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Comment by nimish | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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"

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.

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.

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/ )

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