c548670-0f3e-45f1-ba08-8bb6dd152...
SideburnsOfDoom 5mo ago
> Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying Agreed. It is said that Peter Mandelson had links to Palantir. (1) And also Wes Streeting (2) 1) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/04/peter-mandelson-palantir-jeffrey-epstein-government https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/04/peter-mande... 2) https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s307 https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s307
PaulRobinson 5mo ago
I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years. It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy. As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good. Then we get into actually building and owning tech. Look at the history of GDS - they were empowered to pay half decent salaries and build and own things, but then had budgets slashed and programs cut. Why? Because we can "just buy it". Yes, you won't own the IP, it'll cost 4x as much, it'll take 3x-5x longer, but at least you won't have "inefficient civil service bloat" to have to manage. This all started in the 1980s, and there are signs of it swinging back. I was at one department last year where they were telling me they're thinking about hiring actual engineers and embedding some devops stuff internally - absolutely jaw-droopingly revolutionary. Genuinely.
- robertlagrant 5mo ago
  The problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders. There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value. I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas about a similar concept in the NHS that would require the government hiring well-paid software engineers.
  - sillyfluke 5mo ago
    What you wrote has nothing to do with what the parent wrote. >There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value. The parent is specifically claiming gov jobs don't allow for near market rates. That number would literally be formulated by current market pressures. If that goes lower in the private sector it will go lower in the gov sector. For your point to be correct with respect to their specific example, you would have to claim the gov could pay £300k/year when the going market rate was £100k/year and there would be no pressure to prevent this. Whereas all it would take would be someone to ask why a run-of-the-mill programmer is getting paid 3x the market rate?
captainbland 5mo ago
> and then leaving the civil service to become... an AWS employee. Today in things that the press isn't legally allowed to describe as corrupt but would probably reach the intuitive threshold for corruption for most people who this is explained to.
shevy-java 5mo ago
> why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir Because of financial kickbacks. This is also why people should be suspicious at the current age-sniffing movement. Their next move was "VPNs must be abolished". We can see which mega-corporations finance those movements. Quite suspicious how different countries so easily "copy-paste" this legislation.
dzonga 5mo ago
you're just pointing out elite capture & corruption that tends to be pervasive in the UK. when I was in the UK my landlord was a politician. his peers are politicians. an inflated contract gets given out to a private company - no one complains. yet to give people working in councils, civic sector decent | market rate salaries. now everyone complains. I'm not even gonna go into the whole taxation scam.
- somenameforme 5mo ago
  Not just the UK. Happens everywhere, certainly in the US as well. Pair that with governments granting themselves the power to print infinite amount of money and you get all sorts of causal relationships like increasing inequality, wages becoming disconnected from $ measured productivity, and much more. The data here [1] are for the US but I'd expect it's quite similar for the UK as well, since 1971 is when Bretton Woods ended and the beginning of the era of funny money. [1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
as3qkaH 5mo ago
We can spell it out. Ex MI6 director Sir John Sawers is promoting Palantir against UK interests and Epstein associate Lord Mandelson does the same [1]. Selling out the UK apparently gives you knighthoods and lordships. [1] Palantir was incubated by In-Q-Tel under the auspices of Alan Wade, who was co-founder of Christine Maxwell's (sister of Ghislaine) Chiliad. Chiliad was a data analytics company used in the FBI after 9/11. Thiel had many Epstein contacts and invested with Ehud Barak.
jiaosdjf 5mo ago
I think we just start calling it what it is: TREASON. These are traitors to our country selling out our national assets to a foreign country.
pimlottc 5mo ago
It’s the same as any enterprise software: it looks good to the higher-ups that hold the purchasing authority, but they never have to actually use it.
Bombthecat 5mo ago
Their object layer and identification and categorization is pretty good. You know, the things you need for spying and war etc

omcnoe 5mo ago

They’ve built a platform and sales pipeline optimized for selling data consulting into highly bureaucratic tech hostile orgs with data privacy concerns. All these factors apply equally to public health programs and the military, so it’s no surprise that they see success in both areas.

zipy124 5mo ago

The revolving door as it's known. That's part of it. Another is simply the lack of in-house talent, largely due to poor pay and conditions. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to a certain extent. I'd love to work for NHS digital and make a difference, but all the interesting work is contracted out, so they can't keep the staff who are capable of building themselves. Also the recruitment process is terrible. Take a look at this job posting for example: https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/C9175-26-0093 https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/C9175-26-0093 . The role is more aligned with IT/Data as obvious by the fact that the main skill requirement is SQL.

mytailorisrich 5mo ago
The internal organisation and management of the NHS is horrible. It is horrible to work for them and in fact in consulting as soon as you hear that the project is for the NHS people run and hide not to be assigned.
dust-jacket 5mo ago
Yeah having worked _with_ NHSDigital quite a lot over the years, I would not love to work there! That said, I don't think there's that much wrong with that job description - I've been a software dev/eng for 15yrs and every role has had SQL at its centre. And its much easier to get someone new up to speed on some swanky new UI or scripting tool than it is with SQL IME, so prioritising people who are comfortable with the hard bits sounds fine to me. No, wait, I've read it a bit more closely. It's all about Data warehousing. OK yeah, that's a data job.
regularfry 5mo ago
One of the more confusing things is the branding. That job posting isn't for NHS England. Or NHS Digital, which doesn't exist any more.
- zipy124 5mo ago
  Yeh, the structure is very very very confusing. Largely because you have the Hospital's themselves, then the trusts, then NHS England, or I guess now just the DHSC? And then occasionally even more layers in-between like health boards.
  - dust-jacket 5mo ago
    That and the fact that they rip it up and shake it all about every few years just to seem like they're doing something different.
  - regularfry 5mo ago
    NHSE isn't merged into DHSC yet. Nobody knows what that's going to look like, or when we're going to know. There's every chance the new health secretary will have different ideas.
Silhouette 5mo ago
Look at the salary on offer. This is for a dev/data job in Cambridge. The market rate for a senior developer here was around that level in the early 2000s. Today that would be a big pay cut for almost anyone with even the "essential" skills and experience. The British government and public sector are constantly limiting themselves by being unwilling to pay market rates for the skills they need. Then they contract out needs like tech to work around the bureaucracy - but they demand so many strings attached that the little guys who are more cost effective don't want anything to do with it. And so they mostly outsource to large firms or sometimes specialist agencies who have jumped through the hoops to get all the right certifications. Naturally those suppliers are in a position to charge premium rates even for relatively simple work. If the Civil Service built up a capable IT function staffed by properly qualified and experienced people that would surely save billions in budget and years in timescales for some of the (in)famous government IT projects and probably significantly increase the odds of successfully delivering something usable at the end of them. But as anyone who's working in our Civil Service can tell you the emphasis on ranks and pay scales and other very specific rules about career advancement are unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. Even if they did the culture of people moving around the Civil Service like interchangeable parts instead of building up deep expertise in specific areas would still be a problem.
- zipy124 5mo ago
  The salary isn't that out of line for a mid-level developer nationwide, but yes I would expect it to be higher for the southern location. They could justify the salary if it was fully remote. Bear in mind there is a 23.7% pension contribution from the employer, so it's a roughly £62-70k total comp for a mid-level role. Edit: Actually though, in reality I would expect a salary bump to work in the public sector to encourage one to put up with the terrible working enviornment with all the bureaucracy.
  - bfmalky 5mo ago
    As someone who has recently joined the civil service as a software developer I have to say the working environment in the organisation I joined is pretty great. Salary is not high, but pension, holidays, working hours and flexibility are all very good.

Havoc 5mo ago

> never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir. Same reason the US political system is falling apart - buyable businessmen eh I mean politicians in power. „Lobbying“

cryo32 5mo ago

The people buying them genuinely don’t know what good is.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

robertkoss 5mo ago

Not sure if you have actually used Foundry, but I consider it insanely powerful and well built.

RobotToaster 5mo ago

> Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental. I get the same feeling every time I see oracle chosen for anything.

whywhywhywhy 5mo ago

> why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir Because where they are in their career at that point isn't the endgame and being the person that does the deal and throws the money around is how you get the board position where you broker those deals with governments, the NGO think tank position, essentially all the actually high paying roles.

bko 5mo ago

How are they "obviously evil"?

stevesimmons 5mo ago

There was an article in the FT back in March [1] with the headline "NHS official pushed to add patient data to Palantir platform while also advising company". Amusingly, the person concerned has the surname "Swindells"... [1] https://www.ft.com/content/6c548670-0f3e-45f1-ba08-8bb6dd152af5 https://www.ft.com/content/6c548670-0f3e-45f1-ba08-8bb6dd152...

SideburnsOfDoom 5mo ago

> Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying Agreed. It is said that Peter Mandelson had links to Palantir. (1) And also Wes Streeting (2) 1) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/04/peter-mandelson-palantir-jeffrey-epstein-government https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/04/peter-mande... 2) https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s307 https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s307

PaulRobinson 5mo ago

I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years. It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy. As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good. Then we get into actually building and owning tech. Look at the history of GDS - they were empowered to pay half decent salaries and build and own things, but then had budgets slashed and programs cut. Why? Because we can "just buy it". Yes, you won't own the IP, it'll cost 4x as much, it'll take 3x-5x longer, but at least you won't have "inefficient civil service bloat" to have to manage. This all started in the 1980s, and there are signs of it swinging back. I was at one department last year where they were telling me they're thinking about hiring actual engineers and embedding some devops stuff internally - absolutely jaw-droopingly revolutionary. Genuinely.

robertlagrant 5mo ago
The problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders. There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value. I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas about a similar concept in the NHS that would require the government hiring well-paid software engineers.
- sillyfluke 5mo ago
  What you wrote has nothing to do with what the parent wrote. >There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value. The parent is specifically claiming gov jobs don't allow for near market rates. That number would literally be formulated by current market pressures. If that goes lower in the private sector it will go lower in the gov sector. For your point to be correct with respect to their specific example, you would have to claim the gov could pay £300k/year when the going market rate was £100k/year and there would be no pressure to prevent this. Whereas all it would take would be someone to ask why a run-of-the-mill programmer is getting paid 3x the market rate?

captainbland 5mo ago

> and then leaving the civil service to become... an AWS employee. Today in things that the press isn't legally allowed to describe as corrupt but would probably reach the intuitive threshold for corruption for most people who this is explained to.

shevy-java 5mo ago

> why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir Because of financial kickbacks. This is also why people should be suspicious at the current age-sniffing movement. Their next move was "VPNs must be abolished". We can see which mega-corporations finance those movements. Quite suspicious how different countries so easily "copy-paste" this legislation.

dzonga 5mo ago

you're just pointing out elite capture & corruption that tends to be pervasive in the UK. when I was in the UK my landlord was a politician. his peers are politicians. an inflated contract gets given out to a private company - no one complains. yet to give people working in councils, civic sector decent | market rate salaries. now everyone complains. I'm not even gonna go into the whole taxation scam.

somenameforme 5mo ago
Not just the UK. Happens everywhere, certainly in the US as well. Pair that with governments granting themselves the power to print infinite amount of money and you get all sorts of causal relationships like increasing inequality, wages becoming disconnected from $ measured productivity, and much more. The data here [1] are for the US but I'd expect it's quite similar for the UK as well, since 1971 is when Bretton Woods ended and the beginning of the era of funny money. [1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

as3qkaH 5mo ago

We can spell it out. Ex MI6 director Sir John Sawers is promoting Palantir against UK interests and Epstein associate Lord Mandelson does the same [1]. Selling out the UK apparently gives you knighthoods and lordships. [1] Palantir was incubated by In-Q-Tel under the auspices of Alan Wade, who was co-founder of Christine Maxwell's (sister of Ghislaine) Chiliad. Chiliad was a data analytics company used in the FBI after 9/11. Thiel had many Epstein contacts and invested with Ehud Barak.

jiaosdjf 5mo ago

I think we just start calling it what it is: TREASON. These are traitors to our country selling out our national assets to a foreign country.

pimlottc 5mo ago

It’s the same as any enterprise software: it looks good to the higher-ups that hold the purchasing authority, but they never have to actually use it.

Bombthecat 5mo ago

Their object layer and identification and categorization is pretty good. You know, the things you need for spying and war etc