basically seemingly ethical, open, liberal and highly skilled engineers working for banks and orgs like palantir masking it all under "it's interestsing problems to work on".
disclaimer: i'm super susceptible to this as well..
disclaimer: i'm super susceptible to this as well..
What I mean to say is, not something you have against what a specific group within a specific bank did like manipulating libor or something.
Do you have something against banks in general? Like the activity they perform in society?
If I recall correctly, Palantir had low salaries relative to Google and FB, who they compete for talent with. Their work does seem fast-paced and interesting.
Additionally, while it's very much outside the HN bubble, I can imagine a lot of people would like Palantir's mission of helping law enforcement and the military, even when factoring in the loss to privacy that most HNers value more.
Nobody said that immoral things can't be interesting.
Jane Street also has one of the absolute worst reputations for brutal hazing-style trivia interviews. Round after round with no official timeline given. Nonsense word problems that have no bearing to “how someone thinks.” I think it’s short-sighted when people don’t stop to ask, if a company believes it is entitled to treat candidates that way when evaluating them, what else might it mean about internal culture?
While I think Jane Street is probably an above average employer, I also think people get carried away glorifying them. It’s great pay and benefits, occasionally interesting problems, and all the same headaches as working anywhere else.
I feel like I might know what you mean, but I'd be interested if you could elaborate. (Also, isn't OCaml multiparadigmatic?)
Graded pay scales meant people's price was very low.
I quit when I started putting 2+2 together.
We must have very, very different concepts of defense.
This crude propaganda cliche doesn't offer anything for the discussion. If you take an emotional snapshot of a complex situation and assume that's the whole truth of a situation you almost always are pretty far from the truth - even if in some subset of reality this snapshot is true.
My right wing uncle with his gun collection is a bigger threat to the American people. Why did those 400 innocent people die?
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-...
This is a relevant question, but not precise enough. What I would be interested instead, is, what's the total mean and variance of american lifes saved in all those operations? And more importantly, what other hypothetical possible combinations of these variables (civilians killed, combatants killed, unuidentified casualties, mean and variance of americans saved) we could have if different decisions have been made - i.e. what's the whole problem space?
Of course, this data is impossible to get and hard to estimate, but this is much closer to the real dilemma at hand.
Nothing of that matters if layers above you casually bribe people left and right in order to more freely sell to even worse people than what your democratically elected leaders decided were OK - and that first set of prospective customers are probably not so pretty in the first place, because you know, realpolitik and trade-offs. :-/
This prepared me nicely for a career as a cog in the military industrial complex.
I liked working at Palantir because the work was important and the company's actual ethics was very strong, contrary to the impression you might get in the press. I thought having a company with that kind of ethical beliefs doing the work that other people would be willing to do, but worse, was better for the outcome I wanted.