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Comment by nrki | Hacker News Reader

I wonder who responds positively to Palantir recruiters?

Is the money so good that it is easy to suspend your morals?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Controve...

Outside of the minority in the Twittersphere bubble most engineers are apolitical. Palantir offers the opportunity to work on interesting software solving interesting problems and that gets them very far.

Defense contractors building bombs and the NSA don't really struggle to hire engineers, either. Assuming everyone has your same belief system is a critical mistake.

Are you sure about that last point? I remember reading somewhere that U.S. government agencies were having a hard time hiring tech talent, as they did not pay as well as Silicon Valley nor had the same growth opportunities. Moreover, they had issues with the patriotic argument, as many millenials don't share the same ardent patriotism that previous generations had. It's been a while since I read that article, so things might have changed and I might be wrong.

My thinking is the former problems -- pay, growth, perks -- are more damaging to their hiring prospects than the actual work the US gov is doing.

You can uphold your morals if your morals are different. Not like morals are encoded in law or need to adhere to progressive leftist political views.

For instance: algorithm copyrights and patents are BS. It is immoral to patent a mathematical recipe. Wikileaks turned out to be a dangerous threat. It is immoral to launder Russian intelligence and hide your non-redacted Tor exit node stolen data dumps as journalism. It is nonsense to require a company to be unable to hire for culture fit, and immoral to claim your genetic make-up made all the difference for you not getting a job. It is silly not to make allowed use of Facebook data to help your campaigning client, and it is immoral to attack this, just because it resulted in a President you do not like, while ignoring the fact that social media "engagement" was what won your favorite pick a presidency before that. It is immoral to oppose creating technology for the police to combat human trafficking, illegal immigration, gang violence, and drug problems, under the banner of woke anti-racism.

> I wonder who responds positively to Palantir recruiters when I dislike this company so much?

> Is the money so good that it is easy to suspend my morals?

Getting a job is not easy for everyone and sometimes it's easier to take the first bite you get no matter what it is.

Maybe those who were violently 'other'-ed or marginalized in our dysfunctional technological society? Those who developed a subsequent unconscious (euro-centric) savior-complex? The harmful ubiquity of the lone genius myth doesn't help.

Alexander Karp talks about 'terrorists', and seems to be very patriotically committed to the American empire:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUX0hxlrVXc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeL4BWVk5-k

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