Palantir had a booth at a Summer internship expo I went to once. I asked them what the deal was with helping the NSA in their surveillance capabilities and what not. The guy said he was impressed that "I had the courage to ask tough questions" and asked for my details. They sent me a test but not being super experienced as a dev, I didn't get much further than that. I still got a free shirt so I can rep them when we're full 1984 :)
They look more and more like a consulting firm each day. My previous employer spent £40m with them, only to get nowhere close to the expected project deliverables. We did get a nice looking dashboard though...
Most big consulting firms are extremely inefficient. They succeed purely because they have a monopoly on large corporate and government contracts.<p>These companies are not focused on delivering value. The real purpose of these companies is merely to be an excuse so that executives can keep filling each others' pockets without attracting scrutiny.
I was tangentially involved with DCGS-A - I worked on the DoDAF 'architecture' for it, porting the documentation from the purpose-built views of DoDAF 1.x to the UML models of DoDAF 2.0, mostly in an automated fashion using some hacky VBA code I wrote to recreate the existing diagrams in the the newest and shiniest version of IBM's Rational System Architect.<p>DCGS is everything that is wrong with government, and with the Army in particular. Stakeholders of existing systems demand to be stakeholders in the new system, and because stake demands input, committees at every level make recommendations. It is a monstrosity, trying to tie together systems which have no business communicating with one another, and all the systems' owners would rather that everyone else change than that they change. Furthermore, the existing systems DCGS was supposed to combine were of the caliber you'd expect from government contractors in a pre-18F world.<p>A friend of mine from left the contract, and became a trainer for Palantir. The Marine Corps used Palantir's offering instead of something DCGS-like in Afghanistan. It was easier to use, less buggy, and therefore more useful despite having an ostensibly smaller feature set.<p>Of course, every contractor and GS employee had brilliant ideas, and we pretended to have insight, and of course "the Army should just buy Palantir" was a general murmur among people who couldn't make the decisions.<p>I think this is probably good news, in terms of the Army actually getting something useful. I'm not totally sold on the whole panopticon technology thing in general or on Palantir specifically, but it's at least less wasteful than continuing to flush money down the toilet that is DCGS.
Curious: Why is palantir more associated with thiel than Alex karp?<p>I suspect Thiels right wing position squares with the palantir narrative better than Karp's left wing stances.
Palantir basically does "splunk" except with a UI normal people can use. Honestly, I think ingesting your data into splunk and creating in house splunk apps is a superior solution.<p>What palantir has is "connections" with the intelligence and law enforcement communities. They basically brought "big data" to cops and spooks(and now the military too I guess). They don't do much that isn't done already by other private sector/silicon valley companies
Any defense contract for more than two years is clearly unconstitutional. "Cruel and unusual" and "due process" are intentionally vague. Electing a President who is not 35 years old, or making a military appropriation longer than 2 years are intentionally not vague and not allowed.
Same thing i post everytime Palantir comes up...<p>>I cannot say enough bad things about Palantir.<p>>I cannot comment about the technology but I sure as hell can at a people level. I was a speaker at a conference where one of the Palantir cofounders gave a keynote. This was a conference organized by college students for their peers. As with all such situations these kids worked incredibly hard and his talk was incredibly disrespectful to that.<p>>If I hadn't been so disgusted I would have thought to record it. Rather than talk about anything relevant to his audience, or frankly anything informative, he told 'stories'. We have all seen that type of talk, but I have never seem one which so blatantly braggadocious about his interactions with this and other country's intelligence branches. I found it somewhat ironic, for someone who works for Peter Theil, that the level to which the talk, and his representation of the 'good' the company does was so absolutely and unapologetically statist and authoritarian. He talked about who's jet he rode on, who he knew, and other things that seemed simply organized to ensure we knew just how important he was. Several of the stories were overtly misogynistic, and none of them had any useful knowledge about Palintir or working for them. I was sitting with another speaker and we were literally shaking our heads. I felt bad for the organizers and felt the shame he[the speaker] seemed incapable of.