Having 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.
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.
The problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders. There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.
I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas about a similar concept in the NHS that would require the government hiring well-paid software engineers.
What you wrote has nothing to do with what the parent wrote.
>There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.
The parent is specifically claiming gov jobs don't allow for near market rates. That number would literally be formulated by current market pressures. If that goes lower in the private sector it will go lower in the gov sector.
For your point to be correct with respect to their specific example, you would have to claim the gov could pay £300k/year when the going market rate was £100k/year and there would be no pressure prevent this. Whereas all it would take would be someone to ask why a run-of-the-mill programmer is getting paid 3x the market rate?
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.
Look at the salary on offer. This is for a dev/data job in Cambridge. The market rate for a senior developer here was around that level in the early 2000s. Today that would be a big pay cut for almost anyone with even the "essential" skills and experience.
The British government and public sector are constantly limiting themselves by being unwilling to pay market rates for the skills they need. Then they contract out needs like tech to work around the bureaucracy - but they demand so many strings attached that the little guys who are more cost effective don't want anything to do with it. And so they mostly outsource to large firms or sometimes specialist agencies who have jumped through the hoops to get all the right certifications. Naturally those suppliers are in a position to charge premium rates even for relatively simple work.
If the Civil Service built up a capable IT function staffed by properly qualified and experienced people that would surely save billions in budget and years in timescales for some of the (in)famous government IT projects and probably significantly increase the odds of successfully delivering something usable at the end of them. But as anyone who's working in our Civil Service can tell you the emphasis on ranks and pay scales and other very specific rules about career advancement are unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. Even if they did the culture of people moving around the Civil Service like interchangeable parts instead of building up deep expertise in specific areas would still be a problem.
The salary isn't that out of line for a mid-level developer nationwide, but yes I would expect it to be higher for the southern location. They could justify the salary if it was fully remote.
Bear in mind there is a 23.7% pension contribution from the employer, so it's a roughly £62-70k total comp for a mid-level role.
Edit:
Actually though, in reality I would expect a salary bump to work in the public sector to encourage one to put up with the terrible working enviornment with all the bureaucracy.
Yeah having worked _with_ NHSDigital quite a lot over the years, I would not love to work there!
That said, I don't think there's that much wrong with that job description - I've been a software dev/eng for 15yrs and every role has had SQL at its centre. And its much easier to get someone new up to speed on some swanky new UI or scripting tool than it is with SQL IME, so prioritising people who are comfortable with the hard bits sounds fine to me.
No, wait, I've read it a bit more closely. It's all about Data warehousing. OK yeah, that's a data job.
Yeh, the structure is very very very confusing. Largely because you have the Hospital's themselves, then the trusts, then NHS England, or I guess now just the DHSC? And then occasionally even more layers in-between like health boards.
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"...
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.
> 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.
I was part of a UK company that did sovereign data work on NHS data. They would give NHS trusts equity in the company in return for the data, and the data wouldn't leave the company; only results of paid research studies. The idea was to lower the increasing cost of pharma studies through early data-driven work.
The company bid for this contract, and lost to Palantir. I still can't believe that a company trying to do this in exactly the right way lost to a US intelligence company.
Is it really that surprising? The public would have voted to have the contract awarded to that company, but our benevolent leaders are usually sway by personal gain. This type of news is usually not widely and publicly discussed in the media as they are more concerned about much more trivial things or stocking fear and rage in the public.
1. they aim to deliver product company margins with a consulting-heavy model.
2. your software purchase funds a cadre of "free" FDEs and deployment strategists who customize your install, build a bunch of data pipes/transforms, and talk to people to figure out what all the data means.
This could be a good deal if your tech org is not very competent at integrating your data, or if you have a sudden, short-term need. In the longer term, it's probably cheaper and more effective to develop a competent tech team, modernize the source data systems, and roll your own integration -- but that also requires leaders with long-term vision who are resistant to external hype and pressure.
I never understood why nation states pay outside companies for this stuff. You need the expertise to actually evaluate what you're getting anyway. Incentives are in no way aligned. At the state level you have the scale to do it in house.
If a senior government employee can get a very expensive Palantir contract approved, they have a good chance of a much better paid job at Palantir in the future:
Buy: you need expertise in contracts and knowing what you need.
Build: you need expertise in contracts, knowing what you need and also software development.
It's obviously easier to buy than build, especially for civil service roles where they can't attract the best developers due to political/ideological constraints.
Because "nation states" are not one making decision either. It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group of them and even best of people who work on such positions usually choose it because of job security and stability.
Spending 10x more on IBM or Palantir can't get them fired, but trying to build something in-house their organization don't have competence for can get them fired.
And this is even if you don't take lobbying or corruption into account.
> It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group
Almost all governments have a legally defined public procurement framework. If this is overridden, it's pretty much always by elected politicians, not by regular government employees.
The GDS is one of the more credible parts of government IT in the UK and IME generally well respected. The government websites and online services have largely been well done. But there are limits on how much that organisation can take on with the resources it has and it's still subject to the same challenges around compensation and working environment I mentioned in another comment that make it difficult to hire and retain good people. Unfortunately it's not realistic to build all government IT projects in house that way at the moment.
This is a paradox that you see in many countries. I work for a private company that make software for the public sector in France, so I am very familiar with the subject. And to be fair, there are many cases where using contractor does make a lot of sense (seasonality or infrequent demands, shared resources, etc).
But a lot of the population sees public spending as the biggest evil. This lead to the public sector putting a huge pressure on their biggest spending : payroll. This means fewer employees and worse pay. That makes the public sector not attractive to talent and unable to create a workforce for specific project that should have been fully in control of the public entity.
Due to this, the public sector often has to go through private contractor, which ironically often cost more than if you had the skills internally. But increase the number of employee in your municipality and a part of the taxpayers are going to crucify you (somehow they are ok with paying millions to private contractors though).
The internal vs. external spending is a difficult one and there is a lot of subtlety to it. Sadly, in the public discourse it is often reduced to "public spending bad" or "everything should be nationalized".
Isn't it obvious? Because governments aren't good at management. There's no incentive or feedback loop. A company goes out of business if it's operationally a mess or doesn't deliver value. Not always but it's highly correlated. Governments face no pressure like this. Maybe mild pressure on the very local level. But when you get to the national level, orgs like the Pentagon misplace trillions of dollars with not so much of a protest.
Plausible deniability. "We paid £5 million for consultants who recommended this system, it's not our fault it turned out to be a steaming pile of crap that wasted £20 million and took 3 years".
if Palantir (or other consultancies) are friends with government decision makers (especially in the US) then spending more on a service is a feature, not a bug.
reads like Salesforce to me, ugh! Enterprises are paying so much to blatantly vendor-lock in themselves using hundreds of "Salesforce engineers". It's baffling to me.
I owned Salesforce setup with 4 engineers and 500+ licenses. I don‘t see how could I replace our SF setup with an in-house product on the same budget within reasonable timeline. We won local competition within a few years, because our sales could use good CRM from day 1 and our competitor, according to the rumors I heard, could not calculate properly sales agent commission. Vendor lock-in is not always a stupid thing. Sometimes it‘s the bet that wins you a market.
Zoom out a little though.
I've always felt the main reason
That most companies use Salesforce
Is that most companies use Salesforce.
I'll give you an example.
At a previous employer,
We used Google Analytics.
We paid for Google Analytics.
I feel positive that as a mid size company,
We shouldn't have paid for Google Analytics.
The free product with 50 events in GA4 should be plenty for us.
But why do we use Google Analytics in the first place?
Because everyone uses Google Analytics.
I agree that sometimes Salesforce might be a good idea. However, it should be a part of an overall strategy, not just because everyone does it. This kind of deliberate tooling strategy is difficult though because the way Google Analytics or Salesforce works from what I understand is make marketing folks feel they are specialized in Google Analytics or Salesforce so they feel like they have to keep using it or their skill will become useless.
It is like resume driven development but for the whole business.
>I've always felt the main reason That most companies use Salesforce Is that most companies use Salesforce.
It's like this for most software, but as a salaryman it's better for you if you use the common software. If you have an interview you can now say "I know how to use the thing that most people use" instead of "Actually we had an inhouse system so if you hire me I need to be onboarded for 3 months".
I got hired to my 2nd job in large part because I knew how to use Broadridge Paladyne (back then it was pretty good if you got over the pretty bad UI/UX, by today's standards it's not great).
I think it‘s kind of a common knowledge now that Salesforce is very expensive, so it is not a go-to choice for most startups/no-CRM-experience people. You are more likely to start with Hubspot today than with anything else, but those low-effort CRMs are also quite easy to migrate from. Google Analytics too, so it’s not exactly a „lock-in“. The lock-in happens when you struggle with your current setup or risks associated with it become unacceptable, but do not have the budget and a competent team or external partner to execute the migration.
„Everyone does that“ is definitely part of decision-making process almost everywhere, but I personally have not seen companies where it’s just a cargo cult rather than a reasonable strategic choice. The obvious benefits are that it’s easier to find implementation partners, the costs are predictable and your users may already know the system, so you won’t have unnecessary friction in your ops.
1. Palantir isn't selling consulting as much as Palantir is selling the confidence you get from buying a name brand. It's the same as paying for McKinsey to provide justification to do what you already want to do.
2. Palantir actually has some good core tech. An in house team can probably do a better job just because the incentives are better aligned, but they'll be starting from behind and have to catch up.
3. LLMs aren't at a level to replace a team of FDEs. Maybe in a couple of years. The role requires too much understanding of the human systems, and too much initiative to keep the ball rolling/acknowledge and deal with real problems.
"In a 2023 blog post, external, Palantir described the challenge of combining data from multiple government systems containing tens of thousands of visa applications and hundreds of thousands of accommodation offers."
This is the kind of thing GDS and other Civil Service departments build all the time, its a completely standard kind of challenge that a small team of Devs (+ supporting staff) from a departments DDAT department does day in and day out.
The output will be open source by default and use existing standards.
Yeah, this exactly. "multiple government systems", "tens of thousands", "hundreds of thousands" is the typical "part-time allocation for four people in an office" government project. This should have a budget in the low hundreds of thousands of £ at most.
Hundreds of thousands of documents is small enough that you can feasibly run a pen and paper office handling them. Especially since most of them do not cross-reference eachother (family applications do, but unrelated families have no such links).
That America's brightest tech minds can't solve this problem is embarrassing. (Never mind the baggage of giving a foreign, potentially adversarial nation access to something as sensitive as residency and visa information.)
I assumed that when the GP said the UK was "giving a foreign, potentially adversarial nation access" the GP meant that the US is that "foreign, potentially adversarial nation"
I can't believe that in our timeline Europe has to think like this, but here we are.
The core data platform for NHS Test and Trace was not Excel based at all. It was a reasonably simple but solid AWS setup using S3, Glue and the smallest Redshift instance at the time, on top of which were Tableau/Quicksight/PowerBI dashboards. Some organisations insisted on enabling an "export to CSV" feature which was...not a good idea for so many reasons, and Public Health England (PHE) in the article found out one of those reasons the hard way.
I was at an event in London that involved a lot of government people. It came up that Palantir was not a very good company, Someone felt compelled to shout out, oh don't talk about that here, "we like Palantir here". It is certainly the elephant in the room (elephant in cost, and a very difficult situation).
Free software from Palantir is not free. Peter Thiel's co is all about monopolies.
There's not really enough info to know if this is just a coin toss or something more. "Company tries to roll its own system and [saves / loses] money" is just a common story, one way or the other.
For context, the Homes for Ukraine refugee scheme cost 2-3 billion as of 2023. I can't seem to find an updated cost. This cost (from the article) was Palantir working for free for the first 6 months (could they have beat that, time wise?), then awarded 4.5m and 5.5m for two more 12 month terms, and now they're transitioning to something home-grown instead.
> The MHCLG [
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government] said it initially needed a system which could be ready within days but, in seeking a "steadier service", later created an updated platform to meet the programme's longer-term needs and bring down costs.
I basically agree with the MHCLG's reasoning here. It's always worth at least experimenting to see if you can roll your own.
I worked on a small part of one of these back in around 2013 ( specifically managing beds ).
You were talking about a team of 5 cranking this out in about 2-3 months with some longer term part time involvement, with an annual cost of less than 1m and those people mostly all dellivering several product lines ( so actual cost is half or a quater ).
> "Company tries to roll its own system and [saves / loses] money" is just a common story, one way or the other.
Governments build these kinds of systems ("collect data from a bunch of internal systems and show some public forms and have some internal processes for handling form submissions") all the time. When I worked for a local municipality, we built something like this every other month.
> There's not really enough info to know if this is just a coin toss or something more.
The difference is always having one or two devs who care. Every successful software project I've ever seen has had a few devs who care way more than is healthy
Developing a replacement system is still going to cost a hell of a lot. It's not like if you dropped palatir then we'd suddenly have a free drop-in replacement and everyone can have their fiver back
You pay money to Palantir that money essentially escapes the economy, you develop a sovereign solution yes you pay millions even more but that goes into corporations and people actually living in the country, paying taxes and spending their coins here.
I would rather not hand mine or my neighbours' health data to a spy-tech firm, who will have unlimited access to their data[0].
Not having the system (it's not like it's already in use anyway) is always a good step in the right direction. And a replacement built-in UK will provide more jobs, more tax money, and digital sovereignty for UK.
My parents took in a Ukrainian family as part of this scheme, and I knew many others who did. They all matched with each other through Facebook groups set up for this purpose. I don't know anyone who was matched automatically by the Palantir thing
Palantir is not just analyzing data, but, it is increasingly wired into operational decisions like deportations, policing, health-data access, military targeting and public-sector workflows.
Tjheir "ELITE" guide says that during "special operations" normal safeguards may need to be turned off.
Palantir's Maven Smart System ha grown into a Pentagon program of record with 20,000+ active users. "Human in the loop" may become "human rubber stamp" when the number and speed of AI recommendations exceed real human review capacity.
A Palantir-backed program reportedly operated secretly from city council members, defense attorneys, and the public.
Vendor lock-in issue: once a system becomes embedded in agency workflows, switching vendors becomes politically and operationally hard and they are trying their best to achieve this. The Army's $10 billion enterprise agreement consolidating many contracts into one Palantir platform is the cleanest example of institutional dependence.
---
tldr;
The accountability chain is broken: when harm happens, the agency blames the tool, the vendor blames the customer, the operator blames policy, and the model blames the data.
---
Also, I won't share the full report link since whenever I share something like that here, I get banned/flagged for a day.
1. ICE awarded Palantir a reported $30 million contract for ImmigrationOS, described as a platform to support immigration lifecycle operations, including enforcement prioritization and self-deportation tracking.
2. Palantir’s Maven Smart System was designated a Pentagon ‘program of record’ in March 2026, with 20,000+ active military users and a contract ceiling that grew from $480 million to $1.3 billion.
3. The US Army’s $10 billion enterprise agreement consolidates 75 separate contracts into one Palantir platform.
4. The Maven Smart System has 20,000+ military users across 35+ military tools.
5. The UK NHS Federated Data Platform, valued at £330 million ($448.4 million), places Palantir at the center of England’s health-data architecture.
6. Palantir’s UK public contracts across NHS, Ministry of Defence, councils, and police forces total more than £500 million.
7. NHS England’s Data Protection Impact Assessment documents 15 inherent risks, all assessed as ‘Low’ residual risk after mitigations.
8. The NHS FDP contract was published with 417 of 586 pages redacted.
9. Palantir received more than $113 million in federal spending since Trump took office, plus a $795 million Pentagon contract.
10. Polling cited by The Guardian indicates more than two-thirds of the UK public are concerned about Palantir’s growing number of public contracts, and 40% distrust Palantir specifically regarding NHS patient data.
11. From detection to ‘prosecution’ (killing), ‘no more than two or three minutes elapse’ with Palantir systems, compared to six hours previously.
12. Palantir’s lobbying spending more than quadrupled since 2019, from $1.4 million to $5.8 million.
Honestly, a web app to match people looking for and willing to provide accommodation is completely different to dealing with the health data of an entire country that is pre-existing in different formats. The first is essentially a CRUD app that should never have been given to Palantir.
Now, I get it. The UK is not exactly providing good jobs for a lot of people, so of course we're seeing this. But, getting a mental health diagnosis, be long-term-sick and avoiding unemployment while both getting paid by an employer and getting unfair advantages out of the public health system ...
In the UK, long term sick leave with a mental health diagnosis is a way to be unemployed (ie. not working) but not have the disadvantages of that. There's the money difference: 530 pounds per month for sick leave, 338 or 425 pounds per month for unemployment. On long-term sick leave you get all advantages job seekers get (ie. "Universal Credit"), PLUS others (support for not being able to work, ESA, and support for extra living expenses due to long-term sickness, PIP). So if you don't want to work, long-term sick leave has many advantages (you can even put that you're working on your CV), plus it's a big cost to employers. You don't have to look for work in long-term sick leave. In fact, nothing is expected at all (other than medical evidence).
2.8 million people are long-term ill, not participating in the workforce, not being economically productive at all, at least half due to being diagnosed with mental illness. The issue with this is that this is happening with full support of government employees, and even the courts cooperate to a lesser extent.
What the government is trying to do, in other words, is trying to kick people off, uh, let's say "mental disability", force them to work. And they need to do this without relying on government workers, because they often side with the people on sick leave.
Hence, Palantir. Being hated is a feature here, not a bug.
> The issue with this is that this is happening with full support of government employees, and even the courts cooperate to a lesser extent.
Why is that an issue? The simplest explanation is that the underlying rate of mental illness is inconveniently high. Which would tally with, as you say:
> In fact, nothing is expected at all (other than medical evidence).
Also I would take a look at the date when the upcurve starts on that chart and ask myself: was there some sort of mass disabling event that happened about then? Might that be contributing?
Palantir’s roots seem practically indistinguishable from the traditional Korean/Japanese dispatch programmers (often referred to as SI, or System Integration).
They dispatch engineers under the title of FDSEs, but in Korea and Japan, this kind of on-site deployment is often considered the lowest tier of programming.
In my own experience consulting with factory owners—advising them on hardware choices like Lumens versus Mitsubishi—I see the physical reality. The idea of absorbing a client's database into an ontology and hooking it up to an LLM sounds great in theory. However, considering the extreme fragmentation of equipment standards and data representations across different sites, I seriously question if this is a sustainable business model.
Sure, initially it’s just dispatch programming. But how can they possibly absorb all these disparate, chaotic field environments into a single platform asset? Even within a single factory, different assembly lines use entirely different equipment, often from completely different manufacturers.
The idea of interpreting every piece of equipment's specific protocol, reverse-engineering the DB schemas, standardizing the terminology, and modeling the entire approval flow seems practically impossible. Is this actually achievable? Take PLCs, for example: even if they share a standard communication protocol, the ladder logic itself is completely incompatible across different brands
Thinking about it in reverse, Palantir might have absolutely no intention of solving this fragmentation problem themselves. Their survival strategy might be to dictate the core tech stack of the end-point B2C clients, creating a structure that essentially incentivizes specific B2B vendors to fall in line. Ultimately, what makes Palantir so dangerous is the high likelihood that they will simply shift the massive cost of standardization onto those B2B subcontractors
http://archive.today/xgkiS
Having 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.
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.
The problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders. There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.
I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas about a similar concept in the NHS that would require the government hiring well-paid software engineers.
What you wrote has nothing to do with what the parent wrote.
>There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.
The parent is specifically claiming gov jobs don't allow for near market rates. That number would literally be formulated by current market pressures. If that goes lower in the private sector it will go lower in the gov sector.
For your point to be correct with respect to their specific example, you would have to claim the gov could pay £300k/year when the going market rate was £100k/year and there would be no pressure prevent this. Whereas all it would take would be someone to ask why a run-of-the-mill programmer is getting paid 3x the market rate?
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.
Look at the salary on offer. This is for a dev/data job in Cambridge. The market rate for a senior developer here was around that level in the early 2000s. Today that would be a big pay cut for almost anyone with even the "essential" skills and experience.
The British government and public sector are constantly limiting themselves by being unwilling to pay market rates for the skills they need. Then they contract out needs like tech to work around the bureaucracy - but they demand so many strings attached that the little guys who are more cost effective don't want anything to do with it. And so they mostly outsource to large firms or sometimes specialist agencies who have jumped through the hoops to get all the right certifications. Naturally those suppliers are in a position to charge premium rates even for relatively simple work.
If the Civil Service built up a capable IT function staffed by properly qualified and experienced people that would surely save billions in budget and years in timescales for some of the (in)famous government IT projects and probably significantly increase the odds of successfully delivering something usable at the end of them. But as anyone who's working in our Civil Service can tell you the emphasis on ranks and pay scales and other very specific rules about career advancement are unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. Even if they did the culture of people moving around the Civil Service like interchangeable parts instead of building up deep expertise in specific areas would still be a problem.
The salary isn't that out of line for a mid-level developer nationwide, but yes I would expect it to be higher for the southern location. They could justify the salary if it was fully remote.
Bear in mind there is a 23.7% pension contribution from the employer, so it's a roughly £62-70k total comp for a mid-level role.
Edit: Actually though, in reality I would expect a salary bump to work in the public sector to encourage one to put up with the terrible working enviornment with all the bureaucracy.
Yeah having worked _with_ NHSDigital quite a lot over the years, I would not love to work there!
That said, I don't think there's that much wrong with that job description - I've been a software dev/eng for 15yrs and every role has had SQL at its centre. And its much easier to get someone new up to speed on some swanky new UI or scripting tool than it is with SQL IME, so prioritising people who are comfortable with the hard bits sounds fine to me.
No, wait, I've read it a bit more closely. It's all about Data warehousing. OK yeah, that's a data job.
One of the more confusing things is the branding. That job posting isn't for NHS England. Or NHS Digital, which doesn't exist any more.
Yeh, the structure is very very very confusing. Largely because you have the Hospital's themselves, then the trusts, then NHS England, or I guess now just the DHSC? And then occasionally even more layers in-between like health boards.
The internal organisation and management of the NHS is horrible.
It is horrible to work for them and in fact in consulting as soon as you hear that the project is for the NHS people run and hide not to be assigned.
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...
2) https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s307
How are they "obviously evil"?
I was part of a UK company that did sovereign data work on NHS data. They would give NHS trusts equity in the company in return for the data, and the data wouldn't leave the company; only results of paid research studies. The idea was to lower the increasing cost of pharma studies through early data-driven work.
The company bid for this contract, and lost to Palantir. I still can't believe that a company trying to do this in exactly the right way lost to a US intelligence company.
Is it really that surprising? The public would have voted to have the contract awarded to that company, but our benevolent leaders are usually sway by personal gain. This type of news is usually not widely and publicly discussed in the media as they are more concerned about much more trivial things or stocking fear and rage in the public.
Palantir is very expensive. This is because:
1. they aim to deliver product company margins with a consulting-heavy model.
2. your software purchase funds a cadre of "free" FDEs and deployment strategists who customize your install, build a bunch of data pipes/transforms, and talk to people to figure out what all the data means.
This could be a good deal if your tech org is not very competent at integrating your data, or if you have a sudden, short-term need. In the longer term, it's probably cheaper and more effective to develop a competent tech team, modernize the source data systems, and roll your own integration -- but that also requires leaders with long-term vision who are resistant to external hype and pressure.
I never understood why nation states pay outside companies for this stuff. You need the expertise to actually evaluate what you're getting anyway. Incentives are in no way aligned. At the state level you have the scale to do it in house.
If a senior government employee can get a very expensive Palantir contract approved, they have a good chance of a much better paid job at Palantir in the future:
https://www.thenational.scot/news/26055524.palantir-hired-30...
Buy: you need expertise in contracts and knowing what you need.
Build: you need expertise in contracts, knowing what you need and also software development.
It's obviously easier to buy than build, especially for civil service roles where they can't attract the best developers due to political/ideological constraints.
Because "nation states" are not one making decision either. It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group of them and even best of people who work on such positions usually choose it because of job security and stability.
Spending 10x more on IBM or Palantir can't get them fired, but trying to build something in-house their organization don't have competence for can get them fired.
And this is even if you don't take lobbying or corruption into account.
> It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group
Almost all governments have a legally defined public procurement framework. If this is overridden, it's pretty much always by elected politicians, not by regular government employees.
Also it's not like 4 years ago either UK or EU governments would expect they will soon want to get rid of all US companies in their public sector.
Yes, and: often they're prevented from building it in house!
In some countries yeah. In UK almost all of gov.uk even hosted on github with public commit history.
But its kind a obvious why some system for refugees was outsourced for consultancy.
The GDS is one of the more credible parts of government IT in the UK and IME generally well respected. The government websites and online services have largely been well done. But there are limits on how much that organisation can take on with the resources it has and it's still subject to the same challenges around compensation and working environment I mentioned in another comment that make it difficult to hire and retain good people. Unfortunately it's not realistic to build all government IT projects in house that way at the moment.
As far as I get it GDS cant just build things fast for the reasons you mention and refugee situation look like reasonable one to outsource it.
This is a paradox that you see in many countries. I work for a private company that make software for the public sector in France, so I am very familiar with the subject. And to be fair, there are many cases where using contractor does make a lot of sense (seasonality or infrequent demands, shared resources, etc). But a lot of the population sees public spending as the biggest evil. This lead to the public sector putting a huge pressure on their biggest spending : payroll. This means fewer employees and worse pay. That makes the public sector not attractive to talent and unable to create a workforce for specific project that should have been fully in control of the public entity. Due to this, the public sector often has to go through private contractor, which ironically often cost more than if you had the skills internally. But increase the number of employee in your municipality and a part of the taxpayers are going to crucify you (somehow they are ok with paying millions to private contractors though). The internal vs. external spending is a difficult one and there is a lot of subtlety to it. Sadly, in the public discourse it is often reduced to "public spending bad" or "everything should be nationalized".
Isn't it obvious? Because governments aren't good at management. There's no incentive or feedback loop. A company goes out of business if it's operationally a mess or doesn't deliver value. Not always but it's highly correlated. Governments face no pressure like this. Maybe mild pressure on the very local level. But when you get to the national level, orgs like the Pentagon misplace trillions of dollars with not so much of a protest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
The irony in your example is the modern Pentagon is largely a collection of private companies.
See my comment on the AI replacing consultants story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48133728
Plausible deniability. "We paid £5 million for consultants who recommended this system, it's not our fault it turned out to be a steaming pile of crap that wasted £20 million and took 3 years".
If you get someone else to do it you are not responsible for failure.
if Palantir (or other consultancies) are friends with government decision makers (especially in the US) then spending more on a service is a feature, not a bug.
reads like Salesforce to me, ugh! Enterprises are paying so much to blatantly vendor-lock in themselves using hundreds of "Salesforce engineers". It's baffling to me.
I owned Salesforce setup with 4 engineers and 500+ licenses. I don‘t see how could I replace our SF setup with an in-house product on the same budget within reasonable timeline. We won local competition within a few years, because our sales could use good CRM from day 1 and our competitor, according to the rumors I heard, could not calculate properly sales agent commission. Vendor lock-in is not always a stupid thing. Sometimes it‘s the bet that wins you a market.
Zoom out a little though. I've always felt the main reason That most companies use Salesforce Is that most companies use Salesforce.
I'll give you an example. At a previous employer, We used Google Analytics. We paid for Google Analytics. I feel positive that as a mid size company, We shouldn't have paid for Google Analytics. The free product with 50 events in GA4 should be plenty for us. But why do we use Google Analytics in the first place? Because everyone uses Google Analytics.
I agree that sometimes Salesforce might be a good idea. However, it should be a part of an overall strategy, not just because everyone does it. This kind of deliberate tooling strategy is difficult though because the way Google Analytics or Salesforce works from what I understand is make marketing folks feel they are specialized in Google Analytics or Salesforce so they feel like they have to keep using it or their skill will become useless.
It is like resume driven development but for the whole business.
>I've always felt the main reason That most companies use Salesforce Is that most companies use Salesforce.
It's like this for most software, but as a salaryman it's better for you if you use the common software. If you have an interview you can now say "I know how to use the thing that most people use" instead of "Actually we had an inhouse system so if you hire me I need to be onboarded for 3 months".
I got hired to my 2nd job in large part because I knew how to use Broadridge Paladyne (back then it was pretty good if you got over the pretty bad UI/UX, by today's standards it's not great).
I think it‘s kind of a common knowledge now that Salesforce is very expensive, so it is not a go-to choice for most startups/no-CRM-experience people. You are more likely to start with Hubspot today than with anything else, but those low-effort CRMs are also quite easy to migrate from. Google Analytics too, so it’s not exactly a „lock-in“. The lock-in happens when you struggle with your current setup or risks associated with it become unacceptable, but do not have the budget and a competent team or external partner to execute the migration.
„Everyone does that“ is definitely part of decision-making process almost everywhere, but I personally have not seen companies where it’s just a cargo cult rather than a reasonable strategic choice. The obvious benefits are that it’s easier to find implementation partners, the costs are predictable and your users may already know the system, so you won’t have unnecessary friction in your ops.
could palantir consulting be replaced by LLM in the hands of a half competent hacker?
No.
1. Palantir isn't selling consulting as much as Palantir is selling the confidence you get from buying a name brand. It's the same as paying for McKinsey to provide justification to do what you already want to do.
2. Palantir actually has some good core tech. An in house team can probably do a better job just because the incentives are better aligned, but they'll be starting from behind and have to catch up.
3. LLMs aren't at a level to replace a team of FDEs. Maybe in a couple of years. The role requires too much understanding of the human systems, and too much initiative to keep the ball rolling/acknowledge and deal with real problems.
Its much easier to replicate a thing that already exists and has had many sunk expenditures incurred.
Seriously what did LLMs replace or can replace? You are living in a world of dreams
No one got fired for buying ~IBM~ Palantir. (Well...)
Whenever I want to get depressed I read ycombinator
"In a 2023 blog post, external, Palantir described the challenge of combining data from multiple government systems containing tens of thousands of visa applications and hundreds of thousands of accommodation offers."
This is the kind of thing GDS and other Civil Service departments build all the time, its a completely standard kind of challenge that a small team of Devs (+ supporting staff) from a departments DDAT department does day in and day out.
The output will be open source by default and use existing standards.
Yeah, this exactly. "multiple government systems", "tens of thousands", "hundreds of thousands" is the typical "part-time allocation for four people in an office" government project. This should have a budget in the low hundreds of thousands of £ at most.
Hundreds of thousands of documents is small enough that you can feasibly run a pen and paper office handling them. Especially since most of them do not cross-reference eachother (family applications do, but unrelated families have no such links).
That America's brightest tech minds can't solve this problem is embarrassing. (Never mind the baggage of giving a foreign, potentially adversarial nation access to something as sensitive as residency and visa information.)
This article is about the UK.
I assumed that when the GP said the UK was "giving a foreign, potentially adversarial nation access" the GP meant that the US is that "foreign, potentially adversarial nation"
I can't believe that in our timeline Europe has to think like this, but here we are.
I'm well aware.
Note that Palantir is an American company that failed to solve this problem well, and introduces an adversarial risk to the UK.
Could probably be moderately complex excel sheet. Well, hopefully not but keeping that one guy that know how it works is still cheaper than Palantir!
They did that with the COVID19 tracker.
And ran out of rows
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
The core data platform for NHS Test and Trace was not Excel based at all. It was a reasonably simple but solid AWS setup using S3, Glue and the smallest Redshift instance at the time, on top of which were Tableau/Quicksight/PowerBI dashboards. Some organisations insisted on enabling an "export to CSV" feature which was...not a good idea for so many reasons, and Public Health England (PHE) in the article found out one of those reasons the hard way.
I was at an event in London that involved a lot of government people. It came up that Palantir was not a very good company, Someone felt compelled to shout out, oh don't talk about that here, "we like Palantir here". It is certainly the elephant in the room (elephant in cost, and a very difficult situation).
Free software from Palantir is not free. Peter Thiel's co is all about monopolies.
Oh, and don't forget to opt your data out of Palantir: https://your-data-matters.service.nhs.uk/
There's not really enough info to know if this is just a coin toss or something more. "Company tries to roll its own system and [saves / loses] money" is just a common story, one way or the other.
For context, the Homes for Ukraine refugee scheme cost 2-3 billion as of 2023. I can't seem to find an updated cost. This cost (from the article) was Palantir working for free for the first 6 months (could they have beat that, time wise?), then awarded 4.5m and 5.5m for two more 12 month terms, and now they're transitioning to something home-grown instead.
> The MHCLG [ Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government] said it initially needed a system which could be ready within days but, in seeking a "steadier service", later created an updated platform to meet the programme's longer-term needs and bring down costs.
I basically agree with the MHCLG's reasoning here. It's always worth at least experimenting to see if you can roll your own.
I worked on a small part of one of these back in around 2013 ( specifically managing beds ).
You were talking about a team of 5 cranking this out in about 2-3 months with some longer term part time involvement, with an annual cost of less than 1m and those people mostly all dellivering several product lines ( so actual cost is half or a quater ).
> "Company tries to roll its own system and [saves / loses] money" is just a common story, one way or the other.
Governments build these kinds of systems ("collect data from a bunch of internal systems and show some public forms and have some internal processes for handling form submissions") all the time. When I worked for a local municipality, we built something like this every other month.
GDS has a framework that UK Gov departments have been following for some time to build sites with similar challenges to this for some time.
> There's not really enough info to know if this is just a coin toss or something more.
The difference is always having one or two devs who care. Every successful software project I've ever seen has had a few devs who care way more than is healthy
The contract with NHS is about 300 mil, public don't want it, most GPs don't want it, so let's drop that next.
Developing a replacement system is still going to cost a hell of a lot. It's not like if you dropped palatir then we'd suddenly have a free drop-in replacement and everyone can have their fiver back
You pay money to Palantir that money essentially escapes the economy, you develop a sovereign solution yes you pay millions even more but that goes into corporations and people actually living in the country, paying taxes and spending their coins here.
I would rather not hand mine or my neighbours' health data to a spy-tech firm, who will have unlimited access to their data[0].
Not having the system (it's not like it's already in use anyway) is always a good step in the right direction. And a replacement built-in UK will provide more jobs, more tax money, and digital sovereignty for UK.
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/05/palantir-to-be-granted...
When they first rolled out Universal Credit, they decided to do it using Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
It didn't work very well, so GDS rebuilt it in-house.
Have you considered just not building this kind of thing at all?
Seriously how does a sane government official trust Palantir of all companies with their data.
The MHCLG blog post that this article is reporting on is available here: https://mhclgdigital.blog.gov.uk/2026/04/09/from-emergency-t...
My parents took in a Ukrainian family as part of this scheme, and I knew many others who did. They all matched with each other through Facebook groups set up for this purpose. I don't know anyone who was matched automatically by the Palantir thing
Palantir is not just analyzing data, but, it is increasingly wired into operational decisions like deportations, policing, health-data access, military targeting and public-sector workflows.
Tjheir "ELITE" guide says that during "special operations" normal safeguards may need to be turned off.
Palantir's Maven Smart System ha grown into a Pentagon program of record with 20,000+ active users. "Human in the loop" may become "human rubber stamp" when the number and speed of AI recommendations exceed real human review capacity.
A Palantir-backed program reportedly operated secretly from city council members, defense attorneys, and the public.
Vendor lock-in issue: once a system becomes embedded in agency workflows, switching vendors becomes politically and operationally hard and they are trying their best to achieve this. The Army's $10 billion enterprise agreement consolidating many contracts into one Palantir platform is the cleanest example of institutional dependence.
--- tldr;
The accountability chain is broken: when harm happens, the agency blames the tool, the vendor blames the customer, the operator blames policy, and the model blames the data.
---
Also, I won't share the full report link since whenever I share something like that here, I get banned/flagged for a day.
... Continuing with a few important numbers...
1. ICE awarded Palantir a reported $30 million contract for ImmigrationOS, described as a platform to support immigration lifecycle operations, including enforcement prioritization and self-deportation tracking.
2. Palantir’s Maven Smart System was designated a Pentagon ‘program of record’ in March 2026, with 20,000+ active military users and a contract ceiling that grew from $480 million to $1.3 billion.
3. The US Army’s $10 billion enterprise agreement consolidates 75 separate contracts into one Palantir platform.
4. The Maven Smart System has 20,000+ military users across 35+ military tools.
5. The UK NHS Federated Data Platform, valued at £330 million ($448.4 million), places Palantir at the center of England’s health-data architecture.
6. Palantir’s UK public contracts across NHS, Ministry of Defence, councils, and police forces total more than £500 million.
7. NHS England’s Data Protection Impact Assessment documents 15 inherent risks, all assessed as ‘Low’ residual risk after mitigations.
8. The NHS FDP contract was published with 417 of 586 pages redacted.
9. Palantir received more than $113 million in federal spending since Trump took office, plus a $795 million Pentagon contract.
10. Polling cited by The Guardian indicates more than two-thirds of the UK public are concerned about Palantir’s growing number of public contracts, and 40% distrust Palantir specifically regarding NHS patient data.
11. From detection to ‘prosecution’ (killing), ‘no more than two or three minutes elapse’ with Palantir systems, compared to six hours previously.
12. Palantir’s lobbying spending more than quadrupled since 2019, from $1.4 million to $5.8 million.
Good. We don't need monsters such as Palantir sniffing on everyone. Don't give Evil a chance.
Honestly, a web app to match people looking for and willing to provide accommodation is completely different to dealing with the health data of an entire country that is pre-existing in different formats. The first is essentially a CRUD app that should never have been given to Palantir.
hopefully a similar route is taken with regards to NHS too.
I would imagine with AI generated software this kind of replacing off the shelf software with internally created software will only increase.
well, I mean their goals are kind of clear https://newrepublic.com/post/207693/palantir-ceo-karp-disrup...
Palantir needs to be banned in every EU country. The UK would be wise to do the same.
I would never trust an openly MAGA company.
That "Press Release" they put out with echos of Nazi Germany should have been enough for anyone
The reason for Palantir at the NHS, the problem they're trying to solve is this:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388245/uk-sick-leave-fi...
Now, I get it. The UK is not exactly providing good jobs for a lot of people, so of course we're seeing this. But, getting a mental health diagnosis, be long-term-sick and avoiding unemployment while both getting paid by an employer and getting unfair advantages out of the public health system ...
In the UK, long term sick leave with a mental health diagnosis is a way to be unemployed (ie. not working) but not have the disadvantages of that. There's the money difference: 530 pounds per month for sick leave, 338 or 425 pounds per month for unemployment. On long-term sick leave you get all advantages job seekers get (ie. "Universal Credit"), PLUS others (support for not being able to work, ESA, and support for extra living expenses due to long-term sickness, PIP). So if you don't want to work, long-term sick leave has many advantages (you can even put that you're working on your CV), plus it's a big cost to employers. You don't have to look for work in long-term sick leave. In fact, nothing is expected at all (other than medical evidence).
2.8 million people are long-term ill, not participating in the workforce, not being economically productive at all, at least half due to being diagnosed with mental illness. The issue with this is that this is happening with full support of government employees, and even the courts cooperate to a lesser extent.
What the government is trying to do, in other words, is trying to kick people off, uh, let's say "mental disability", force them to work. And they need to do this without relying on government workers, because they often side with the people on sick leave.
Hence, Palantir. Being hated is a feature here, not a bug.
> The issue with this is that this is happening with full support of government employees, and even the courts cooperate to a lesser extent.
Why is that an issue? The simplest explanation is that the underlying rate of mental illness is inconveniently high. Which would tally with, as you say:
> In fact, nothing is expected at all (other than medical evidence).
Also I would take a look at the date when the upcurve starts on that chart and ask myself: was there some sort of mass disabling event that happened about then? Might that be contributing?
Millions of pounds wasted by using Palantir tech in refugee system
(FTFY)
Palantir’s roots seem practically indistinguishable from the traditional Korean/Japanese dispatch programmers (often referred to as SI, or System Integration). They dispatch engineers under the title of FDSEs, but in Korea and Japan, this kind of on-site deployment is often considered the lowest tier of programming.
In my own experience consulting with factory owners—advising them on hardware choices like Lumens versus Mitsubishi—I see the physical reality. The idea of absorbing a client's database into an ontology and hooking it up to an LLM sounds great in theory. However, considering the extreme fragmentation of equipment standards and data representations across different sites, I seriously question if this is a sustainable business model.
Sure, initially it’s just dispatch programming. But how can they possibly absorb all these disparate, chaotic field environments into a single platform asset? Even within a single factory, different assembly lines use entirely different equipment, often from completely different manufacturers.
The idea of interpreting every piece of equipment's specific protocol, reverse-engineering the DB schemas, standardizing the terminology, and modeling the entire approval flow seems practically impossible. Is this actually achievable? Take PLCs, for example: even if they share a standard communication protocol, the ladder logic itself is completely incompatible across different brands
Thinking about it in reverse, Palantir might have absolutely no intention of solving this fragmentation problem themselves. Their survival strategy might be to dictate the core tech stack of the end-point B2C clients, creating a structure that essentially incentivizes specific B2B vendors to fall in line. Ultimately, what makes Palantir so dangerous is the high likelihood that they will simply shift the massive cost of standardization onto those B2B subcontractors