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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Not really a surprise. Palantir has always been secretive about what exactly it is they do every day, though it's always been implied and rumored that a large part is government intelligence work.

Also the reason why I've ignored every contact from a Palantir recruiter so far. This smells like working for the white collar, air-conditioned, catered-lunch version of Blackwater.

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They're pretty upfront with the fact that a major portion of their business is from the US government, especially intelligence analysts. The other chunk is financial (hedge funds and the like as well as banks looking for fraud).

Not that it excuses any of it but they really don't try to hide it.

It seems a quick run through the open positions at Palantir can tell you a lot more...

http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPositionLanding

   "Embedded Analyst, Government: Canberra"
   "Embedded Analyst, Government: London"
   "Embedded Analyst, Government: New Zealand"
   "Engineer, Developer Support Team (McLean, VA)"
   "Forward Deployed Engineer: Singapore"
   "Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Government: Berlin"
   "Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Denmark"
   "Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Finland"
   "Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Norway"
   "Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Stockholm"

As some one who's just interviewed with them for a "Forward Deployed SE, Government" internship position, I did ask what's up with the government in the title and what kind of work I'd do for them. They informed me that the word referred to one of the two products I'll be working on (Gotham over Metropolis) and that Gotham used to be called "Government", something that you can see on Wikipedia as well.

Now I'm not saying Gotham isn't used by gov't, I just wanted to explain what the word actually stood for.

Ugh, a quick review on glassdoor makes their hiring practices sound soul sucking

http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Palantir-Technologies-Int...

They have a really strong college recruiting organization, which seems to be how they hire most of their people, so glassdoor probably isn't as representative.

For the "FDE" positions, it's much closer to being onsite support/tech/contractor. I assure you Palantir is less shitty to interview for/work for than virtually any "traditional defense contractor", which is their comparison (I've never interviewed at Palantir, but know a lot of people there, including their recruiters, and have worked for the alternatives.)

This is all independent of their "mission". (I support national security but not unlimited monitoring of US citizens; It's annoying that stuff like PRISM deters good people from working for government, lowering our capability to respond, and thus hurting national security...)

I have a friend who does recruitment at Palantir and he told me he has PERSONALLY hired 100 people in the past year. Sounds like quite the conveyor belt of new people coming in. He said it was mostly interns, so I guess they must have a strong college program.

Associates of Alexander Karp and Peter Thiel from Bilderberg meetings.

>Not that it excuses any of it but they really don't try to hide it.

Exactly. I had a chat with a recruiter a couple years ago and he was upfront about contracts with government agencies and data mining. But sure, someone internet gumshoe totally _cracked the case_ by going to Palantir's official website and clicking 'What we do' ( https://www.palantir.com/what-we-do/ )

Be careful with moral judgements like that. You basically work in an industry that exists due to it's role in preparing for nuclear war.

Sure, but I wasn't alive then, and the work I've done personally hasn't contributed to nuclear war or anything of that sort. Through my college years I had a couple of opportunities to work in the defense industry, but chose not to.

Which doesn't mean people aren't getting shot and blown up, it just means I'm not closely involved with it. My stance is not beating people over the head with morality, it's purely personal and self-centered. It helps me sleep better at night when I'm not building tools that directly spy on people. I'd like to be as many degrees removed from that as possible, really. Don't take my post to mean that I'm prescribing this morality onto others.

We could do a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon that proves that my work actually does lead to pain, death, and suffering throughout the world in a convoluted and indirect way, and it may in fact be true - but I don't think it's a stretch to say that there is a large moral difference between directly working on something with ill effects and being far removed from it with no intentional contribution.

Side note though: I don't buy this argument that we can't condemn things unless our hands our perfectly clean. The fact that we all are products of war, suffering, and other terrible things does not remove our ability to steer the ship forward.

> the work I've done personally hasn't contributed to nuclear war or anything of that sort.

You might find this interesting: https://gist.github.com/zmaril/5326884

TL;DR: if you've contributed to open source in some way, you've probably given Palantir the tools they need to do their work.

I don't agree with the post you're replying to, but your argument seems pretty specious to me.

Software developers are generally no more responsible for the misdeeds of others using their software than anyone else that produces almost any kind of tool.

I agree, its "first do no harm" mantra

I'd go further than that. A bunch of people are expressing surprise/outrage that a bunch of companies that spy on for profit you at the service of the advertising industry are sharing the fruits of that spying with the government for national security.

The greatest minds of our generation are figuring out how to get a sated consumer to click

No, the greatest minds of our generation are still working where they always have: in academia, research labs, etc. The people figuring out how to get consumers to click are the top 5-0.5% minds. When I look back at people from my high school, most of the tippy-top people are getting PhD's and figuring out how to do nuclear fusion. It's the next rung down that are working on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.

Speculating about who has the bigger brain seems pretty silly.

There's no way you could ever realistically prove your position (ditto the parent).

Perched so high, looking down on mere mortals. The view from the Ivory Tower is never cloudy.

Whats wrong with preparing for nuclear war, especially if preparation is an effective deterrent to actual nuclear war. Ensuring a credible second strike ability is probably one of the more rational ethical actions someone can take outside of pacifism.

Of course creating a credible second strike ability is so easy ( merely hide x weapons with delivery systems controlled by PALs ) that it has been a solved problem from the 1960s.

If you're implying that the internet would not exist if the US government had not seen it as a way to prepare for nuclear war, I disagree.

(I do not have an opinion on the morality of working for Palantir.)

How does this logic work? Because people in this profession 80 years ago contributed to those efforts we should somehow be grateful to them or something??

>Palantir has always been secretive about what exactly it is they do every day, though it's always been implied and rumored that a large part is government intelligence work

Wow. That's just as bad as saying since a person uses TOR, they're being secretive and must have something to hide. You must be able to see the hypocrisy in all of this.

> That's just as bad as saying since a person uses TOR, they're being secretive and must have something to hide.

People who use TOR are being secretive and have something to hide.

They may have very good reasons to want to hide it because of threats from bad actors (including, potentially, their own governments), but if they didn't have something to hide, they wouldn't be expending additional resources to actively hide things, which is exactly what using TOR is .

>Also the reason why I've ignored every contact from a Palantir recruiter so far. This smells like working for the white collar, air-conditioned, catered-lunch version of Blackwater.

Is this because you would not like to work at a company handling such data, or because you think you are making a difference by not doing so?

If the former, fair enough. If the latter, you might want to rethink the approach - refusing the job only means someone else will take it, and is likely to be 'worse' according to the values that prevent you from taking the job (less likely to blow the whistle, less likely to challenge sales on projects that are evil etc.)

I haven't talked to any such recruiters or entertained the thought because:

- I'm uncomfortable working for a company that has this much power over private citizens but is not even nominally accountable to said citizens.

- I'm uncomfortable with the (sadly popular) tactic of shoving ugly and disdainful things onto private contractors as a way of distancing and plausible deniability. In both the government and private contexts.

- The job market for programmers is good enough that I have the freedom to be hoity toity with my morality.

I realize full well that given how much Palantir pays, they will fill the seats they need to fill to do the work they do. The world may be on an unavoidable course to hell, but I don't need to jump out and push.

I asked them about this in an interview.

Simply put, they said that if you don't feel comfortable working on a project, you just say so, and get moved elsewhere.

> refusing the job only means someone else will take it

If he's the only person who refuses the job, yes. But the overall effect depends on how many people refuse the job. If a significant percentage of technologists with in-demand skills refuse to do a particular kind of work, it will become harder for a company to hire that kind of employee. Lots of companies in the Valley are already having trouble hiring enough skilled staff, and competing on intangibles, ranging from perceived interestingness of work to perks like gourmet lunches, is one axis they use to try to get employees.

That logic is nice, but when you have the resources Palantir will have available to them, they can afford to train people themselves if need be. Then they don't need knowledge, skills, or abilities, merely talent.

That's how the military does it after all, even in very technically demanding occupations.

> refusing the job only means someone else will take it,

Isn't that true for almost any moral stance? Should I stop being a vegetarian because someone else will eat the meat anyway?

>Isn't that true for almost any moral stance?

That part on its own is not enough. Only when: 1. someone else will do <the job> AND 2. it would be better for you to be doing <the job> than someone who takes it up then you should take it instead of them.

I understand and somewhat agree with your point, but sometimes people anticipate that, given the incentives of the job, they're unlikely to be any better than anyone else when push comes to shove (your pt 2). Think of "golden handcuffs" as one example.

This particular example doesn't apply to me, but I think I'd personally be able to rationalize a lot of selfish behavior following that logic so I try to avoid putting myself in situations where it would come up, even if both points might apply.

Yes. For every animal you don't eat, I'll eat two.

That is an argument for voluntarily joining the most despicable of organisations with the goal of fixing them from the inside. That is foolish.

>That is an argument for voluntarily joining the most despicable of organisations with the goal of fixing them from the inside.

More 'damage control' than 'fixing them', but sure, close enough. The point is, do not compare 'this job is evil, I produce -10 units of global utility' and then 'this job is good, I produce +20 units of global utility' looking only at your output. Instead, compare 'By taking this job, I will produce -10 units of global utility, instead of someone else producing -50', in which case the gain from you taking the job is +40.

I've seen that argument advanced seriously quite a few times, but it seems like a weird combination of utilitarianism taken to it's reductio ad absurdum form and the Nuremberg Defence

If asked what I chose to do with my life, I don't really want to say "I chose to commit acts of evil to order, but at least I was selective about which acts of evil, and not too competent at carrying them out"

If some number of people refuse those jobs, then their pool of potential workers is smaller, meaning they have to either pay more or settle for worse engineers. At least it's something.

Paying more may just mean they charge taxpayers more.

Well then I guess it's my moral duty to help spy on my fellow citizens so that I will save the country money.

I think you need to rethink your argument. As far as i can tell, you're essentially saying "Take this job that's against your ethics or somebody else will".

No, I'm saying "Take this job that is against your ethics and do the best thing you can, because otherwise someone who is not concerned about this job being unethical will take it, and do much more damage than you will".

You sound like Boromir.

Now that I think about it, calling it Palantir is ridiculously apt.

Time to read some Bernard Williams:

http://books.google.com/books?id=J0w3ER2fWv4C&pg=PA93 http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~cjreg/ethicsModule4.htm

From the recruiting efforts I've seen, I would be surprised if they aren't just hiring everyone who meets their criteria. Which would make your argument that "refusing the job only means someone else will take it" not a very good one.

Yes, if they're aiming to hire more people than are actually willing to work there, the argument breaks down. I doubt that's the case, but your point stands.

Well you can't deny that their developers probably take on some pretty novel and interesting challenges.

You could say that about a lot of immoral/unethical jobs.

Yes: solving drug trafficking routes with several constraints, making the best scams, exploiting vulnerabilities to install a botnet.

All are very interesting challenges.

Drug trafficking is a relatively honorable occupation that delivers a highly demanded consumer good that's affordable for a broad cross section of society. It's unfair to compare it to the Stasi or consumer scams.

Except for all the people killed by the gangs involved in smuggling this highly demanded consumer good that's affordable for a broad cross section of society across the borders.

Those are all consequences of illegality, not of the trade itself.

Not just immoral/unethical jobs either - but sometimes other jobs which some classes of people consider "less desirable". It's the social network guys these days, but back in the late '90's I learnt more about large-scale highly-available and secure web development from people working in the porn industry than anywhere else. (I remember a long and fascinating/educational series of conversations with Sudicide Girls tech people at the Open Source Convention in San Diego back in 2000 or 2001.)

What kind of challenges? Please elaborate.

"The problem space we tackle is wildly diverse and growing every day. We enable the discovery of new financial relationships and strategies in capital markets. We uncover fraud rings and cyber attacks. We develop strategies for optimizing home lending default strategies. We are not domain experts; we are problem solving experts."

http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPosDetail?id=a0m80000000...

something that isn't marketing recruitment speak would be more illuminating.

> We are not domain experts; we are problem solving experts

Eeek!

Sounds like my granddad's job he had in the 30s. He was a troubleshooter. It wasn't a euphemism.

Out of curiosity, what sparked this reaction? Is "problem solving" a euphemism for technical drudge-work? Glorified IT contracting?

Because it seems to emphasize doing over thinking. Maybe not a bad idea, but in the context of the comments about blackwater, immoral and illegal things, and indoctrinating fresh grads it sounded spooky.

I was thinking since they are probably on the fringes of legality, but with government sign-off, they probably get a lot of free reign to solve problems you typically wouldn't delve into, for fear of legal backlash. So basically you become a legal hacker. That would be kinda neat, and appealing, from a geek perspective.

I agree with your point here. I wont be surprised if Palantir is associated with PRISM.

Palantir Rakes In Stupendous Money?

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