Palantir Thinks College Might Be a Waste. So It's Hiring High-School Grads (opens in new tab)

It would depend on the course load. Learning languages and how to use them can easily be encapsulated in capstone, software engineering projects, & internships. The goal of a CS degree, as opposed to a bootcamp, is for students to fully understand in intimate detail the background , history, ethics, & the 5 whys of the tool that they’re using. The way I would design a CS degree is:

1. for the first two years to be about general computing with an intro to programming via Java, Typescript, Python, & Go. 2. by the end of the 2nd year Data Structures and Algorithms should be mastered 3. Third year is for tracks , whether frontend, backend, full stack, Theory. 4. Fourth year is capstone project or internship

When I went to a US university in the 90s there was even more extracurricular work needed than now, from my anecdata. I didn't even have any kind of group capstone project. It was understood that the framework college provided was the bare minimum and you needed to push yourself to stand out. And I did, and landed internships, and had no trouble getting hired. Lots of students do the minimum and/or use LLMs to do the work and they have trouble getting jobs for sure. The ones who push and use the school as a springboard get hired even in this downturn.

Switzerland has this and for basically every other job as well. Apprenticeships are very common here, I did mine as a "programmer"

Some countries like Austria have a school type that combines high school with vocational training [1]. It's five years instead of the regular four-year high school there, but you start with 5h/weeks of C programming and write your own linked list implementation at the end of year one. They have similar schools for other vocations, not just software engineering (everything from construction to chemical engineering and accounting). At the end you graduate with a high school diploma that later also enables you to go to college, if you so choose, but gives you enough skills to get hired by industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Höhere_Technische_Lehranstalt

They got a CS degree. Maybe we should have a degree for practical engineering prep, but the subject matter as organized is very beautiful and should not go away just to help people catch up to building apps in Java or whatever.

They have this where I live and it's great for pumping out web developer and generic C#/Java CRUD dudes. And to be fair, 90% of the work here is doable with their skills. It's just fucking wild talking to one and they have zero clue about theory or advanced algorithms the rare time it does come up at work. Like a deer in headlights blank stare sort of situation

Are trade schools four years now? When I was pursuing auto tech it was a two year program. I thought the benefit of vocational programs was the ability to be compressed because they don’t include the breadth of topics of a full undergraduate degree.

It's easier to get a training for those tech (that change all the time) on the job. It's harder to get the CS fundamentals later. Functional programming, type theory, etc are all very important and they are taught in CS schools

We run one in India (kalvium.com). The key differentiation is to being real world work for students for upto 6 semesters, leading to extended hands on learning.

It's the case everywhere in Europe I know of.

  > because I worked on a lot of personal projects and self learned Go and got experience with Postgres, Redis, and basic frontend.

Do you think you would have been able to do that project to the same caliber and as fast had you not had your degree?

  > These things were not, or barely covered in my CS degree.

The degree isn't there to teach you a specific technology. Those come and go. Some people will work on web like you while others will work on games, graphics, machine learning, databases, languages, or other things. The degree is to teach you the generalized principles that all these things share so that you can learn the specifics you want. They try to cover a broad base to give you exposure because you likely don't know what you want to do or what you like until you get some exposure. That broad base also makes you more effective working with those other niches.

The degree isn't to teach you a niche, it is to make it effective in the broad field.

  > No wonder new grads nowadays are struggling to get jobs. Schools aren't preparing them well for jobs.

What do you expect to be taught in only 4 years? Maybe you learned Postgres and Redis in the summer but I'm certain you wouldn't have learned it that fast had you not had other programming experience. It's not hard to learn one language once you already know another. Especially if that other language is low level or "mid" (like C/C++ or Java)[0]. The skills transfer even if the specifics aren't identical.

The problem is tragedy of the commons.

We question why train a junior if they're just going to leave instead of questioning why they will leave. We laugh at someone not "negotiating good enough" or hiring new employees at higher wages than we'll offer in raises.

We believe a new senior will be more effective out the gate than a mid level engineer with years of experience in the codebase. We act like institutional knowledge is meaningless. The senior might solve more jira tickets but their lack of institutional knowledge may lead to more being created and more complicated code that isn't leveraging existing libraries.

We act like training juniors isn't a shared community cost that builds a pipeline that we all rely on. Sure, maybe Google trains a junior that leaves for Apple, but Apple trains a junior that leaves for Google. Those costs balance out.

Juniors are having a hard time getting jobs because we've become myopic. We've created the richest companies ever but have become incredibly stingy. We care much more about the quarter than the decade. The customers became the shareholders instead of those buying the things we sell. We spend pounds to save pennies.

[0] it feels weird to call C "high level" in the days of interpreted languages and no memory management

it is not “engineering” - calling software development “engineering” is the craziest thing we’ve been able to squeeze through as an industry.

trade school won’t help here and 4 (even 8) year degree won’t help. at 4 years by the time you finish sh*t you learned the first year are obsolete. and everyone needs to spare us “the fundamentals” as that doesn’t exist - in my 3 decades in the industry the absolute worst colleagues were once with solid fundamentals (knows all of theory, can’t get any work done…)

Palantir-youth, amirite? :) I won't translate that to German, it's obvious anyway.

Did you graduate before 1971?

I registered to vote when I was still in high school.

Of course this is just a snide remark that doesn't contribute to the conversation, but it can be interesting to dive deeper:

For example, why don't the kids themselves have the right to vote?

The only person who doesn't have a degree listed is co-founder/CEO Alexander Karp. He has a BS, JD and a PhD.

And they list their credentials on the company bio page...

Similar to the Apple CEO who said who needs a degree. Meantime he has an MBA from Duke, and BS in Industrial Engineering from Auburn, not an absolute top school but a very good one.

So they're people that can't recognize the factors that led to their own success? Sounds like they have a promising future

They’re not looking for cofounders.

It's not hypocritical to regret something you've done.

I had an internship at HP when I was 16. I probably wasn't particularly useful, but I learned a lot about how the corporate world works. I'm glad I didn't have to wait until I was 18 to figure that out, and get on the right course for my education and career.

One of my high-school friends went to college for a teaching credential, only to learn at the end that he didn't like teaching.

College or not, it's extremely useful to be exposed to a field of work for at least a few months, before dedicating years if your life to it.

> dumb as rocks

> working on drivers

Yup, checks out :-D

What does this have to do with the post?

On the other hand, you were probably also learning on the job, which meant they were paying you to learn. Not a bad arrangement, especially if they did not demand senior-level code from you.

I was also fortunate to get paid to learn web development in the 90s. This was a work-study job so I was barely paid anything (I think it was something like $100/wk). But I was thrilled to be given a computer in an air-conditioned office. The alternative was to do some other dumb work-study job like making sure students swiped their meal plan cards when they walked into the cafeteria. Although it took me awhile, that job is what set me on the path I’m still on now.

Good thing college is not about memorizing random subjects and you can choose whatever major you want that 90% of your courses are dedicated to! I’m not saying college is necessary for everybody but when you say that it’s an insult to people who have put in four years of work into learning something they’re passionate about. One can also grow in more ways than one “intelligence” through the college experience. I was a highly intelligent 18 year old but was severely lacking in my emotional maturity and self confidence which I learned a great deal through college.

I graduated high school and went out to the valley immediately in 1995. I did well but I eventually got to a point where the natural language and machine learning stuff I was doing required more advanced math and statistics than I had the ability to teach myself. I went back to college leaving my successful career to “memorize random subjects.”

One thing I learned in college was you learn what you put into it and I put everything into whah I was doing. I learned that learning was the most valuable thing one can do because the process of learning new “random subjects” teaches you how to understand how to learn and think. Being intelligent is perhaps necessary but it is absolutely insufficient. Not a single moment I spent studying in college was a waste of my time, none of it was “memorizing.” In fact one reason I didn’t go was I was bad at memorizing - and I learned in college I could derive equations from my understanding faster than memorizing if I really understood the subject.

I graduated summa cum laude at a top engineering computer science program and dropped out of graduate school to get into quant trading at a top shop on wall street and have since done a fairly complete tour of FAANG and adjacent as a distinguished engineer, building stuff you likely use every day.

I never would have had my career had I stayed working without an education. Knowledge and wisdom and learned through education and being taught by those who have explored things you haven’t. Ability and experience isn’t just mechanical knowledge of a technical subject or intelligence.

I’ve done both paths, and I strongly recommend people to never memorize random subjects but to dive into college and learn and understand everything in total depth, then carry that into life. There is no greater gift you will ever receive in the work world than the gift of knowledge and ability to learn and appreciate life in all its complexity you will learn in college.

It’s hard to be ready for a world you do not understand, and the world is a lot more than engineering or any other single subject.

Intellectually yes, but it's surprising how hard a lot of 18 years olds fail at basic adulting. I've been indirectly involved with apprenticeship schemes here in the UK that place 18 year olds at various companies as software engineers. There's no problem finding 18 year olds who are smart and can code, but the challenge lies in getting them to consistently show up to work five days a week. It's doable, but it requires a lot more mentoring and support than you might intuitively expect. Standard corporate work environments just aren't very flexible on this.

Now, maybe this particular scheme is targeting a small number of exceptional individuals who won't have a problem with this stuff. But it would be a big mistake to assume that a typical smart 18 year old is ready for a typical corporate job.

> Highly intelligent kids at 18 are ready for the real world

Highly-intelligent, disciplined kids should go to college. Others should go to trades, including coding and sales.

More pointedly, we live in a democracy. A population ignorant of the classics, of history, of the law, and only obsessed with personal practical concerns is going to do what such populations always do: swing populist and burn down any institution they don't understand because what isn't instantly comprehensible is obviously the work of the devil.

Waste of time for who? The corporation?

I suppose if all you are interested in are productive slaves, I can see why skipping education would be seductive.

If "memorizing random subjects" is all college is to you, or all learning is to you, then yeah, probably is a waste of time.

Intelligent kids at 18 are easier to indoctrinate.

Corporations love that.

"What the deuce is [the solar system] to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work." (c)

Like how to analyze requirements, how to document their work, or even how to problem-solve during debugging.

Saw a meme on this exact logical fallacy of the 'well-trained dog'.

Panel 1:

Human standing, arms out stretched in a shrug saying, "Why should I study science, biology, mathematics, and physics? It is useless, I will never use it. I will not be a scientist."

Panel 2:

Same human with a rageful expression saying, "5G gives cancer. Vaccines have Mind Control Chips for the new world order. The earth is flat. I saw it on YouTube."

.

Albert Einstein credits the humanities with his successes in physics.

> "Otherwise he with his specialized knowledge—more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to the community. "

> "This is what I have in mind when I recommend the 'humanities' as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy."

> "Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included."

https://www.nytimes.com/1952/10/05/archives/einstein-stresse...

Some things however require experience, not just intelligence.

Also working on a surveillance machine should have a proven system of values to be aware where boundaries are being overstepped ... Oh wait, maybe that's the point.

Couldn't you also argue that all education is a waste because it involves (some) memorizing? If I look back at what I learned during any stage of my life it's never any of what I "memorized", but it's all important stuff.

Ready for the real world, no. Ready to forever exist in a corporate bubble, apparently.

Yes this is about hiring folks for low wages and limited ability to leave because they have less transferable skills

Is it college, or is the age where many young people visit college, that the start to mature?

Indeed, this might have been laudable if a lifestyle company that makes CRMs did this, but some sectors and companies are, for lack of a better word, nefarious to society, and some of the most insidiously nefarious are also adept at hiding it. How many on HN/in hacker communities boycott Meta products vs the general population, how many despise OpenAI?

So you get 3-5 years of unpaid labor out of every employee first? Radical man

Why would anyone accept such a terrible deal

I thought that works but I only see "Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker"

It's not the same source but this works

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/palantir...

Employees are far more like goods in a commodities exchange than anyone seems to want to admit.

Hiring/layoff cycles follow the market value of an employee, not the growth/stagnation of the employer.

This is a really important point. A lot of the "locked in" young types that I've seen in the startup ecosystem have very little experience of how the world works, combined with a tremendous arrogance about their own capabilities. They see the wealth and the power that some people have acquired in tech, and they associate that with success with goodness - or they become completely amoral.

I'm not sure how much these people would actually learn in college, but the idea is that some exposure to the humanities and the arts and to people who have different aspirations and life experiences would give them some interest in considering the consequences and moral worth of their actions.

Maybe that doesn't actually happen and these people will always be amoral. But that's the hope.

Next: Palantir thinks high school might be a waste of time, so they are hiring middle schoolers.

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