What’s the state of the company right now? I have a new grad offer to join as a SWE in Denver and was hoping to get some insight here. Been following the company for a while and it checks a lot of my boxes, but wanted to get some employee opinions as well. Looking for any takes on the company’s: * progression - how quickly can I move through the company, assuming top tier performance? how does comp scale? are internal promotions preferred to external hires for management? * hierarchy - is flat hierarchy really a thing at Palantir, and do you view it as a benefit or detriment? how siloed are your SWE teams? * outlook - are you feeling positive about the company moving forward or do you feel it is plateauing or sliding? how quickly do you think Palantir moves - does it still have a startup feel or has it slowed due to size? * ownership - how much responsibility can I assume as a new grad? As much as I can handle, or as much as my manager can get approved? As an outsider, I’ve always viewed palantir as a dark horse in tech: a company which works in morally grey areas on impactful, but dangerous software. I’ve heard that Palantir avoids many of the problems of a tech company of its size, which is one of my primary concerns (I’ve had a few big tech internships in uni and disliked all of them because of the bureaucracy and politics). Is this true, or is it all just marketing to cover up another typical midsized Silicon Valley software company? My alternative is to join a promising mid-series startup in the Bay, but I’m just not as passionate about the product as I am Palantir’s. Appreciate all responses, brief or lengthy. #palantir
Do you know what you'll be working on? Alot of the ethically gray stuff that people talk about are worked on by cleared engineers. Palantir has plenty of non-cleared work that is just helping commerical companies with data.
Stay away
State of company - The company is doing well (even though stock price doesn't agree) and we are hiring a lot of new engineers. With the deflated stock price you'll have better comp over the long run if we execute well since the stock price should rise a bit more then if it was still inflated. * progression - You will progress as fast as you can handle. If you are executing you will be given more and more responsibility. I'd be more worried about you burning out then your progression being flat. * hierarchy - Yes the hierarchy is pretty flat. I have peers who are now leads of entire parts of the business, but I still consider them my peer and their title usually doesn't change that much internally. There's 2 people between me and a director. * outlook - Positive. We have a variety of useful software, a lot of work is being done to scale it and that work is interesting and something you could work on. The actual domains the software are used are varied as well so you can go deep into different problem sets. * ownership - You get as much ownership as you want to handle or even more. You can try to remain an IC or manage lead one of the groups of our software. Or maybe start a new one. As far as morally bankrupt, or nazi, this is laughable. Just talk to an employee and have a real conversation on all the silly things people say about Palantir. Ethics is actually pretty big here.
@Tinder - I won't doxx myself, but most people would consider the work I do to be slightly morally inferior to our work with NCMEC, and about on par with our work with the WFP. Do you sincerely believe working on an app that lets people have one-night stands is superior?
@tinder, man you must not hire many people... Amazonians must be fine with union squashing, metamates with selling US data to Russia, Tinderites with human trafficking, Googlers with squashing competition through biased search results, right? 🙄
Did you have an analytical round and if yes, could you share what that was like? Pretty please??
Ps: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2020/PSA200316