r/LinkedInLunatics • u/SeaCricket8518 • 2d ago
Tech bros already had a narrow worldview. Now, they hi-five a lack of education. It’s cool to drop out of school!
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u/UpsetAd5817 2d ago
In Lord of the Rings, the Palantir are crystal balls used to communicate, but were utilized by Sauron to corrupt the minds of Denethor and Saruman. Gandalf refused to use them.
Seems like a weird thing to name your tech company after. Unless, you know, they are covertly working on behalf of Putin or something. Then it would be perfect.
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 2d ago
Its owned by Peter Thiel and is exclusively contracted with the government for top secret psyop and AI technology. Naming it Palantir is 100% on point for what the company does.
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u/imaginary_num6er 2d ago
When their greatest product is JD Vance, I wouldn’t trust them with any sensitive information that can be sold to other competitors
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u/AnAdorableDogbaby 2d ago
They poached so many good IT security analysts from my old job, and everybody who came back would tell us about how they had a bar in their break room with craft beer on tap. They paid ridiculously well too, like 150-200k. All the most evil companies have the best perks, unfortunately.
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 1d ago
The funny thing is that the tech is actually super mundane and it survives on the teet of government contracts for a reason
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u/You-Know-I-Am-Right 1d ago
I want to be 150-200k evil for a year or so just to pay down some student debt. Then it's back to being a happy hobbit.
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u/Ghostbeen3 2d ago
Thiel was also a major LoTR fan and claimed to have memorized all 3 books. He became disillusioned with academia after he didn’t fulfill his dream of becoming a clerk for a Supreme Court justice basically right out of law school. He was also part of the editorial for a right wing college newsletter at Stanford that denounced gay men for the aids epidemic, while he himself is a gay Christian. Oh I forgot, his dad worked at a uranium mine in Namibia when he was a child (after they were deemed illegal by the intl community) where they treated African workers akin to slaves.
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u/Separate_Draft4887 1d ago
denounced gay men for the aids epidemic
This is a thing that people debate?
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 1d ago
It was in the 80s and 90s.
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u/You-Know-I-Am-Right 1d ago
OMG! That was how dating would start sometimes. "Do you have AIDS? Have you ever been tested?" Paranoia was huge and it did spread a lot among gays back then with deadly consequences. Treatments today make it manageable.
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u/LeadershipSweaty3104 1d ago
Not only debate, it was a common belief. Check the history of homophobia to get an idea
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u/luxveniae 2d ago
I mean Silicon Valley types have a long history of misunderstanding the meaning of fantasy & sci-fi stories they grew up loving.
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u/tallwhiteninja 2d ago
That, or they legitimately identify with the bad guys.
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u/jesuspoopmonster 1d ago
Peter Theil is apparently a fan of a Russian book called The Last Ringbearer. The premise of the book is that Mordor is a good place and the elves are the bad guys
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u/joshthecynic 2d ago
Peter Thiel founded the company. He has this weird obsession with tech bros dropping out of college.
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u/SeaCricket8518 2d ago
Less educated = less likely to have fully formed ethics and morals.
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u/joshthecynic 2d ago
It’s worth noting that Thiel himself has a BA and a JD from Stanford.
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u/AdLiving4714 2d ago edited 1d ago
That's the irony. All these dropout promoters don't only have degrees. They have advanced degrees from world class institutions. Even Thiel's lapdog JD does.
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u/joshthecynic 1d ago
I prefer to think of Thiel as Vance's sugar daddy.
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u/fallingknife2 2d ago
Not really that strange that someone who did all that would see it as a waste of time in hindsight. That's how I feel about my degree.
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u/sekritagent 1d ago
It's like the people quickest to tell you not to worry about promotions and that titles don't matter always have impressive ones themselves: CXO, SVP, MD, etc.
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 1d ago
Titles don’t matter when you have already gotten them before and have basically gotten the “merit”.
They absolutely matter when you don’t have them.
It’s the same way people that went to Harvard try to dodge the question by saying they went to school in Cambridge or Boston.
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u/coder7426 2d ago
It can just as easily go the other way. eg, unethical plastic surgeons, arguably lawyers, political science. Colleges used to teach that non-consensual experiments were perfectly fine too.
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u/incrediblewombat 1d ago
I feel like this is so indicative of the AI bubble we’re in right now. During the dotcom boom, companies also tried to get lots of students to drop out for a job and that didn’t work out well for a lot of them when the bubble burst
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u/joshthecynic 1d ago
Yes, absolutely. Unfortunately, the young tech bros of today either weren't around back then or they were too young to remember it now.
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u/hellolovely1 1d ago
I know a developer who did this. Out of all my former colleagues, he’s the only one who voted for Trump.
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u/Renrew-Fan 1d ago
He likes young men.
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u/joshthecynic 1d ago
Especially chubby neckbeards who like to wear eyeliner. I guess Vance is too old for him now though.
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u/PoisonedRadio 2d ago
I wonder why Peter Thiel wants a bunch of undereducated young boys around. I'm not making any claims, I'm just asking questions.
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u/FuelzPerGallon 2d ago
These kids are now way less marketable, and cannot job hop as easily, a huge win for paying people less.
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u/evercase19 2d ago
This is almost surely not true. Prior professional experience at Palantir will likely supersede a lack of formal education for anyone looking to stay in a comparable field.
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u/FireFright8142 1d ago
Not in today’s tech job market. If you decide to leave and apply for a new job, you’re competing against hundreds of people with companies just as “impressive” as Palantir on their resumes AND college degrees.
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u/evercase19 1d ago
not to mention “I was recruited by Palantir to drop out of college” isn’t exactly the same as “I never got a degree” and no reasonable hiring committee would consider them to be
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u/evercase19 1d ago
Depends on the specific job, surely, but I’ve been in the tech field for over a decade with experience both as a hiring manager and on many hiring committees and I’m not sure I can recall a candidate’s educational background ever being a consideration (pro or con), even as a tiebreaker between two otherwise comparable candidates.
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u/howitbethough 2d ago
Unfortunately you have it 100% backwards. Dropping out and working at Palantir makes them more desirable than probably 95% of CS grads in any given year.
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u/FuelzPerGallon 2d ago
Shows what I know about CS, but in my world of hardware engineering that person would be unemployable outside their current role as an engineer.
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 1d ago edited 1d ago
That's bs and you know it. Maybe if they were let go after a month but if they do 2 years at palantir you honestly believe they would be unemployable across the entire sector? That's ludicrous if you think that.
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u/FuelzPerGallon 1d ago
Cool your jets dude. The rant you went on was in response to me admitting I don't know the CS world. I do however stand by being a drop out is a long term handicap vs finishing your degree.
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 1d ago
You think 3 sentences is a rant?
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u/entropies 2d ago
I need these tech bros to stop naming their companies after objects in Middle Earth
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u/daviddjg0033 2d ago
Alex Karp said Biden was feckless, Trump is wreckless on an interview on Real Time with Bill Maher a few months back. Welcome to wreckless. What else is Alex Karp saying?
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u/Not-the-best-name 2d ago
What exactly does Palantir make again?
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u/Crosscourt_splat 2d ago
To give you an actual answer, they make software and some hardware. Think database backend, analytical software, that type of stuff.
Their equipment they give to the government as a whole is not kinetic.
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u/Backlotter 2d ago
They make software that helps fascist governments detect, track, and kill people.
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u/Ireallydonedidit 1d ago
They make surveillance AI that can DoorDash a drone bombing to some sheep herders village in the Middle East in 5 minutes. It’s the future of tech
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u/Agreeable_Hour7182 2d ago
They make money off of war crimes, death, racism, and the military (which arguably covers all the previous mentions as well)
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u/TarquinusSuperbus000 2d ago
His posture really isn't giving me the sense that they only take the best and brightest.
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 2d ago
You think posture is an indicator of a truly intelligent programmer and computer scientist?
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u/TarquinusSuperbus000 2d ago edited 1d ago
No, I'm just pointing out the absurdity of openly recruiting drop outs and then underlining the point with a poster of someone who looks like they're about to start drooling all over themselves.
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 2d ago
This is the problem here, reading comprehension on the ad in this post is hilariously low. They are looking for interns that perform well enough that they would want to offer them a contract. The key here being they are offering their existing interns contracts. They are not recruiting dropouts.
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u/TarquinusSuperbus000 2d ago
When they drop out of college to accept their contracts then they're by definition recruiting drop outs, arent't they now!?
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 1d ago
No actually, to recruit dropouts you need to dropout first. They are getting interns; and offering them contracts while they are still in school. If they dropout it's after the offer, so no they are not recruiting dropouts.
They are saying our jobs are so good, you will dropout to take the offer; not that we are looking for people who have dropped out. Two totally different contexts.
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u/TarquinusSuperbus000 1d ago
AcTuAlLy offers need acceptance to be consumated and you yourself said they've dropped out after the offer (but not after the acceptance). Therefore, by the time the hiring is done and they are on the payroll, they have recruited drop outs. I never said they're looking for people who have dropped out, only that they're recruiting them—the technalities are meaningless to me. The "looking for" language are your words entirely so not really sure I need to respond to you attacking an argument you made up to salvage a win. Are we done here?
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 1d ago
Therefore, by the time the hiring is done and they are on the payroll, they have recruited drop outs.
Still no, because they were an intern before the offer and before dropping out, being an intern is the recruitment process. So no they are not recruiting dropouts.
Are we done here?
Yes we are done here.
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u/TarquinusSuperbus000 1d ago
Lol just let it go. Who are you trying to impress here anyway? You came into this with a smug, condescending attitude and now you're salty because you didn't get to feel superior. If I offended you beforehand, then stop acting like a passive aggressive little pussy and say so. Otherwise, let it go because this is getting sad—take the L or lie to yourself and say you won, I don't care which. What I can tell you though is that there is no way this conversation goes where I will give you even an ounce of the validation you so clearly crave.
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 1d ago edited 1d ago
No one said I was offended, that's your story to tell. I don't need to feel superior, its pretty clear what that internship advertisement says, and it certainly does not say; "Hello we are palantir and we are recruiting dropouts". You can keep reading it that way if you like, but thats not what it says. Also for someone who is telling someone else they are offended you sure are acting like the one who is offended and cannot let things lie. You could have chosen to be the bigger person as you see it in this and walked away but clearly you are not capable of that.
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u/Agreeable_Hour7182 2d ago
The words "dropping out" appear in the original post, though, so... they kind of are recruiting dropouts, no?
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 1d ago
No actually, to recruit dropouts you need to dropout first. They are getting interns; and offering them contracts while they are still in school. If they dropout it's after the offer, so no they are not recruiting dropouts.
They are saying our jobs are so good, you will dropout to take the offer; not that we are looking for people who have dropped out. Two totally different contexts.
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u/julias-winston 1d ago
They're literally, explicitly, recruiting dropouts.
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 1d ago
Read it again, it's says their interns are dropping out. Meaning you have to be an intern first before you are a dropout. They are not going after dropouts as hires they wants them as interns first to test them.
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u/julias-winston 1d ago
And then, they want them to drop out. That way, the interns lose power, and are at the mercy of their employer.
The intent of the ad is obvious. It's pretty ironic that your complaint was other people's reading comprehension.
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 1d ago
Lol everyone is criticizing this for saying they are recruiting dropouts, when it's clear as day that's not the case. Reading comprehension matters, you can avoid that all you want but you proved you are not getting hired by palantir dropout or not.
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u/Dat_Torii 2d ago
If you can't program yourself then you ain't a top tier programmer. Skill issues 🤷
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u/Charming-Breakfast48 2d ago
Oh cool it’s Peter Theil’s company. Ya know, the white nationalist who’s funding JD Vance!
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u/Key-Wrongdoer5737 1d ago
Higher education isn’t what it was when the universities in the Bay Area and the Department of Defense laid the foundations of the tech sector. Higher education is basically a world unto itself that doesn’t care a whole lot about the wider economy. These are institutions that have exploded their administrative budgets, raised tuition, haven’t raised quality and build vanity projects like gyms while lecture halls are filled with asbestos tile. I went to a CSU in the Bay Area and the more techy students were basically this sub 10 years ago. Higher Ed did this to itself and companies are going to take advantage of that.
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u/Phonda 2d ago
interviewed at Palantir once for a project implementation manager. Basically IT project implementation for customer facing projects. Because of my IT background, I have some certifications on my resume (like Microsoft certified professional and some other very technical certifications). I was told by the Tech-bro-female, that was managing the interview process, that I shouldn't put irrelevant certifications on my resume. I was like ... lol ok? I wasn't offered the job... probably for the better because I got mad 'better than you' vibes from them throughout the entire process. I probably wasn't a good fit.
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u/Important-Ability-56 2d ago
The phenomenon of coder nerds dropping out of their undergraduate education before they learned anything else is actually the worst problem in the world right now.
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u/CaseInformal4066 1d ago
You can learn way more software development on the job than during university. Even theoretical computer science can be learned outside of university. It's not like physics or some other field like that, where it's easier to learn in a university and all of the jobs require a degree.
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u/SeaCricket8518 1d ago
You’re talking about skill. Most everyone else here is talking an education.
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u/CaseInformal4066 1d ago
Yeah, true. Education is valuable in itself, but software engineering and undergrad comp sci are vocational degrees. Their main value is skill. Liberal arts and science have value beyond skill, but software and CS usually don't unless you become a researcher.
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u/dingus-pendamus 1d ago
After reading Careless People by that Facebook insider, I am convinced normal people should muster whatever political power we can to kneecap silicon valley and their army of psychopath tech bros.
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u/CuriousSpell5223 1d ago
I mean realistically how much of your CS curriculum did you ever use on the actual job. Not defending Palantir, but until SWE gets regulated like other professions, you will most likely become better by being in the meat grinder than in college
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u/jesuspoopmonster 1d ago
Somebody needs to tell the tech bros that think dropping out of college is a good idea that when Bill Gates and Elon Musk dropped out they were already incredibly rich and had access to resources
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u/SuchTarget2782 2d ago
It’s because the stuff they do needs bodies to code and manage but not creative thinkers or skilled engineers.
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u/Pure-Huckleberry-484 2d ago
Depends on what you're learning in school but as a software engineer this could make sense. A lot of CS departments are 10+ years behind the technology..
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u/julias-winston 1d ago
I'm a career software developer with college degrees, and 10-15 years until retirement.
I've worked with numerous, gifted, devs over the years who left college early for the "big" money, and found themselves stuck when they were laid off, unable to find work because every potential employer required a degree.
Education is power. Don't give up your power for a couple bucks. That's how they play you.
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u/PorgCT 1d ago
Techbros are what happens when you focus only on STEM, and not include liberal arts.
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u/jesuspoopmonster 1d ago
The Rationalist movement is mostly made up of tech bros and people focused on the STEM field. Their most influential work of literature that drives the philosophy is a Harry Potter fan fiction
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u/Impressive_Wing_1410 1d ago
How come the Tolkien estate is allowing them to use that name?! Mind-blowing
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u/VanillaPossible45 1d ago
in fairness, this is a Peter Theil thing. he's a strange man to say the least
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u/WingItISDAWAY 1d ago
Pretty pathetic attempt to make themselves look friendly to the uneducated.
Their interview gauntlet is among the most elitist and toxic.
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u/Jerkstore_BestSeller 1d ago
Dropping out of school to work an internship (low to no pay), sounds pretty stupid.
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u/sabautil 1d ago
They are talking about grad student not under grad.
Business is teaming with those who left academia because they just couldn't cut it.
At some point every grad student decides am I in it for the love and passion of the subject - or am I in it for the money?
Are you for real for real - or are you a sellout?
Einstein was for real. He didn't do it for the money. And Palantir is trying to get these potential Einsteins to sell out for some money. That's what they are proud of.
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u/LivingCourage4329 1d ago
I mean stuck between two losing decisions:
1) Spend 10's of thousands of dollars to get degree with questionable ROI and non-dischargable debt
2) Drop out to work entry level for 3 years before being replaced by the person that took option 1 who will work for less because they are trapped by college debt.
Tech is amazing.
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u/tempaccount00101 2d ago edited 2d ago
The comments here are insane. I didn't learn anything from my CS degree. So many people will say the same. So many people will also say they did learn something. It's hit or miss. At my job as a SWE at a big tech company I basically don't use my CS degree whatsoever except my first year classes I guess which teach how to code very basic things. But I didn't learn that in my first year classes either. I learned that on my own before university.
Many companies hire without degree and sometimes even have alternative job postings (which are highly competitive, sure) for those without degrees.
If I interned at Google and got a full-time return offer but had to drop out of school, I would take it in a heartbeat and assuming that I don't need immigration sponsorship I think that would be the smartest move. You can always finish school. You won't always have an offer from Google that pays 200k and will pay 400k in 5 years.
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u/ex_nihilo 1d ago
You probably should have paid attention in your comp sci courses, or gone to a better school then. I was a software engineer for 17 years and I used concepts from my undergraduate education all the time. Later got a MSc in comp sci and learned even more.
Nowadays I’m a white hat hacker and folks like you make my job pretty easy with all the novel exploits you introduce. 😁
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u/tempaccount00101 1d ago edited 1d ago
I still disagree. No classroom will ever teach you how to build a real-world migration tool to migrate petabytes of data in a way that is highly performant, deploy autoscaling microservices with fault tolerance, or even build a simple CRUD GraphQL API. These are all things my coworkers and I learned on the job.
However I never had to use the knowledge of how my operating system uses context switching or paging memory. I never had to know what the exact bytes were inside a TCP header. Maybe if I'm 10+ years in my career I would have to know how exactly my CPU is optimized for bitwise operations, but at that point I think I would have learned everything that I would need on the job already. I also never had to know what the underlying architecture was of my CPU and how it processes instructions.
Bugs will always exist. It is cope to think that just because your job doesn't use any concepts from university that you will create bugs. You seem to be a strong advocate for university and I guarantee you that you have written your fair share of bugs yourself. Nobody is immune to writing bugs or causing an outage in prod. If you have never written a bug in your life then congratulations I guess. You probably deserve a Nobel Prize.
Edit: just wanted to add that I recognize the work that I do is more abstracted. I would imagine a CS degree is probably more useful when either doing research or working in the embedded space, but that is a super small subset of all people who want to become SWEs.
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u/ex_nihilo 1d ago
Scaling and fault tolerance are quite literally things you directly learn how to do in a valid comp sci curriculum. How do you engineer scaling without understanding time complexity? You just kinda…guess? “Well boss it doesn’t fall over with 7 K8s nodes but I think we should let it scale to 9 so that’s how I configured the ASG.” Very scientific. Yes, I’ve had to design message processing systems to embed SMS messages to high dimensional vectors at rates up to 40,000 per second per cluster that were realtime sensitive. It’s now used by every telco in the US. And that was well before the AI craze, 10+ years ago. I’ve fixed bugs in OpenSSL. Hell if you use a container scheduler at all I guarantee you’re running code I wrote. I’m an oldhead.
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u/fallingknife2 2d ago
Losers with degrees cling to them because it's all they have to make them feel better than other people. They can't stand seeing people without a degree get a $200K job that they could never get because it puts a lie to their myth of self worth through meaningless credentials.
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u/pina_koala 1d ago
I just feel bad for all the redpilled guys who will never, ever even come close to their tech aspirations and think they have a shot at being the guy in the picture. Psyops at its finest.
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u/You-Know-I-Am-Right 1d ago
Putting ill-educated people in charge of killer drones. What could go wrong? Hopefully they drop out before any wasted time in an ethics class.
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u/Technological_loser 1d ago
It doesn’t sound like you know the first thing about what Palantir actually does lol
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u/Sad-Pop6649 1d ago
Drop out of school for us, we like bullying employees who don't have other options.
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u/Beginning_Book_751 1d ago
Peter Thiel specifically fucking loathes Higher Education institutions(despite having a degree himself) and views them as part of a secret cabal that is actively suppressing the advancement of humanity. By which he means our degradation into technocratic oligarchy where he can be a dictator. It makes perfect sense that he would be actively pushing for people to drop out and not get educated.
Also, if people get educated like he did, there's more competition for him, and he doesn't want that.
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u/Dontchopthepork 2d ago
Hands on experience is honestly far better than what you’ll learn in school. If palantir is offering you a job, definitely worth dropping out tbh. Having on your resume you worked at palantir and they wanted you enough to hire you before you even graduated will take you much further than just finishing your degree
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u/Agreeable_Hour7182 2d ago
Palantir has a not-entirely-unearned negative viewpoint in a lot of the tech world, though.
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u/taco-prophet 2d ago
Palantir's in my "technically better than unemployment" tier of potential employers.
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u/Dontchopthepork 2d ago
Some people don’t like them because of their government contract work. But most don’t care.
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u/Agreeable_Hour7182 2d ago
How are you defining "most" here?
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u/Dontchopthepork 2d ago
The majority of people hiring for jobs. Very few businesses have morals
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u/Agreeable_Hour7182 2d ago
Oh, wow, that's a lot of people! Can you provide some numbers?
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u/Dontchopthepork 2d ago
You need numbers to know that most businesses care about money over morals?
What is this argument style? Like you know there’s no “study” on what hiring managers think about palantir to either support or rebut what im saying.
What is your goal in this style of argument other than to be an ass?
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u/Agreeable_Hour7182 2d ago
To challenge people like you who make unfounded assertions. Since you asked so nicely.
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u/Dontchopthepork 2d ago
Where’s your data on palantirs negative reputation in the tech world?
Edit: and to the “asked so nicely part”. I hate people like you that act like they’re “just having a friendly convo” when you’re really just trying to tell people to shut up and they’re wrong, by you asking questions you know there’s no “study for”. If you want to be an asshole and say you know better than everyone, just say that
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u/Temporary-Vanilla482 2d ago
This is about Thiel wanting people who will work insane hours and have no familial attachments. Its the same model that PayPal had for years. Google also employed this model as well for quite some time.
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u/SeaCricket8518 2d ago
Absolutely not. The folks that push that story are the ones that don’t realize how out of touch they are with humanity. I’ve worked with developers that are rather mediocre because they are one-trick ponies - all code, and no higher level analytical skills.
Mediocre dudes that could have opened their eyes and minds juuuuuuuuust a little by staying in school and embracing a history or literature course.
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u/_agilechihuahua 2d ago
Sure, but IME it’s more an age thing than an education thing. If you’re talented enough, and have zero ethical qualms about your work, I don’t really see an issue here. Plus, college is fucking expensive. I don’t think a sociology elective is gonna really matter in this scenario.
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u/Agreeable_Hour7182 2d ago
Your argument nibbles its own tail, I think. The "zero ethical qualms" would potentially be resolved via... better education about sociology perhaps
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u/_agilechihuahua 1d ago
If you think so. It’s a little idealistic to think more college is going to dissuade people from money in an unstable job market.
I just don’t think this is lunatic behavior. Unless we’re gonna run down the list of F50 companies and decide which is evil enough.
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u/Dontchopthepork 2d ago
I’ve worked with many similar developers, and they all went to school and graduated. They still sucked.
I highly doubt paying $6k for a literature or history course is a smart investment for a developer
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u/Agreeable_Hour7182 2d ago
Have you published a statistical analysis of relative suckitude between college graduate developers versus dropouts? I'd love to read it.
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u/taco-prophet 2d ago
It's hardly statistically significant, but in my decade as software engineer, I've met one self taught successful engineer versus a reasonable number of folks who went through coding bootcamps and never managed to get jobs outside of testing. I actually think it's pretty neat you can be a self taught developer, but "self taught" is no shortcut. You still have to put in the work.
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u/ex_nihilo 1d ago
Let’s be honest, all developers are self taught. At least, the employable ones. The ability to absorb new concepts quickly is largely what’s going to determine your success in this field.
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u/fallingknife2 2d ago
I have! It's in the same place your analysis is.
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u/Agreeable_Hour7182 2d ago
Conveniently linked on a website with an edit history? Lovely! Do share.
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u/Boring_Pace5158 2d ago
The irony is Silicon Valley would not be what it is without Stanford and UC Berkeley, and the other major research universities around the country. They rely on the knowledge that comes out of the universities they so despise