Having said that, I think the intention was to describe Palantir in relative terms compared to other companies in SV. With that in mind, then yes, Palantir is one of the worst places to work at among companies of the same type: well-funded startups with a rather convenient revenue stream.
There are people who legitimately enjoy super high intensity environments. There are people who legitimately loathe low intensity environments. If you're not one of those people, you're not going to have a good time at Palantir — this is not a secret. This is stated over and over by everyone. Shyam (head of BD) has a public blog post shaming the very notion of work-life balance. No one is tricking anyone, except candidates fooling themselves into believing everyone is lying and it's actually a chill place.
Ultimately, the sweatshop analogy is pathetic on this basis alone: you have a choice to work there or not. Working conditions aren't really the problem with abusive employment. There are people who take on far more life-threatening and limb-damaging jobs than a sweatshop.
The key distinction from those people and those who are abused is that they are free to leave and thus free to demand proper compensation.
No Silicon Valley company is a sweatshop. What a delusionally entitled way to see the world.
This actually gives some credence to the sweatshop narrative. A Stanford education is so much about getting placed in a titled job that a manifest goes out every year about where graduates were allocated?
100k/yr as a rented contractor to a multi-billion dollar hedge fund does have a sweatshop feel. In-house programmers or independent contractors would be making much, much more.
Why does the salary matter?
The labor in those firms are treated like fungible slaves, worked for illegal hours and disposed off uncerimoniously after a few years, to be replaced by fresh bodies.
"Sweatshop" is a mild term.
Stanford emails out a jobs summary for each graduating class. For 2013 graduates the #1 most common job title was Forward Deployed Engineer lol
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Calling Palantir a "sweatshop" when the starting salaries are six figures is ridiculous.
There are 8 billion people in the world, and a lot of them actually do work long hours for a few USD a day with next to no rights.
Say you took a job at Palantir because you bought into the hype about fixing government. Now you work with some smart people and the pay and perks are pretty strong, but you find yourself doing consulting type work and feel unfulfilled. Maybe youre helping some large fund manager migrate off of Oracle DB or something.
The solution is to find more important work. Something you really care about. Something that directly helps at least a few of the 7.9b people out there who are less lucky than you.