alt Hacker NewsHaving spent time working in UK healthcare tech, I never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir. Quite apart from being obviously evil and so on, none of their solutions were actually very good.
Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental.
See also senior staff at NHS England (or Digitial? can't remember) handing massive NHS compute contracts to AWS, and then leaving the civil service to become... an AWS employee.
Replies
The revolving door as it's known. That's part of it. Another is simply the lack of in-house talent, largely due to poor pay and conditions. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to a certain extent. I'd love to work for NHS digital and make a difference, but all the interesting work is contracted out, so they can't keep the staff who are capable of building themselves. Also the recruitment process is terrible.
Take a look at this job posting for example: https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/C9175-26-0093 .
The role is more aligned with IT/Data as obvious by the fact that the main skill requirement is SQL.
There was an article in the FT back in March [1] with the headline "NHS official pushed to add patient data to Palantir platform while also advising company".
Amusingly, the person concerned has the surname "Swindells"...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6c548670-0f3e-45f1-ba08-8bb6dd152...
They’ve built a platform and sales pipeline optimized for selling data consulting into highly bureaucratic tech hostile orgs with data privacy concerns. All these factors apply equally to public health programs and the military, so it’s no surprise that they see success in both areas.
> and then leaving the civil service to become... an AWS employee.
Today in things that the press isn't legally allowed to describe as corrupt but would probably reach the intuitive threshold for corruption for most people who this is explained to.
> Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying and some er... reciprocal back scratching might have been instrumental.
I get the same feeling every time I see oracle chosen for anything.
> why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir
Because where they are in their career at that point isn't the endgame and being the person that does the deal and throws the money around is how you get the board position where you broker those deals with governments, the NGO think tank position, essentially all the actually high paying roles.
> never understood why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir.
Same reason the US political system is falling apart - buyable businessmen eh I mean politicians in power. „Lobbying“
> why everyone was lining up to throw buckets of money at Palantir
Because of financial kickbacks. This is also why people should be suspicious at the current age-sniffing movement. Their next move was "VPNs must be abolished". We can see which mega-corporations finance those movements. Quite suspicious how different countries so easily "copy-paste" this legislation.
The people buying them genuinely don’t know what good is.
Not sure if you have actually used Foundry, but I consider it insanely powerful and well built.
> Unfortunately, it's hard to escape the feeling that friends in high places, some lobbying
Agreed. It is said that Peter Mandelson had links to Palantir. (1) And also Wes Streeting (2)
1) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/04/peter-mande...
How are they "obviously evil"?
I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years.
It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy.
As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.
Then we get into actually building and owning tech. Look at the history of GDS - they were empowered to pay half decent salaries and build and own things, but then had budgets slashed and programs cut. Why? Because we can "just buy it". Yes, you won't own the IP, it'll cost 4x as much, it'll take 3x-5x longer, but at least you won't have "inefficient civil service bloat" to have to manage.
This all started in the 1980s, and there are signs of it swinging back. I was at one department last year where they were telling me they're thinking about hiring actual engineers and embedding some devops stuff internally - absolutely jaw-droopingly revolutionary. Genuinely.