Reflections on Palantir

Re:Reflections on Palantir by vundercind on Thursday October 17, 2024 @12:44AM (#41866480)

I’ve known companies to spend stupid amounts of money on fake, fancy “war rooms” they staff with people doing nothing useful, filled with “big board” style maps and shit, big graphs and visualizations that aren’t used anywhere else, just as a sales tool. Walk the visiting CEO through, let them pretend what they’re involved in is way cooler and more interesting and important than it really is, and I guess that assists sales so much that such endeavors make way more money than they cost.

I connect this with comments I heard from several major management consulting firm folks stating bluntly that the best way to communicate effectively with execs is to approach them like young children.

Life is super weird. Who knew imaginative play would be such a big thing for “serious” adults? I’d never have imagined, but it’s kinda everywhere.

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Re:Reflections on Palantir by red-iron-pine on Thursday October 17, 2024 @03:01PM (#41872719)

I used to get paid to develop those war room monitoring solutions. literally just crafting dashboards that no one would ever look at directly, but just sorta had around.

> execs is to approach them like young children.

lots of images. bright colors. no more than 3 bulletpoints per slide. no more than 4 minutes to get to the point, and be unambiguous about what and why.

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Re:Reflections on Palantir by anitil on Thursday October 17, 2024 @07:03PM (#41874691)

> approach them like young children

To take a generous go at this - my guess is that they have multiple urgent issues they're dealing with at any one time, and so the cognitive bandwidth they're able to dedicate to 'random presentation number 3 for the day' is quite low

But I do agree that a lot of day-to-day work is play acting at being cooler than our actual work.

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