I was talking with my friends about Palantir the other day. We all basically agreed that we could never work there unless we were truly desperate. The role they have played in surveillance capitalism is just too slimy for us.
Rarely is it someone diving into something questionable. It is typically either 1) a slow culture change, and one day find yourself sitting at your desk doing horrible things. 2) naivety and person is unaware going into the situation, but now they are in it. It is super easy to sit back from afar after the culture change, after the info is public, to say “I would never work there/do that”.
Certainly. To be clear, I'm not describing "how horrible" people are who originally joined it. I'm saying that today, with what we know and the problems we see growing around the world, especially the rise of authoritarianism, we have some reserves about working for a company like Palantir.
I think you're giving engineers too much credit. I know a people who work at Palantir despite fully knowing what they do, and I know a lot of other engineers who, in 2020, would love to work there.
Really? That's not the impression that I'm getting from observing developer discussions on social media, including here, on HN. The impression I am getting is that an overwhelming majority of developers who are vocal online share left democratic values and thus resent Palantir. (They've recently started to be resentful of Facebook as well, although I haven't heard of a mass exodus of developers from there.) Do you have a sample of developers who express diametrically opposite views?
I bet most HNers don't even know what Palantir is much less why it would be wrapped up in any controversy.
I'd be wary of extrapolating much from online bubbles.
Btw I don't think I speak for a minority of HNers when I say that it's not that easy to find a "good" job, whatever that could mean. For example, simply wanting a fully remote job already damns you to a tiny minority of US jobs, especially pre-Covid. Even a so-called "bad" company doesn't need to check many boxes to be one of someone's few options, so it always seems quite premature to claim that nobody would want to work at said company. Hell, if you even particularly enjoy your job, you've hit jackpot as far as many of us are concerned.
Sometimes statements about what fellow developers will or won't do make us all sound like millionaires looking for our next hobby.
This is a sign you're living in a bubble. If you're a high performer on a FB/G ad team, you're earning half a million dollars a year. Morals don't usually survive that amount of bribery.
These teams have thousands of employees.
Palantir has 2,500 employees. Obviously they have no trouble hiring. Facebook and Google have ad teams with tens of thousands of people. Juul managed to hire swathes of people, etc.
The problem with looking only at people who are vocal online, is that you only see things from a small bubble of people, and only the things, that don't get downvoted/removed by moderators.
If you looked at e.g. reddits users and their comments, Bernie Sanders would be on his way to a second term.
Since the article is mentioning ICE, and i'm from a small eu country, really close to relatively shitty non-eu countries, I know that what people say or don't say online is different from what people think in their heads. Being a developer here, and trying to find work in USA is a big pain in the ass... if you're a good developer, but without a formal education, might be even impossible. Even if you have everything, have a good resume, big projects, get invited by facebook/google/whoever, going through the endless stream of bureaucracy takes a lot of time and a lot of money (which is understandable, because hiring local is good for local workers, and importing foreign workforce means lowering pay, due to more supply). When such people get their papers, green cards, and work in USA for some time, their opinion on illegal immigrants, who skip the whole process (and sometimes even get praised for that) is a lot different than the comments you see on reddit. They might not say it there, but they say it here.
>When such people get their papers, green cards, and work in USA for some time, their opinion on illegal immigrants, who skip the whole process (and sometimes even get praised for that) is a lot different than the comments you see on reddit. They might not say it there, but they say it here.
Surely you realize that the people who come to the US without documents aren't doing the same job or getting close to the same compensation as you? If you want to pay a smuggler a few thousand dollars so you can work in a meat packing plant and risk you and your kids being locked up at any time, you can also follow their path. The fact that this is the best option for these people should tell you something about the circumstances they are in and how they differ from yours.
Because they have no incentive to? Not sure what that question has to do with my response.
I'll try making my point in a different way. You seem to have some kind of resentment for undocumented immigrants because you went through a long immigration process and they didn't, and now you both work in the US. My point is that the facts that you're both immigrants and work in the US are the only similarities. They have to work hard jobs for little pay, and look over their shoulders for their whole lives knowing they could be locked up at any moment. They're not getting the same reward that you did for going through the immigration process. You don't have anything to be resentful towards them about.
Nah, I didn't, I stayed at home, I'm just telling the issue my friends and former coworkers had. They get paid well (we're talking coders/developers/engineers, not meat packers).
Why do americans have no incentive to work in meat packing plants? What you're advocating for is to offer (below) minimum/livable pay for every work possible, and then, if noone local applies (because the wage is too low), just get some foreign workers from some shitty country (legal or illegal), and exploit them. Wouldn't it be better to just stop immigration for shitty paid jobs (in situations like now, with relatively high unemployment), and passively force the employers to just pay more to get enough workers?
When a big company (eg. one with a logo of a famous mouse), fires whole teams of local workers, and replaces them with cheaper H1B workers ( https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/technology/disney-h1b-worke... ), whole HN/reddit/... is outraged, with "disney bad!". Why would you let meat packing plants do this? Why not just say "no, you wont get immigrant workers, when there are so many local ones unemployer, and you'll get punished if you hire illegals", and just work with that?
Otherwise, again, as someone living in a small EU country, i could never understand how a large company can employ illegal workers, and how illegals can stay in the country (and even get benefits, send kids to school, etc.), without the system noticing (because all of that is pretty much impossible anywhere else in the developed world.
I agree with you that the employers exploiting the workers is the core problem. My disagreement is that you can't blame undocumented immigrants for taking the job, they're just trying to survive.
>how [undocumented immigrants] can stay in the country (and even get benefits, send kids to school, etc.)
"Immigrants taking benefits" is a big misconception pushed by right wingers and others with anti-immigrant sentiments. Getting any kind of government benefit of significance in the US is hard even for citizens. If you don't have documents they'll laugh you out of the office.
I hope you're not suggesting banning the children of undocumented immigrants from attending school would somehow be more fair. Pretty clearly they didn't have a choice in the matter.
I just don't understand how you can send a kid to school without any papers/documents/etc.? Here (in slovenia), every citizen has a citizen ID (not really public, but not secret, and can be generated by hand), you have a permanent resident address, your kid belongs to that school district, your kid has a medical file, documents (medical card too), everything, and without all the papers and the kid being "in the system", there's no way for a kid to go to school here.
If I understand correctly, you can just bring a random kid to school, say "this here is bobby, he'll be going to school here", and they just take him? Without an ID, any checks, checks on parents, etc.?
Same with jobs.... i understand the "under the table" jobs, e.g. picking fruit and getting paid in cash at the end of the day.... this is theoretically possible here too.... but people working in large companies? How do you get paid? How do you even open a bank account? Here, again, you need an ID and a tax number, every bank account is tied to your personal tax number, and you get paid to that account. When you start your job, the company has to pay for benefits (pension, medical, etc.), and those are tied via your tax number and paid directly to the government. Just to start working, you need to pass a medical exam, where they also check your documents, and even check your medical records from your personal doctor.
As I said, i'm not advocating for anything, I just don't understand how you can do all that, without being a citizen, having your ID number, tax number, bank account, ID card, registered permanent residence, etc.
(yes, there are exceptions, foreign workers get temporary tax numbers, and use special documents, kids of diplomats get special documents again, etc., but in general, if you're not "in the system", there's no way to do anything).
In the US, that is how hard it is to get a government benefit like unemployment or food stamps, but public schools are one exception. There have been several states that have passed laws banning undocumented immigrant, but those laws were ruled to be unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1981 because to deny education to these children would ”deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation." More info here: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/plyler-v.... As you can imagine, people who hate immigrants also hate that court decision, but it's the law of the land and I think it is fair.
The case with employment is pretty different, I don't know much about it other than that the employers figure out how to pay people with cash in a way that they're able to not get caught very often.
But really my point is just that undocumented immigrants work incredibly hard at essential jobs and have very difficult lives, and hating them for not going through a long legal process that's usually not even open to them is unfair.
I lived in a former communist country ("former" in both ways... not communist anymore, and also, I haven't moved, the country just doesn't exist anymore).
Wanting to get cheaper labour is universal, capitalism has nothing to do with that.
> If you looked at e.g. reddits users and their comments, Bernie Sanders would be on his way to a second term.
And this despite reddit being generally considered more trolly and less left-leaning than, say, twitter, and possibly github.
> When such people get their papers, green cards, and work in USA for some time, their opinion on illegal immigrants, who skip the whole process (and sometimes even get praised for that) is a lot different than the comments you see on reddit.
I hear you. I find it fascinating to hear person after person admit that online spaces have become dominated by particular ideologies, where people holding dissenting views but knowing what's good for them are reluctant to share their opinions. Fifteen to twenty years ago, maybe even ten, it wasn't like that.
I think a lot of people are not against illegal immigration but against the subhuman treatment desperate people who have no other choice receive, it used to be more human. And the fact that the treatment is starting to be reminiscent of nazi concentration camps is a big reason to dissent.
I think comparing this to nazis is very bad.... if nazis let jews from outside germany, there illegaly, just go back home whenever they wanted, and at worse, send them back themselves, history would be a lot different.
Nobody in their right mind would publically express these views in today's Cancel Culture witch-hunting climate. You're probably in a bubble of like-minded people, and mistakingly extrapolating the views expressed in that bubble to the whole developer community.
If you think that James Damore had universal disagreement among his peers then you're in a bubble. Ask yourself why they would bother to speak up when hundreds of thousands of dollars and their career is on the line.
Since we already have read that it will be different. Imagine a world where we all have neural sims integrated with something like Palantir. So many criminals will be caught. Found a body dumped in a swamp, lets query who has been there. Don't we all love when criminals are caught from CCTV recordings.
Is it scary, yes. We will need to be more involved in the democratic process.
What is your obsession with catching criminals, and what makes you think that punishment reduces crime? Wouldn't it be a more efficient use of resources to target the socioeconomic factors that lead to crime?
I'm told by my blue friends that I'm naive. Reds call me a socialist.
This is by design. It is intentional. Billions of dollars are spent giving people these 'views'.
Sanders gave people an opportunity to vote for "those things", and he was the clear favorite to take out Trump - until Democrats pulled every dirty trick to scupper his campaign. Again.
So people really do want to vote for these things, but massive effort is put into not giving them the option. Sanders is the most popular politician in America, every year - and instead of helping him, instead of boosting him, the Blue team stabbed him in the front, in the back, in the eye balls, etc.
>until Democrats pulled every dirty trick to scupper his campaign
You mean it's the democrat's fault that 20 somethings didn't go vote?
I liked Bernie, I voted for him, but the demographic he targeted apparently preferred swiping through tik tok to improving their world so he learned a hard lesson a second time.
