Pros: - Brilliant people, domain experts, quick thinkers, constructively critical. - Opportunity to solve problems and impact a variety of institutions and domains that doesn't exist anywhere else. - Teammates honestly depend on the hard work of each other, and it keeps us moving forward. - Great culture of working hard on important, high-stakes work and supporting the people you're working with. Not super political.

Cons: If you don't know how to prioritize your own work/life balance, you will have to learn. The sensitive nature of certain work requires secrecy, which can often be perceived as malintent by default.

Pros: The company treats interns well. The perks are good (food, housing, laundry, gym, etc.), and the salary is very high for software engineers. Engineers are, on average, very smart and think/code fast.

Cons: If you are inexperienced, you will probably have a very short time at the company, even if you do your best to adapt. They put interns in ongoing projects which are often changing and blame you if you perform poorly or don't keep up. They are unwilling to inform you about technologies you should know upon arrival and will just kick you out of a project if you don't speed up within a couple of days. They expect amazing results in a matter of weeks, even if you are still in college. Even though they have weekly intern/mentor feedback, the feedback is poor. You pretty much have to read the minds of project leads, most of whom, by the way, are often rude to you and usually too busy to answer any inquiries or questions you may have. They will blame you for wasting their time if you even try. Palantir is also ethically dubious, as they have multiple concurrent banks to whom they work and keep secret from one another. They often urge interns and full-time software engineers to post positive reviews on Glassdoor.

Pros: Very grateful this is where I started my career, with plenty of amazing mentors and opportunities to grow beyond my comfort zone.

Cons: It's unclear how transferable the backend tech stack is to other engineering jobs.