Comment by htrp
7 months ago
Palantir is a tech platform that consumes data from their clients in return for providing high level data-driven insights. They assign FDEs (or consultants) to really learn the details of a customers data. Foundry allows them to get single pane view of the data in an org and they actually have both the tech and engineering skills to do the dirty data cleaning jobs.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
Another thing to add is (according to a coworker who worked with them at previous big company) that they present solutions in a way that makes it hard for the customer to use the solution outside their ecosystem.
They're supposedly very aggressive on that point, so once you integrate their solution to your pipeline you're pretty much stuck with them for the foreseeable future.
Many safety/mission critical companies can get really bogged in by this, with too many administrative hoops to detach. which is probably why they're focusing on that industry.
My coworker liked to describe them as a parasite that creates a symbiotic relationship with their host.
So it's outsourced data science?
Yes but if you don't have enough budget to pay for their engineering time, they also provide good UI to do data science. It's like a fancier version of Excel for data wrangling: imagine Excel but your data is not necessarily tabular; it may be a graph; it may contain images and multimedia, etc.
I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.
yes, and they also make user interfaces for killing people
Closer to outsourced data engineering
A bunch of dash boards, tools and ingestion yes.
Worked for a similar company with similar clients at the time. Making the data usefull in innovative ways was a big part of it so in a way sure part of it data science related. At the same time I’d say it’s broader than that.
>For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
AFAIK, this is the most succinct description of Palantir I've read. A looser-fitting analogy is they come in, replace whatever the hell you were trying to use SAP for with actually competent software. Most "FDEs" can't explain what the company does because what they did was work at $CLIENT for 18 months ripping apart all their internal software with Palantir building blocks.
It sounds like fundamentally SAP and Palantir target different use cases though? While SAP has OLAP functions, their bread and butter is highly domain-specific and transactional.
FDE = Forward Deployed Engineer
Forward Deployed Engineer = Consultant
I will not allow Palantir to extend their reality distortion field to me. They are consultants. They are also engineers. Other places call them FEs. But they didn't invent some new class of engineering, they just rebranded one.
>They are consultants. They are also engineers.
Good lord the egos must be massive.
Reality distortion, or they're just using military terminology?
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“Forwarded deployed” is just national security jargon adopted by to a tech co, as I recall.
As opposed to the more commonly known 'Reverse Deployed Engineer', who sits behind the product manager who can deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to.
The product manager deals with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. He has people skills; he is good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!?
> had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
so beautiful.
If by "you give them your data" you mean "your data never leaves your data warehouses and never touches a Palantir server", then you're close
Their FDE embeds in your org yeah. Thats worth noting maybe, but not that novel
They take an exorbitant fee to clean up the mess government created when they outsourced their tech infrastructure to private sector companies preying on dumb government money.
That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
At least in my country the reason is that the politicians force them to outsource in various ways like not letting them pay their employees market rate salaries.
It is not that they believe more money will solve the problem. It is often cost cutting which makes things this expensive.
My take is that government is like a really lazy college student. Goimg to the library to study would be hard, and you’d need vision and motivation to do it. Instead, you take the money given to you by your parents, buy the best textbook there is on the subject, and put it on your shelf. You haven’t actually achieved anything. But you still feel a sense of accomplishment. You paid money. You bought something. That counts. Or at least so you tell yourself. And so does the government. It’s basically all Y Combinator rules, reversed.
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> That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money.
They know they can’t drown out the problems, nor do most of them want to. The privatization of government work is just a dog and pony show that lets rich assholes give taxpayer money to other rich assholes.
Not to say the left doesn’t do this too (assuming the US political speak, “left” referring to democrats is really just barely right of center), but part of the conservative playbook has always been to rip apart the federal government (or the parts that they don’t like, such as providing social services). The easiest way is to tank a group by hiring a private company to do a shit job and then saying “see how bad they did? We should just axe food stamps.”