Comment by Centigonal
15 hours ago
Palantir is very expensive. This is because:
1. they aim to deliver product company margins with a consulting-heavy model.
2. your software purchase funds a cadre of "free" FDEs and deployment strategists who customize your install, build a bunch of data pipes/transforms, and talk to people to figure out what all the data means.
This could be a good deal if your tech org is not very competent at integrating your data, or if you have a sudden, short-term need. In the longer term, it's probably cheaper and more effective to develop a competent tech team, modernize the source data systems, and roll your own integration -- but that also requires leaders with long-term vision who are resistant to external hype and pressure.
I never understood why nation states pay outside companies for this stuff. You need the expertise to actually evaluate what you're getting anyway. Incentives are in no way aligned. At the state level you have the scale to do it in house.
If a senior government employee can get a very expensive Palantir contract approved, they have a good chance of a much better paid job at Palantir in the future:
https://www.thenational.scot/news/26055524.palantir-hired-30...
This is a paradox that you see in many countries. I work for a private company that make software for the public sector in France, so I am very familiar with the subject. And to be fair, there are many cases where using contractor does make a lot of sense (seasonality or infrequent demands, shared resources, etc). But a lot of the population sees public spending as the biggest evil. This lead to the public sector putting a huge pressure on their biggest spending : payroll. This means fewer employees and worse pay. That makes the public sector not attractive to talent and unable to create a workforce for specific project that should have been fully in control of the public entity. Due to this, the public sector often has to go through private contractor, which ironically often cost more than if you had the skills internally. But increase the number of employee in your municipality and a part of the taxpayers are going to crucify you (somehow they are ok with paying millions to private contractors though). The internal vs. external spending is a difficult one and there is a lot of subtlety to it. Sadly, in the public discourse it is often reduced to "public spending bad" or "everything should be nationalized".
Because "nation states" are not one making decision either. It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group of them and even best of people who work on such positions usually choose it because of job security and stability.
Spending 10x more on IBM or Palantir can't get them fired, but trying to build something in-house their organization don't have competence for can get them fired.
And this is even if you don't take lobbying or corruption into account.
> It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group
Almost all governments have a legally defined public procurement framework. If this is overridden, it's pretty much always by elected politicians, not by regular government employees.
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Yes, and: often they're prevented from building it in house!
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Buy: you need expertise in contracts and knowing what you need.
Build: you need expertise in contracts, knowing what you need and also software development.
It's obviously easier to buy than build, especially for civil service roles where they can't attract the best developers due to political/ideological constraints.
The catch is that if you don't know software development, you probably don't know what you need...
>knowing what you need.
But if you have a government department that builds software, they can also spec it. And everyones interests are aligned.
Further you open the door to bell labs/DARPA type speculative work.
Seems to me, the type of work environment where you have that freedom, are able to open source work would be attractive to a lot of people.
They do this because the UK is a failing nation state (it's poorer than the USA state of Missouri) that needs to make goodwill with any country willing to trade with it. So of course they will go full tilt into USA branch of neoliberalism. Expect them to talk about privatizing more of the NHS to "save the budget" too come 2030.
Plausible deniability. "We paid £5 million for consultants who recommended this system, it's not our fault it turned out to be a steaming pile of crap that wasted £20 million and took 3 years".
More like “we did exactly what our constituents wanted and bought a system to do this instead of hiring a team to do this.”
Isn't it obvious? Because governments aren't good at management. There's no incentive or feedback loop. A company goes out of business if it's operationally a mess or doesn't deliver value. Not always but it's highly correlated. Governments face no pressure like this. Maybe mild pressure on the very local level. But when you get to the national level, orgs like the Pentagon misplace trillions of dollars with not so much of a protest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
The irony in your example is the modern Pentagon is largely a collection of private companies.
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See my comment on the AI replacing consultants story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48133728
If you get someone else to do it you are not responsible for failure.
if Palantir (or other consultancies) are friends with government decision makers (especially in the US) then spending more on a service is a feature, not a bug.
reads like Salesforce to me, ugh! Enterprises are paying so much to blatantly vendor-lock in themselves using hundreds of "Salesforce engineers". It's baffling to me.
I owned Salesforce setup with 4 engineers and 500+ licenses. I don‘t see how could I replace our SF setup with an in-house product on the same budget within reasonable timeline. We won local competition within a few years, because our sales could use good CRM from day 1 and our competitor, according to the rumors I heard, could not calculate properly sales agent commission. Vendor lock-in is not always a stupid thing. Sometimes it‘s the bet that wins you a market.
Zoom out a little though. I've always felt the main reason That most companies use Salesforce Is that most companies use Salesforce.
I'll give you an example. At a previous employer, We used Google Analytics. We paid for Google Analytics. I feel positive that as a mid size company, We shouldn't have paid for Google Analytics. The free product with 50 events in GA4 should be plenty for us. But why do we use Google Analytics in the first place? Because everyone uses Google Analytics.
I agree that sometimes Salesforce might be a good idea. However, it should be a part of an overall strategy, not just because everyone does it. This kind of deliberate tooling strategy is difficult though because the way Google Analytics or Salesforce works from what I understand is make marketing folks feel they are specialized in Google Analytics or Salesforce so they feel like they have to keep using it or their skill will become useless.
It is like resume driven development but for the whole business.
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could palantir consulting be replaced by LLM in the hands of a half competent hacker?
No.
1. Palantir isn't selling consulting as much as Palantir is selling the confidence you get from buying a name brand. It's the same as paying for McKinsey to provide justification to do what you already want to do.
2. Palantir actually has some good core tech. An in house team can probably do a better job just because the incentives are better aligned, but they'll be starting from behind and have to catch up.
3. LLMs aren't at a level to replace a team of FDEs. Maybe in a couple of years. The role requires too much understanding of the human systems, and too much initiative to keep the ball rolling/acknowledge and deal with real problems.
Its much easier to replicate a thing that already exists and has had many sunk expenditures incurred.
Seriously what did LLMs replace or can replace? You are living in a world of dreams
No one got fired for buying ~IBM~ Palantir. (Well...)