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Comment by huac | Hacker News Reader

Note that that work doesn't require a top CS degree. Palantir could easily achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads, but because they only take Stanford/Princeton/MIT/etc, they can justify their high prices to clients. It's classic consulting - McKinsey/Bain/BCG could achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads instead of Harvard/Wharton grads at lower salaries, but you gotta wow the clients to win the jobs.

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What strikes me is when the clients know this to be true, but don't actually care. They have a budget and they need to spend it! Looking forward to the day when the market catches up to them.

The way it works is like this -- consultants like these have to have a good reputation. They are effectively the sacrificial goats to absorb failure. If the project fails everyone can say "but we had the best of the best doing this, if they failed, surely nobody could have done it better". In that model it makes sense to hire the most prestigious candidates.

Also remember clients also have their own bosses, board of directors, investors and supervisors to answer to.

It seems with Palantir it worked well with CIA. If you ever sold anything to Uncle Sam, you know he loves to pay lots of money and then pretty often it ends up not being used or forgotten. Guess they tried that with a few big companies but found out that Coca-Cola is not as careless with its budget as Uncle Sam, and \had a hard time convincing them to just throw away tens of millions on some analytics thing.

It's part of the cowardice game.

How do you both take credit when you succeed and avoid blame when you fail?

You take an action that's easy to justify by external validity factors. If you succeed, you made the call, you take the credit. If you fail, you justify it using external validity factors ("they're one of SV's most valued companies! they only hire Stanford graduates!") to indicate there's no way anyone else could have done better.

ah yes, a textbook NMP [1], CYA [2], OPM [3] scenario. [4]

[1] NMP: Not My Problem

[2] CYA: Cover Your Ass

[3] OPM: Other Peoples' Money

[4] Profit!

It's not a budgetary issue. Generally the consultants are brought in to bring about a conclusion that the managerial team already decided upon. The expense and prestige of the consulting firm now backs this conclusion with sunk cost fallacy, and the managerial team has political leverage to push forward with their plan.

And, if it fails, political cover.

This.

People bring in consultants for one of two possible outcomes:

1) Rubber stamp a preconceived conclusion or idea;

2) Test out an idea and take the hit if it fails.

Basically, they are there to ensure a win-win scenario for the commissioning member(s) of management.

And to that end, the elite degrees confer a sense of authority and prestige. Additionally, "sounding smart" is a skill that such students have cultivated over the years in addition to but independent of possibly also being smart.

Huh, that got a bit convoluted near the end.

Think bulshit artist but with brains

Can confirm. Fake it till you make it. But with a really smart person who can fake extremely well.

>Palantir could easily achieve 97% of their results with tier 2 grads, but because they only take Stanford/Princeton/MIT/etc, they can justify their high prices to clients.

Do we actually have any data on Palantir's hiring practices? Because my personal anecdata is that I have a friend working there and he's from a tier 2 school (University of Toronto, maybe even tier 3?).

Sure. Here are 818 data points: https://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Palantir-Technologies-In...

Top 5 schools according to LinkedIn are Stanford, Cornell, Berkeley, MIT, and CMU. See https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=20708&trk=rr_connect...

I have an additional data point of someone who didn't finish any university.

Paysa ranks Palantir #20 in terms of tech talent [1], and also supports a large fraction of their workforce coming from tier 1 schools, as well as salaries [2] that can help attract top talent, even if the work turns out to be unsatisfying.

[1] https://www.paysa.com/company-rank#!companies=Google:::Airbn...

[2] https://www.paysa.com/salaries/palantir-technologies

That salary data is pretty misleading. The equity grants are almost entirely illiquid, and if you take those out the numbers start to look normal (for startups) or low (for big tech companies). Not what you'd expect to need to attract Stanford grads.

Does anyone else find it a bit ironic that the same guy who wants to pay people to drop out of college is also the guy who only wants to hire from the "Top schools."

I'm old enough now to know where you went to school doesn't correlate to who you are as a person and your level of intelligence (however you may wish to define the different types of intelligence). That and I've met way too many people from "Top Schools" who are just this side of morons, and too many people who have zero or little education who are quite intelligent/innovative/great "engineers"/etc. Still, it's all about that brand.

The difference is Thiel is paying people to drop out of college to start a business, not to just go get a job.

But yes, there is irony, maybe not as much as at first glance.

> Does anyone else find it a bit ironic that the same guy who wants to pay people to drop out of college is also the guy who only wants to hire from the "Top schools."

From what I understand, Thiel is not super-involved in the day-to-day running of Palantir.

It's ironic that the guy who says college isn't best for everyone finds it a useful probabilistic filter, and a useful way to sell brand to clients?

How can I determine which school belongs to which tier? I always thought of University of Toronto as a top school based on the fact that it employs some of the best computer scientists in the world (Geoff Hinton is practically a celebrity nowadays). Apparently they were a third-world diploma mill all along and I never knew.

> How can I determine which school belongs to which tier?

Just out of curiosity, what is it that you do that you need to know this?

It helps with reading comments on HN that discuss tiers of schools. Shared context and all, even if the tiers themselves are meaningless (see Big 3 CS companies etc).

What ar the big 3? This seems like a meaningless distinction. I always see Big 4 on Reddit. I don't think anyone has ever said Bi4 4. And even Big 4 makes no sense. It should be Big 5. Wait or Big 10? Isn't that a football conference?

Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon have prestige, but more importantly, recruit and hire the most heavily out of college.

These days, I think the big 3 are Google, Apple, and Facebook.

Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc... are all great places to work, but are definitely on the backup-list of the best college grads.

I don't think Apple recruits as many SWE out of college as my original 4.

If we're talking about where college seniors want to work, it'd look more like a list of unicorn startups (Airbnb, Uber, and yes, Palantir) - reasoning is you actually get to build something instead of end up a cog in Google. But necessarily these places hire fewer college grads.

Yeah really, I was going to make the same comment. UofT is outstanding.

1745 current employees on LinkedIn [1] and 76 on AngelList [2]. Those are some data points that could be analyzed from their APIs.

1: https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=20708&trk=rr_connect...

2: https://angel.co/palantir-technologies

This applies to almost every tech and non-tech company, so this doesn't necessarily imply anything. All companies want to hire "the best" (let us set aside the totally valid question of whether or not elite schools graduate the best). And if you've done such a killer job at selling the reputation of the company to the public that all the top graduates want to work with you, why wouldn't you hire them?

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