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Comment by natch | Hacker News Reader

Palantir has hundreds of employees swarming around downtown Palo Alto. Hundreds. Somebody is paying that company a LOT of money for something.

There is something very weird about the employees in Palo Alto: I never see them at local meetups, events, parties, and such. They are truly strangers who keep to themselves and don't engage with the local community... and very young. I get the feeling they come from afar and are just out in California for a short time, and don't see themselves staying here. Like expats in their own country. Maybe they are from NSA families. Maybe Palantir functions effectively like an internship program for future NSA employees.

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I don't think Palantir is a sinister NSA conspiracy so much as a manifestation of a certain kind of corporate culture present both in and outside of the intelligence community. At least from my interaction with employees there, it's not an NSA feeder nor an NSA nepotism apparatus, just a corporation that hires aggressively out of Ivy Leagues and then indoctrinates into a specific culture.

In my experience Palantir employees tend to work late and party with other Palantir employees. A friend lived with a Palantir employee and I worked in one of their buildings (100 Hamilton). In my limited observation I noted a definite "wake up, go to Palantir, work, go out with Palantir, go back, after-party at Palantir, sleep" lifestyle that many Palantir employees subscribe to.

It's very "corporate cult"-esque: they hire inexperienced fresh grads from top-tier universities, and put them all together so that they foster relationships with each other, then build social events and in-office parties so people are reluctant to go out.

A lot of them also obtain US Govt security clearances, and it's a bit of a process to obtain and something of an achievement in and of itself.

But the ones I know also take the responsibility seriously, and I can't help but wonder if that influences some of them to spend more time with each other where they don't have to watch what they say, and less with the "outside" world where they have to be a little more on guard.

If you're born and raised in America, with a clean record, and sane, shouldn't getting clearance be easy?

First, in order to get a clearance you have to be sponsored. Companies have a limited number of sponsorship slots allocated to them by the government.

Then, the process behind getting cleared is fairly arduous. You may have a clean record but you have to prove it exhaustively even for the lowest level of clearance -- I believe the application form is on the order of 40 pages. You have to list all of your friends and sexual relations from the past 10 years, for instance, so that they can go an interview every single one of them.

Essentially, being born and raised in america and having a clean record while being sane is just a baseline requirement.

One of the most visible Palantir employees is Michael Lopp (aka Rands), ex-Apple and Borland engineering manager and now a director at Palantir.

Lopp is pretty visible, writing a blog (http://www.randsinrepose.com), publishing a few books, and speaking at numerous conferences.

But you're right, it seems Palantir takes a lot of it's culture from Apple as opposed to Google.

It's probably hard to get a lot of government counterterrorism and military contracting work if you are dedicated to openness in the spirit of Google.

What? I subscribe to his mailing list, and read his blog... Yikes.

On the other hand, they openly and frequently share information about their work on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Palantir-Technologies. Here they sort of address the apparent secrecy:

> This is a common misconception. We do have clients whose names we can't share, but we try to be as open as we can, both internally and externally. We put as much of our customer work as we can on our Analysis Blog (http://www.palantirtech.com/gove...). We participate in the open source community (https://github.com/palantir/). We have engaged with press who have pretty thoroughly profiled the company (http://www.washingtonian.com/art...). We share how our technology works on our white videos (Google "white videos"). We even tell people exactly what we look for when we interview candidates and give tips (see entries in (http://blog.palantir.com/)

http://qr.ae/pgHRy

> Somebody is paying that company a LOT of money for something.

As they've made perfectly clear, their major clients are the department of defense and hedge funds. Of course they're getting paid a lot of money.

Palantir was funded by In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is the CIAs VC arm. It's a non-profit VC for the intelligence community. So, they don't even care if their investment makes money, they just want spy tech at whatever their budget can afford.

Not conspiracy theory or speculation, all public info.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/additional-publicat...;

It's absolutely a spook shop. Many people working there don't seem to realize they're spooks though. They highly target a lot of young, naive, fresh grads.

They don't come from afar. As an ex-dev, I can actually say that most of them come from across the street (Stanford). When I was there, the heaviest represented schools were Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, UIUC, and Cornell.

And no, at least on the core dev team, I can't imagine any of them ever even considering joining the NSA. We did what we did because it was fun. NSA sounds too corporate.

Very similar behavior to Washington DC defense contractors.

I don't think this is true at all. At my school (CMU), Palantir was one of the big companies that students wanted to work for, along with Facebook and Google. I think they're just really good at recruiting and creating a brand.

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