In 2019, I was honoured by the outstanding journalist Zsuzsanna Dömös writing a portrait of me for Forbes Hungary. Many of my international friends asked for a translation - so, here it is. Thank you to Réka Turcsányi for the translation.
This work, it’s fulfilling
Written by: Zsuzsanna Dömös. Photo by: László Sebestyén.
Miklós Danka is not even thirty, yet he has been working for one of the most exciting Silicon Valley companies, Palantir Technologies, for seven years. Spies, the army, government bodies, and the aerospace, pharmaceutical, and energy industries are among his business partners, while he also teaches on a regular basis, at home and abroad. He has taken part in Hungarian politics too.
As a fan of Sherlock Holmes, Columbo, and Poirot, he wanted to be a detective when he was little, and he carried crime novels everywhere. To this day, Miklós Danka is most interested in discovering errors, understanding correlations, and the patterns of human thinking. He may not be a detective, but these are important elements of his current job. “When I later came up with the idea of becoming a programmer, I didn’t really know what a programmer did. I couldn’t picture the kind of jobs available and I haven’t heard of Palantir until the end of university.”
This is not very surprising given that the company’s output can be obscure to even cybersecurity professionals. According to ethical hacker József Makay, due to the lack of experience in the field, the social impact of the technology Palantir provides is unknown even to its employees, not to mention its clients.
I meet with Miklós at a coffeeshop in the city centre. He is on a business trip and he is stopping in Budapest solely for the sake of meeting me in person. He greets me with a warm smile, suitcase in one hand, wearing a dark blue shirt. The next hour and half flies by, and he does not rush me despite his busy schedule, answering every question with enthusiasm. I find out after a few minutes that he will be 29 next year.
After we stop recording, he turns the tables and starts asking about me. It reinforces my feeling that he has an instinctive, deep interest in people, and he is not the stereotypical computer guy.
Miki explains the work his company is doing: “Detectives are good at investigating, not at programming. Let’s say they have thirty databases, a bunch of dossiers, and they spend eighty percent of their time trying to access data. Palantir saves them this time, it provides an intuitive level with all the sources in the background so they only have to deal with objects, connections, and concepts.”
“If the police gets a call about a child and an adult fighting, and the latter wears green trousers, he has a black car, and they have the last two numbers of the license plate, it traditionally takes two weeks to process the data at hand and identify the suspect. With Palantir’s solution, it takes twenty minutes, meaning it’s on a completely different scale.”
Founded in 2003, Palantir Technologies is one of the most interesting tech companies of the decade. Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, is among its original founders. The company’s data management, analysis, and security platform is used by multiple American government agencies. Initially it was made for the secret service, the army, the police, and other state bodies, but nowadays Palantir has clients within the aerospace, pharmaceutical, and energy industries as well. Palantir’s highest profile partner is Airbus, for whom they make flying safer and more efficient.
Help in discovering
On top of his work at Palantir, Miki comes home to Hungary once a month. A few times a year, he teaches at a weekend maths camp for talented children where he uses a methodology created by Lajos Pósa, promoting the students’ individual discovery of mathematics and logical thinking. At first, he was a volunteer at The Joy of Thinking Foundation, later he was given his own group of students. He is very enthusiastic about the foundation’s approach to mathematics.
“In schools, they typically teach maths like here are some formulas, let’s practise and solve a hundred equations, and by the end you may be able to use them, but you don’t understand what they are good for, and it’s mostly just very boring. In contrast, the whole point of the approach focusing on discovery is that thinking should feel good. Within a well-developed system the kids get exercises that help them discover everything themselves. That makes the whole thing much more interesting, and they remember the material better too. The students can experience the joy of thinking, that’s where the name of the foundation comes from.”
According to Péter Juhász, the chief executive of the foundation, Miki is an open and empathetic person. He sees Miki as someone outstandingly talented in opening students up to a given topic.
Using the approach based on personal discovery, Miki and maths teacher Gábor Szűcs created a programme called Techtábor (Tech camp), where they are trying to implement the same attitude towards learning programming. The goal is to plant the seeds of certain thoughts in students’ minds, and for them to build their own projects.
Miki occasionally teaches in Cambridge and Prague as well. For example, he teaches statistical programming at the Czech Charles University, using the same mindset focusing on discovery.
Chat stickers vs. counter-terrorism
It takes a long time for Miki, who has a degree in software engineering, to describe what his job entails. Palantir has two big branches, Product Development and Business Development. The former is responsible for the main platform, while the latter encompasses a myriad of different jobs. The two most important positions are the Deployment Strategists who liaise with clients and make the decisions. The so-called Forward Deployed Engineers are also programmers, and Miki held this position for a long time.
Traditionally, in a software company the programmers work on the product in isolation, they do not communicate with the user. The Forward Deployed Engineers are in one place with the analysts, they work with them, and they use the software themselves so they can discover problems fairly quickly.
“Professionals like these understand the needs in a given situation much better,” Miki explains in detail, “and they can immediately code it. I haven’t really seen this in other companies. They focus on the client and complete engineering tasks on site, and this doesn’t always mean just programming. This was my first full-time job after university and they immediately sent us to Sweden, to a new client. We had to talk to the head of the organisation there, to the middle managers, to the users, we had to order the hardware, do the demos, model and integrate data, and we created new apps and programmed on top of all this.”
Miki’s current title is Product Developer, as part of the only team in the company allowed to work remotely. He lives in Prague, but he travels to London and New York too, to meet the other members of his team. He loves his job, that much was obvious from his tone. “The satisfaction doesn’t necessarily come from how awesome of a technological system I built, but from the happiness of the user. When, for example, they couldn’t solve a crime case for ten years, but then they succeeded with the help of this platform. We get a lot of similar feedback at Palantir, that they have been waiting for these kinds of solutions and people for ten years.”
The road so far was paved by relentless work. Miki got his degree at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, at the University of Cambridge. In Hungary, he was a student at Fazekas Mihály Gimnázium, and a programming competition nudged him towards studying abroad.
“There was a Lego-robot building and programming competition, Lego Mindstorms. We got into the regional finals with my team, and it was in Cambridge. I had a very pleasant experience there. Going to Cambridge was not that popular at the time, I was one of two people from my class who went on to study there, the other was my then best friend. I wanted excellent grades and I put in a lot of effort, I managed to be the top of my class twice.”
He was an intern at Google for three months during the summer between his second and third year. He worked at the department developing Chrome’s secure browsing in Mountain View, California. “I am the first to get a degree in my family, for us simply getting into BME (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) would have been a big deal. No need to say that Cambridge was a huge step in the family, not to mention Google. The perspectives were completely different. It was not so common to go abroad at the time either, and I didn’t even consider the possibility of ever learning at such a big company. It was a huge deal for me, I took and wore all the Google T-shirts.”
While in the US, Miki got news that one of his friends was an intern at Palantir. He didn’t know anything about the company that was much smaller at the time. Palantir was just opening an office in London, where, after a personal interview, they offered him a full-time job so he ended up not going back to university for a Master’s Degree.
“That was the first time they were introduced to me properly, and I was awed. I realised that oh my, all this technology and knowledge could be used for things I felt were important and beneficial for society. It was not about optimising ads for individuals, or getting more clicks, or adding stickers to chats. I’m not saying that these don’t have a place, but for me they are less fulfilling. Instead, we can replace the 20-30-year-old tools with a more proficient product in counter-terrorism.”
Part of a society
Along having an educational role in Hungary, Miki is interested in national politics and the technological possibilities within it. Together with the political party Momentum, he created an interface for Hungarian voters living abroad. After a few questions and adding their address, voters could access information about when and where they could cast their vote, and what papers would they need to take with them.
“I’m interested in making participation in politics easier, like using such techniques during a campaign,” Miki says. “I think you can only have a system-level impact if you try to help through education, through social organisation, and if you try improving people’s mental health. We talk a lot about how money is important, but less about what makes people happy as a part of a society.”
“I like certain aspects of Hungary a lot, and it is important to me personally that I contribute to how things go in some way. But I don’t have to live here for that, I can come back once every month. I’m interested in many technological challenges here, but I’m not planning to move back. I am gay and I have a partner, I wouldn’t feel comfortable in Hungary, I guess that’s the main reason. There is a constant bad taste in your mouth if you have to constantly pay attention to how others react to you. It seems to me that the situation is even getting worse at the moment. It may be better in Budapest, people care less in the capital if someone is homosexual, but this tolerance is nowhere to be found on a governmental level.”
