Learning from Palantir?

Forward-deployed engineers as a model for the humanities

Fortepan / Fortepan

It is always illuminating when experts from different fields or professions share their perspectives on the humanities, such as natural scientists exploring aesthetics or economists analyzing culture. Maybe there’s something to be learned there?

Lately, a peculiar gap has opened: many talented minds are steering clear of the humanities, believing that fields like computer science offer greater intellectual stimulation, influence, and professional growth. On the other hand, especially in the context of AI, humanities-based skills are gaining significant traction and praise across the business, tech, and security worlds. For example, Jeff Bussgang, a venture capitalist and Harvard Business School professor, recently noted:

„(...) being good at discernment and taste and judgment, I think, is going to be really important. And for young people, how to develop that? I think it’s a moment where it’s like the Revenge of the Liberal Arts, meaning, like, go read Shakespeare and go read Homer and see the best movies in the world and, you know, watch the best TV shows and be strong at interpersonal skills and leadership skills and communication skills and really understand human motivation and understand what excellence looks like, and understand taste and study design and study art, because the technical skills are all going to just be there at our fingertips (...)“

What should we make of this? Are the traditional humanities more appealing than they realize? Or does the STEM environment offer a better climate for open minds than humanities departments constrained by orthodoxies and an unspoken pressure to ideological conformity? Is Big Tech absorbing the last bits of critical thought? Or should the humanities embrace this new interest coming from unexpected places?

Silicon Valley and the humanities

As far as I can tell, three distinct approaches are emerging in how the humanities engage with the cultural side of Silicon Valley:

• Intellectual histories of the Bay Area, such as those proposed by Fred Turner, Adrian Daub, or Moira Weigel

• Critiques of the so-called Silicon Valley canon and its one-sided focus on social engineering

• Ethical critique of surveillance and security technologies

All three perspectives are insightful and important. They share the premise that the humanities can offer a ‘contextual’ or ‘critical’ lens on the intellectual framework of the tech industry. But they also share a remarkable bias—namely, the assumption that the humanities have something to say about and to the tech world, without having anything to learn from it in return. There is a quick tendency toward condescension. For instance, Jürgen Kaube characterizes Peter Thiel’s comments on René Girard as “embellishments,” “private quirks,“ and “lingering memories of his own youth on campus and a teacher who impressed him.” That might as well be the case.¹ But has anyone ever actually bothered to sift through the Silicon Valley canon—which is indeed unbalanced and oddly heterogeneous—to find legitimate starting points for a critique of intellectual life?

Palantir and the study of philosophy

Palantir Technologies, the data integration software firm specializing in defense and security applications, was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, who remains the company’s CEO. Although their political views differ, Karp’s biography, much like Thiel’s, reveals a surprising interest in philosophy. He holds a doctorate in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt, where, for a time, his thesis adviser was Jürgen Habermas. In Klaus Stern’s 2024 documentary Watching You, Karp is seen at psychoanalyst Margarete Mitscherlich’s 80th birthday party; his advisor confirms that he also attended Habermas’s birthday celebration. A photo taken years later shows him surrounded by Palantir employees in front of a portrait of Michel Foucault, the French thinker who characterized the panopticon as a model of disciplinary power.

So, does Karp deserve to be taken seriously as a philosopher who applied his theories to the real world? I suggest a reverse approach: instead of following the CEO’s explicit statements, look at his company’s day-to-day practices. Palantir’s appeal to top talent and the company’s success aren’t so much rooted in its founders’ deep thinking, but rather in specific practices, as reports from former employees show. It is the way Palantir handles ’unknown knowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns‘ that makes it a compelling case for the humanities.

Forward-deployed engineers

In general terms, both the sciences and computer-based data analysis are about sorting and synthesizing vast amounts of information that would otherwise be impossible to navigate. Palantir apparently succeeds better than its competitors at processing datasets that are „often formatted differently from the others and siloed in separate databases.” But how do they do it?

The company is considered mysterious and notoriously secretive. Recently, however, several insightful accounts from former employees have emerged. For this post, I’m skipping the company’s own blog as well as CTO Shyam Sankar’s and Global Head of Commercial Ted Mabrey’s Substack to focus instead on firsthand reports from Palantir alumni.² Can these practical accounts serve as a resource to help the humanities better define their specific appeal, potential, and relevance in the digital age?

The most comprehensive and thoughtful report I could find was written by Nabeel S. Qureshi, who worked at Palantir from 2015 to 2023.³ Also worth reading is a recent post by Chris Walker, who was with Palantir from 2010 to 2016, as well as pieces by Adam Judelson and Barry McCardel, both Palantir alums.

Qureshi mentions three points that may offer insights for the humanities:

1. During the interviews, it’s made clear that beyond technical expertise and soft skills, a certain kind of philosophical broad-mindedness is expected: “one of my interviews we just spent an hour talking about Wittgenstein.“

2. The approach only works with highly motivated individuals eager to have an impact. Consequently, the workplace culture rewards feedback: “criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed.“

3. While wide-ranging curiosity and openness toward criticism are—or at least should be—taken for granted in the humanities, the third point involves something less common: tackling specific problems on the ground rather than just applying pre-packaged frameworks and toolkits.

Interestingly, the third point reflects exactly what Henry Farrell, in a nuanced critique, finds lacking in the Silicon Valley canon:

“The engineer’s focus on simplifying and solving problems can be of great value, so long as it is leavened by a deep appreciation of the richness and complexity of the systems that it looks to transform.“

To go beyond simply acting as a product provider or consultant and instead develop on-site solutions that feed back into product development, so-called forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are sent to customers.⁴ Chris Walker explains:

“Forward deployment means leaving your office and embedding in the customer’s environment (...) Code is a key output, but it’s downstream of something that doesn’t exist in any database: an understanding of how work actually gets done.“

This approach, he says, allows software engineers to understand the “real map of influence and trust”:

“You observe the workarounds, the informal protocols, the tribal knowledge passed between colleagues. None of this is written down. Very little of it can be written down. Tyler Cowen likes to say ‘context is that which is scarce.‘ Forward-deployed engineers are hunters of scarce context.“

Nabeel S. Qureshi agrees with this assessment:

“the key idea is that you gain intricate knowledge of business processes in difficult industries (manufacturing, healthcare, intel, aerospace, etc.) and then use that knowledge to design software that actually solves the problem.“

Forward-deployed engineering means communicating within specific contexts, listening, translating languages (e.g., from CS to exec-speak), engaging stakeholders, recognizing trade-offs, navigating ambiguities, and immersing oneself in the messiness of day-to-day reality. It’s a genuinely praxeological method, as Adam Judelson points out:

“The golden nugget in this philosophy is that you don’t worry about how to ask users the right questions or obsess over ‚interviewing‘ them. Instead, you are literally there, in the shit with them, getting involved in what is happening.“

Even more pointed:

“You have to be the user to unlock this concept. I don’t mean that spiritually as in ‘think like the user‘; I mean literally do their same job with your product as an extended member of their team and see what you learn.“

Writers like Hollis Robbins and Jasmin Sun have begun advocating for a similar conception of the humanities in the age of AI. The latter writes:

“The job of the researcher, then, is to live in the world—to uncover the subtexts of small things (...) I want to do work grounded in place and culture, to put human faces on abstract secular trends. Translate between disciplines, fill trust gaps. Let the Hill staffers bring their memos and the economists their charts. Writers serve the public as historians of vibe: they tell us what it feels like to be here, now.“

To be sure, merely adopting the (temporarily) popular label FDE isn’t enough, as several critical voices have noted. FDE is a very radical concept. Barry McCardel points out that this approach to building and delivering software „needed more than technical skill – forward-deployed folks also needed creativity, judgement, and customer-facing charisma.“ He underlines:

“The core of ‘Forward Deployed‘ culture is a radical deference to teams in the field. They are empowered to do whatever they need to solve a problem, even if it bears only a thin – even begrudging – relationship to the base platform. This isn’t limited to just configuring or customizing; it’s inventing entirely new products and technologies, if that’s what it takes to win.“

And:

“But to reap the benefits of Forward Deployed Engineering, you have to not only accept the chaos, but embrace it. You have to look at overlapping efforts, and failed projects (and burnt-out husks of FDEs) with gratitude for the lessons learned. This is the core of the ‘forward deployed‘ model, and unless you’re willing to commit, you’re not really doing it.“

McCardel hits the mark by characterizing FDE as “R&D,“ as “primarily an opportunity to build and learn, rather than harvest short-term cash.“ This requires a “mindset that you don’t actually know the thing to build, and you’re going to discover it bottoms-up with users.“ James Pratama makes a similar argument, describing FDE as a first-principles-approach where the goal isn’t “product-market fit,” but rather “outcome-market fit.”

For the humanities, if they’re looking for a true understanding of the world and real change rather than just cheap virtue signaling, an ‘FDE-mindset‘ entails moving beyond convenient, one-size-fits-all theories. To avoid being sidelined by know-it-all attitudes and gestures of condescension, they should study the success of Palantir—hated as it may be. While the pace will certainly be slower than in tech deployment, what the humanities may learn is to get out there, ground their reflections, and subject themselves to the demanding intricacies of life.

1. He adds: “The glamour of the billions and political gambles shines back on his pet theories. There has to be a connection between his daily activities and his nighttime thoughts. Does there really?“

2. I’m making an exception to share this anecdote from Ted Mabrey: “The FDE role was famously inspired by Karp’s observation of how excellent French restaurants operate. The waitstaff is an intrinsic part of the kitchen. If you want to order the wrong wine with the fish, the wait staff will simply tell you no. In order to provide the best experience the delivery mechanism has to be a part of the product, it has to be opinionated, and it has to own that in this case the customer is going to get the best meal even if they don’t know how to ask for it.“

3. You can also listen to his interview on the Lenny Rachitzky podcast.

4. Barry McCardel: “Customer deployments were proving grounds for new technologies – and those that worked were migrated toward the core and taken over by Dev teams, while FDEs fanned out in search of the next frontier problems. This development cycle happened incredibly quickly (...).”