Basic anti-intellectualism framed as if it's something revolutionary, but really for the purposes of finding easily-moldable loyal cogs for the coming corporate-totalitarian society. High schoolers have had one class of "Civics" at best, for which they likely just memorized the answers and don't really get the hard-won ideals at play. College is where students start to mature from having to manage their own independence, and have time to reflect on things like morals and society (albeit going a bit idealistically overboard). Can't have the latter gumming up the works!
My company has exclusively hired interns out of high school, including myself, since the mid 2000s. Every single hire was an intern first, either as a junior or senior in HS. The board is now 2/3rds former interns (I'm one of them), 1/3rds original founders.
It works extremely well. Any high school AP CS teacher we ask is delighted to send us their best students. We basically get to interview for 3-5 years during summers while they're at college and then hire (if we have a spot, we are a "lifestyle" company) when they graduate. Of course this means we don't hire seniors, which probably gives us some blind spots, and it means we can't silicon-valley-scale up, but we're very happy with growing software engineers vs hiring them.
A corporation, founded by a Stanford grad who’s been giving talks on the Antichrist, who’s business is to spy on everyone and create a panopticon, is offering a four week indoctrination scheme to susceptible teens.
Idk how our society gets out of this mess but the elites in charge are deranged and focused on destroying one of the west’s great institutions liberal arts colleges. STEM is great but liberal arts flesh out your mind and teach you to think critically and engage with the world. Something sorely missed in today’s age
Not for any serious positions I bet. Only where they want to do dirty stuff like killing or stalking other humans. It's like recruiting for army- you get them before they learn how to use their brains.
There really needs to be a trade school for software engineering. Not just a short boot camp, either. A rigorous 4 year degree that focuses on industry relevant skills and hands-on projects.
The biggest reason I got my 1st job out of college at Cloudflare was because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend. These things were not, or barely covered in my CS degree. No wonder new grads nowadays are struggling to get jobs. Schools aren't preparing them well for jobs.
It's an Alex Karp pet project that is less of an apprenticeship or professional skills program and more of a mini-uATX [0] style "great books" program [1].
Apprenticeship programs have value, but how this Palantir program is structured clearly isn't providing the technical chops needed, and is just an ideological bootcamp
Finally, if Palantir wanted, they could always just recruit from a more diverse set of universities or create a hiring pipeline out of community colleges. Yet Palantir is notorious about only interviewing and hiring candidates from high prestige programs.
Not requiring a degree is one thing. Not requiring any basic socialization or life experience is bizarre, maybe cultish, and sounds a little like non-sexual grooming. Hire adults, weirdos.
My first job was a dotcom startup who heard via social connections I was a bright high school student who could program. I think I was paid $15/hr to write Windows GUI code. In retrospect I think they were just happy for the cheap labor and I didn’t know any better. There was no mentorship or any other useful growth to make up for the low pay.
Visit Phnom Penh (its not pleasant), visit the killing fields and the prisons. There are pictures of the child soldiers that were authorities at prisons, encouraged to report on adults and punish.
I teach freshmen through seniors in college. Let me just say good luck with that -- last week I had to explain to a freshman what a "colon" was and where to find it on the keyboard. This person graduated near the top of their HS class. I also had to explain to a Master's student who graduated with an "IT" degree what a "compiler" was. So yeah, Palantir isn't ready for what they're suggesting.
The consequence of "everyone" getting a bachelor's degree is that high schools outsource their work to colleges. Especially since COVID have things gotten worse; the students I'm teaching now were middle schoolers 5 years ago. I will say that the kids are great, but they are severely lacking in fundamentals in a way students even 5 years ago were not.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 48.5 ms ] threadFour out of the five top executives of Palantir earned degrees from top 10 US universities.
It works extremely well. Any high school AP CS teacher we ask is delighted to send us their best students. We basically get to interview for 3-5 years during summers while they're at college and then hire (if we have a spot, we are a "lifestyle" company) when they graduate. Of course this means we don't hire seniors, which probably gives us some blind spots, and it means we can't silicon-valley-scale up, but we're very happy with growing software engineers vs hiring them.
Idk how our society gets out of this mess but the elites in charge are deranged and focused on destroying one of the west’s great institutions liberal arts colleges. STEM is great but liberal arts flesh out your mind and teach you to think critically and engage with the world. Something sorely missed in today’s age
The biggest reason I got my 1st job out of college at Cloudflare was because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend. These things were not, or barely covered in my CS degree. No wonder new grads nowadays are struggling to get jobs. Schools aren't preparing them well for jobs.
Apprenticeship programs have value, but how this Palantir program is structured clearly isn't providing the technical chops needed, and is just an ideological bootcamp
Finally, if Palantir wanted, they could always just recruit from a more diverse set of universities or create a hiring pipeline out of community colleges. Yet Palantir is notorious about only interviewing and hiring candidates from high prestige programs.
[0] - https://uatx.substack.com/p/this-is-why-we-built-uatx
[1] - https://americanmind.org/salvo/great-books-is-for-losers/
Visit Phnom Penh (its not pleasant), visit the killing fields and the prisons. There are pictures of the child soldiers that were authorities at prisons, encouraged to report on adults and punish.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12211296
The consequence of "everyone" getting a bachelor's degree is that high schools outsource their work to colleges. Especially since COVID have things gotten worse; the students I'm teaching now were middle schoolers 5 years ago. I will say that the kids are great, but they are severely lacking in fundamentals in a way students even 5 years ago were not.