Palantir's interview process is incredibly long and inefficient. It took 8 weeks from when I was first contacted by their recruiting coordinator.

This included:

• Four phone calls
• Two last-minute reschedules
• A take-home assignment
• A cross-country flight on less than 24 hours' notice, all just to get a rejection.

Around week 5, I spent many hours working on the take-home assignment. On week 6, I spoke with someone about it for maybe 15 minutes. That engineer didn't even understand the data they had provided for the assignment.

I think their inefficiency in interviewing is due to the lack of structure in the company. Instead of meeting a couple of people at the level of the position and a couple of managers, you meet 8 people at the level of the position and no managers. You end up dealing with a lot of people with minimum experience as interviewers, and it shows.

• Binary search for an integer with no upper limit
• Open-ended machine learning decomposition question
• Take-home time-series modeling assignment
• Calculate the variance of a list of integers
• Given two random variables uniform on 0-1, create a random variable uniform on the unit circle