Recently Palantir's image has clearly fallen quite a bit amongst engineers. Their IPO plans are unclear, and their valuation hasn't budged since 2015. That being said, they're doing pretty well financially and are starting to see some pretty substantial adoption across government and enterprise. Their play has always been a long term one, and it seems like they're growing in to the potential that people saw in them c. 2013. The work is interesting, and many people there seem genuinely happy. What do you all think about the future of the company? Here are three options in my mind: 1. the community criticism will catch up to them, and they will work to remedy the negative image they have started to gain in the eyes of valley engineers. (ie: they'll pay more base salary, hire more senior engineers, reduce the percentage of FDE staff, improve recruiting process, etc). Once they start doing this their brand will begin to improve. 2. their glory days are forever behind them, and they will slowly fade into obscurity. 3. they will continue to be profitable, and continue to grow. However they will never regain the shine they had in 2013 and struggle to ever again recruit top talent. What do you all think?
They have said that they will never go public. They are same tier as spacex/kinda tesla (tesla is at least public so at least they can sell stock). You get less base and less stock (which you cannot liquidate unless you are at tesla) and work double the hours. Pretty much the only reason to work at these companies is if you totally believe in their mission or cannot get a better offer.
3. They still need a lot of FDE’s but now everyone knows work life and culture are lacking.
3. while it doesn't seem to be too late for the first option I can't really see anything happening in that direction.
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3 - think we already moved towards more comp, but don't think will go much more in that direction
I think theyre doing their best to be 1, but were still closer to 3. Base pay is good, I haven't seen recruiting issues at all, and the ratio of FDEs to Devs seems to be pretty reasonable right now given where the company's business is. That said, theyre not doing much to improve their recognition throughout the valley, and I don't see a lot of senior hires.
Didn't palantir only hire 10% of the industry devs they planned to hire? I thought recruiting was one of the biggest problems.
Interesting, I hadn't seen that data before. It seems were surging pretty hard on recruiting, but I do see a lot of new grads in the pipeline and not many industry hires.
Palantir never struck me as anything particulary special from a company standpoint. At the end of the day, they are to operations research ...err... data science what McKinsey is to strategy and Thoughtworks is to general software. They need name brand diplomas and devs to justify the high price of their services. If you were a CocaCola, who would you have more faith in consulting you? The CS grad from MIT who interned at Google or Joe Six-pack with 10 years of consulting experience?
And being a top company means something different to new grads than it does for people with some experience.
What are top companies in your opinion?
In terms of raw tech, I would say Google and Microsoft and a host of small companies you probably never heard of (Galois ring a bell?). Facebook is trying to pretend to be Google for mindshsre, but their culture is more product and less tech oriented.
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