I interviewed at Palantir London about 10 years ago.
I am based in Europe and one of the younger interviewers let-slip that they will all be working during the local public holiday. lols. No thanks.
Also, I grew up in a mixed ethnic environment. For the last few decades there has been a focus on trying to make society more inclusive. Such that my school exam papers would have questions like "Susan has 6 apples and gets 6 more. How many does she have" or "Rohit is travelling at 50mph ...." So a variety of names and genders etc to reflect the people who live here.
Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc. These names were my school colleagues and friends, so this didn't sit well with me (just to be clear, I didn't want to work somewhere that seemed to be making software to track entire groups of people).
They really should have sanitised their material and made it about helping Susan and Rohit track financial crime or some such. Instead I got vibes of that tv show Homeland.
Cynically, it sounds like their interview process worked pretty well for selecting people who were quite happy to work public holidays and had no issue with tracking "people that need to be tracked"
I don't think cynicism is even needed. Public holidays are surprising - there's no legal way in Europe[1] to force someone to work during a holiday. And trying is a lawsuit waiting to happen. But tracking Muhammads? If someone has moral problems with that, they better resign before being employed. Because at best they will resign soon after joining, at worst they will become a whistleblower.
[1] I know Europe is big etc, but I used to work in UK on particular and everyone took bank holidays seriously.
There is a simple legal way, hire immigrants, they cannot sue if they are no longer resident.
Simply enough, I am a Blue Card holder currently, haven't filled my 5 years hence it is on the temporary state for now. I have been working many weekends/public holidays & whatnot. This was not even part of the original contract. I was presented an "addendum" roughly after 1 month into starting of work. This being moved from another country, including your family and home, and now either you sign or mutual termination of contract because this is the business needs situation. Not to mention the requirement to pay back _all_ relocation expenses (including their taxes).
If I didn't sign, I would be terminated with a notice of 2 weeks. I have to leave within 3 months of that (of find a new job). Even if I sued, I doubt my first hearing will be within that period... (And again, this is a new country, no contact, no lawyer and haven't been part of an union)
So, it is certainly possible to _force_ people to work on holidays. Larger the company is, higher the leverage... (ie. making the process longer so you'll run out of time)
> Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc.
I can't begin to describe how sick this makes me feel. At the same time, I'm happy that your upbringing resulted in you making the right choice of not pursuing such a horrible company.
I on the other hand was contacted by Helsing, which at the time sounded cool to me (????) (secret agent vibes???). The recruiter however failed to appear at the screening call 2 or 3 times, which I interpreted as a strategy on their part to select for persistence/yes-men (Occam's razor on the other hand is that the recruiter was overworked and/or shitty).
I told the recruiter off.
Only after a while I realized that it really, really was not a good thing that I even considered working for a company that in the end just kills people for money (I know, european defense yadda yadda). I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.
I'm curious what names did you expect for an intelligence op in Afghanistan or Iran?
Generally the police take care of things like financial crimes, so not sure why you expected this from a service provider to US three letter agencies
This worked really well for me at work. A new text file for each day, so I could explain what I did/plan to do during standup.
I struggle at home though. Because there's not as much pressure to do one task until it's done... so my text file gets forgotten about. Then I start a paper list. Then I forget that... rinse and repeat.
I once interviewed at the London office of a US based company. The best part was when they took me to lunch... I asked the young American what he was going to do on the long holiday weekend. He said they have to work. Lol. No thanks!
Hobby projects on super old / free hardware was/is fun. I remember using dumpster desktops as a student. I could SSH to my home PC from school. Ran a webserver. Even wrote C code to generate HTML for a website to host my photos. Fun times.
All my current desktops are ~8 year old corporate cast-offs.
I've seen a few stories of murders where the "smart" criminal turned their phone off during the exact window the crime took place. That and being seen at the scene of the crime was used as evidence.
So the intent part is definitely a thing if they simply turn off their phone.
My wife is also T1, diagnosed a couple years back with a week in ICU. She pulled through and now has a CGM and pump.
What really surprised me was her blood sugar rockets up when she has video meetings with a certain difficult colleague. While other chilled colleagues have no such effect.
That made me wonder if interacting with difficult people causes more physiological changes than I realised.
Epinephrine causes the body to release sugar into the bloodstream - it's one of the reasons you get shaky when your blood sugar gets low (if you're not T1DM at least) - your body is attempting to increase blood sugar by epinephrine. So in reverse, stressful situations that cause the release of epinephrine increase blood sugar.
There's a similar issue with e.g. running as a T1DM (as I understand it, not being one) - when you're running, your body will pump out sugar, but when you stop running, it doesn't stop instantly, so your blood sugar can spike high post-exercise. Or you can run out of sugar and crash hypoglycemic.
It's amazing that CGMs exist that can, to some degree, compensate for these things, but man the body's autoregulation on 50 different axes is fascinating.
There are observable changes in the structure of the brain when people take up meditation. Not to get too crass, but we are the meat in our heads and bodies.
I'm not into mediation, but I watched something that said the brain scans of meditating experts resembled someone having a seizure or something. But the person with sat quietly.
I'm not drawing any conclusions. But I found it fascinating.
Sorry to hear about what happened to your daughter.
I read a really terrible story years ago, a daughter was sunbathing in the driveway on a lounger, father comes home and parks... on his daughter, who is then paralyzed.
In games QA, the deadlines are fixed and development creeps into QA time. So you get less QA time than you originally planned. If you're lucky, a patch will fix some bugs.
In non-games QA, if development takes too long, you typically get an extra sprint to test the changes.
In the games industry QA is considered an entry level job with little respect from other departments.
In non-games testing, QA is a career that pays double and is usually a respected part of the development process.
Basically, I would support the claim that QA could be improved generally across the board in the games industry.
Well, the places that have QA people tend to respect them. But having QA people at all is not very common.
Also, I have never seen any place where they get double of a developer's salary. They usually get a bit less than a developer of the same seniority, with enough variance for some places to pay a bit more.
I have no idea why games have those fucked-up development practices where dropping features or extending deadlines are prohibited (ok, I have some ideas, but little confidence on them). But it's not only QA that is degraded by them. Every single aspect of the development suffers.
Sorry about the confusion.
Games QA tends to pay around minimum wage. So similar to working in a supermarket.
Testing any other software tends to pay atleast double minimum wage. But less than a developer salary.
Obviously this is a very general statement but that has been my experience.
I'd heard deadlines couldn't be extended due to console certification timelines. But I think a bigger problem is poor project management and waterfall development methodology... add the fixed deadline and you've got a recipe for a buggy under tested game.
Relative to QA in the gaming industry I assume. I'm pretty sure (though I'm making significant assumptions, apply pinches of salt as appropriate) our testers are on less than our “standard” developers, certainly not more (though I think more than the junior/grad level), and that this holds for places friends work at.
How much “a respected part of the development process” holds true varies a lot in my experience, and depends on your PoV. A lot of places consider QA to be much less skilled work, a step (maybe two) above shelf-stacking, but still consider it vital to project success and needing enough thinking & understanding that it is far from all automatable.
> QA is a career that
In terms of career, I get the impression that QA management is much more respected and paid, but that there is comparatively less demand for people of those higher positions so upwards movement can be slow/difficult. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people who start in QA move sideways into development: there is greater opportunity for moving up.
I am based in Europe and one of the younger interviewers let-slip that they will all be working during the local public holiday. lols. No thanks.
Also, I grew up in a mixed ethnic environment. For the last few decades there has been a focus on trying to make society more inclusive. Such that my school exam papers would have questions like "Susan has 6 apples and gets 6 more. How many does she have" or "Rohit is travelling at 50mph ...." So a variety of names and genders etc to reflect the people who live here.
Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc. These names were my school colleagues and friends, so this didn't sit well with me (just to be clear, I didn't want to work somewhere that seemed to be making software to track entire groups of people).
They really should have sanitised their material and made it about helping Susan and Rohit track financial crime or some such. Instead I got vibes of that tv show Homeland.