Palantir No Longer Works With The NSA
sfist.com
sfist.com
So what does it mean it no longer works for the NSA? Like they stopped taking government contracts? Of course not. They still work for big banks and big corporations and they still have government contracts. Whether the contract is with NSA or CIA or FBI I don't think makes a difference.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/protest-palantir-muslim...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-22/palantir-...
I.e. they don't seem to have scary innovative technology as much as a horde of people doing integration work (and some good reusable tools)
See discussions from 1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11646587
And 2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8872054
Google for Intelligence is what they have been selling, but it's unclear they have actually delivered.
Palantir and Accenture are consulting company. They make money by reselling meat by the hours, as we say in business. They don't profit from what is created at the client. They profit more by buying cheaper meat (graduates) and reselling with higher margin to clients.
Google is a software company. It makes money on the software service they provide. They get the returns for everything you do. They get more money by you making "better" software infrastructure and services.
Palantir does indirectly profit from what's created at the client, by reselling the code created at one client to other clients later.
Consulting companies don't. The reason they are called in the first place is to make highly customized software.
Most consulting companies will pretend to re-use things across clients. In practise however, it cannot be achieved because it's going against their business model (yet they'll still pretend they do).
I'm not sure what you think the business model is that would go against code reuse across sites. If you can afford to negotiate for ownership of what you build at a client site, why wouldn't you reuse things that are common?
Like, the reuse thing isn't binary. There's a whole spectrum between 'give everyone exactly the same thing', and 'give ever y single client something built for them from scratch'. And if you can build something from scratch at one client site, take half of that to another client, take 3/4 of that to yet another, and eventually end up only having to build 2-3% of the thing at every place, that's building a product while already getting paid for it.
In general, strict consultancies are inherently unscalable and expensive, whereas SaaS has a unit cost of nearly $0. The benefits of consultingish, unscalable behaviors are known, in order to get to, and create new, scalable products.
Because there isn't much that is common. You're called to craft customised software, with special customization for the client needs and tight integration with the client systems.
Anyway, none of this matters. At the end of the day. A consulting shop doesn't bill software, it bills the hours*men.
Whatever spectrum you think you can achieve, your actual business model always push back to its extreme side.
I've worked at consulting shops trying to bill software as software. I've never seen it goes very well.
Is there still hype around Palantir? It's 13 years old. I think the hype has been gone for years now, similar to Airbnb or Uber. They're just regular big companies now like an eBay or Priceline. Certainly there's some curiosity focused on Palantir due to their somewhat secretive nature and who they've worked with historically.
Wait.. what? Aren't they still on the top of the list for Stanford students?
there is -- palantir is a privately held company. in his interview with charlie rose, alex karp mentions that being a private company is essential to palantir, though he doesn't specify why. at a minimum, it means they have no obligation to shareholders and they can take whatever contract they want without public scrutiny.
2016 saw 106 IPOs. That's below horrible recession years in the early 1980s. And that was with the stock market at very high levels.
The stock market has hit new all-time highs, the Nasdaq is on the moon, and very few companies want to go public. The entire vast shift to the private market occurred solely due to Sarbanes Oxley. The simultaneous extreme growth of the private capital market for ventures, the drastic reduction in IPOs vs the prior 30 years (while there has been an explosion of billion dollar start-ups), and the fact that the best companies are choosing to wait a lot longer to IPO vs the prior 30 years, makes it overwhelmingly obvious what has happened.
They're becoming rarer, except for ventures which require an enormous amount of working capital, because angels and other investors typically have more cash than pre-Sequoia times to lend out to ventures which are smart about their cash & business models.
No. They have to act kb the interests of shareholders, whatever interest that is.
>> Serving shareholders’ “best interests” is not the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value. "Shareholder value," for one thing, is a vague objective: No single “shareholder value” can exist, because different shareholders have different values. Some are long-term investors planning to hold stock for years or decades; others are short-term speculators.
>> Also, most investors care not only about their portfolios, but also about their jobs, their tax burdens, the products they buy and the air they breathe. Which is to say, companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them.
and
> And what exactly is the interest of the shareholders, rather than maximising share value / dividend payout?
Wait. By your own logic why would anyone invest in anything that wasn't public if you were just throwing money at some dude that wanted to do something that wasn't in your interest? Your logic makes no sense. It sounds like you're saying, it's sad that founders don't get to spend money anyway they want without carrying about the wishes of who gave them the money.
Because usually you get preferred stock, that means that all the 'crazy' non-profit-oriented things that the founders might be doing are still done with their money, rather than yours.
There's just a difference in both incentives and philosophy, isn't there? If the company is controlled by a private person, they're not obliged to make decisions that are 'best for the company'; and anyone choosing to go along for the ride is expressing trust into that persons ideas and goals. (And any contractual terms they set in their shareholder agreement; but the owners can refuse terms that misalign with their vision)
>It sounds like you're saying, it's sad that founders don't get to spend money anyway they want without carrying about the wishes of who gave them the money.
No; I'm saying that if as a founder you want to be able to spend money any way you want, you do not want to go public.
Why is that? (genuinely curious here.) Do they employ younger people with hopes an IPO?
They've got a better image, they get graduates for cheaper, oversell the future IPO and make them work longer hours.
It's no secret that Palantir is a sweat shop filled with "Forward Deployed Engineer", a bullshit title to make people feel important and impress graduates (it does work!).
The sad reality of consulting shop: You are sent from client to client anywhere anytime (the "forward deployed"). Your company takes a big cut on your salary, and they benefit by paying you less while charging more for you.
The guy who replied all seeking clarification on what exactly a "serious" relationship was (regarding who could be your plus one in the company retreat). He got quite graphic.
The guy who got hired, showed up one day to do HR paperwork and got paid for 3 months before anyone figured out he never showed up again.
At least in the UK, FDE's are definitely not underpaid; I don't know how the pay compares in the SV.
Disclamer: I work for Palantir
Tip: When evaluating a work, adjust the compensation for hours worked and don't be tricked by the shares that will never IPO.
The hours are a red herring. Sure, there's people who work very long hours, because they have nothing else to do. But in 2 years as an FDE at Palantir I averaged maybe 50h a week, and only remember one crunch week in all two years where I chose to work >80h (i.e. work on the weekend).
The 42k figure is very low. That's likely for all IT roles including tech support and help desk.
If you are good enough to enter Palantir (they have some standards despite the bad PR), you are good enough to enter a real tech company.
Note that if you are a consultant going left and right to a new client regularly, you should make a comparison against being an independent contractor too.
42k is not very low for an effecitvely entry level software engineer position. My first job in london after (a v. good) college was ~30k (5 years ago though, so sure inflation probably makes that ~32-33k now); finance was paying ~38-40k to grads back then.
Of course independent contracting is a thing; but you can't really be an independent contractor right after college (unless you built a great network, but then you're a ridiculous outlier), and even with job experience it's not a clear tradeoff.
But generally, it feels like you've moved the goalpost quite a bit here. Originally you claim the company exploits young graduates to build a sweatshop. Now we're talking about how they compare to the best tech companies around, and independent contracting.
Palantir London is decent in compensation from what I have heard (that doesn't speak for their other offices). They are however known for pushing 60h+ hours weeks very very bad until your whole life is your work, screwing people with shares that will never be paid, and sending people here and there around various locations.
Of course, there is also variance within a single company. It's possible that you've got a good position at Palantir.
That's 25% over a "standard" work week in the US. If that 42k is based on 40h/week, you'd need to earn 53k+ to "break even" on a 50+h/week (which Palantir appears to do).
FWIW, there are plenty of 40h-45h/week software jobs in the US that pay well into six figures.
a similar trend happened with dell, hp, oracls and ibm- gone are the older, whiter males making over 100k base to sell to corporations as "trusted advisors"
in are the thousands of young kids fresh out of college dialing for dollars and making 45k
What does that have to do with sales aptitude?
I've known a few salesmen who were quite open about their role as the senior guy on the contract was literally to take the client it for a round of golf and reassure them that the 25 year-olds weren't going to suggest too much change too quickly. Sharing the same cultural background, wearing a good suit, etc. gave them instant credibility on that front so they could spend lunch talking about which colleges their kids/grandkids were looking at, which pro golf/baseball/football team was going to do well, etc. and get the deal because the client now felt confident that they'd get what they asked for.
This is definitely a generational thing and I'm sure there's more diversification as the Boomer executives retire. There's must be some salesperson cleaning up with craft beers and SXSW or Tour de France trips now.