Pros: A startup-like culture in a mid-sized company. Highly skilled engineers from whom you can learn. Amazing, developed infrastructure (automated integration testing, fully automated release process, good monitoring tools). High speed of developing code and pushing code to production. Fairly good transparency to see how your code is affecting the business.

Cons: - Decreased compensation post-IPO (compared to pre-IPO compensation). - Leads lacking management skills (although this is improving). - Slowly trending towards increased corporate bureaucracy as the company is growing, rather than maintaining the startup-like culture. - On some teams, on-call is hard because of a lack of resourcing.

Pros: Mission, the impact this company has and the impact you can create as an intern is amazing. You immediately work on hard and important problems, with no side projects to keep interns busy. You're treated as a full-time employee for the most part. Culture, the people are among the friendliest and smartest out there. You can ask anyone for help. Further, from the constant internal dialogues, you can tell the company is ethically-minded and pursues success with integrity. Support system, mentor/lead/team/recruiter are all actively helping you make the internship a great experience. If there's a problem, you can raise it and it will be addressed. Personal growth, you're given a voice in what you want to do and what skills you want to improve. Travel, we had the opportunity to travel across and out of the country as interns. Perks, the free housing, 3 meals a day, the haircuts, the massages, etc., make life quite comfortable. Intern cohorting, interns in an office got to know each other pretty well and we've become friends throughout the internship. This is just my experience, but my experience isn't uncommon from what I can tell. Compensation, one of the highest out there.

Cons: Finding your own work-life balance. Because of the flexible hours, it can be difficult to find a balance that works for you when you see coworkers arriving or leaving at vastly different hours. That said, I didn't feel any pressure to work late or get in early. It's just a matter of doing what's best for you and communicating that.

Pros: It has good leadership at the top under Dr. Karp. A lot of their work will provide a sense of purpose and genuinely has a positive impact on the world. The office perks are also excellent, especially the food.

Cons: Palantir is arrogant and even borderline cultish. Below Dr. Karp, it suffers from immature leaders and managers. Being a people lead only implies that you have power over people, not that you have people skills. Few checks exist on a manager's power to ruin your career, especially if they subjectively determine that you are not a good "culture fit." A lack of "culture fit" means that it's OK to mistreat you because you're different, not that you don't fit into Palantir's culture.