Pros: - Still some smart people left. - Decent comp (if you joined pre-IPO). - Used to have good perks, but most of them got cut during the pandemic and with constant cost-cutting that started in advance of the IPO.

Cons: Poor work-life balance. If you don't mind 24/7 on-calls and frequent "surges," this is your home. Professional growth perspectives are virtually non-existent. It's all very random and mostly luck/politics dependent. If you are "unlucky" and got assigned a crappy team/project early on, you will struggle to ever get considered for anything better. You will not learn much and just get stuck. There are few good teams, but since most others are so mediocre, you are unlikely to get into a good one, and moving "upwards" internally is very hard. It's worse if you also get a lead (Palantir term for "manager") who lacks motivation, time, or power to support you. As burnout gets more widespread, more long-timers either quit or become jaded and stop caring; the chance of getting such a manager is higher. In terms of coding, you will mostly fiddle with internal frameworks. If you are "lucky," you might get to work on something new; otherwise, expect vast legacy codebases with plenty of tech debt and support issues. Or they could put you as a "dev" on infra. Leadership is still rather inexperienced and often not sure what they are doing. They try to call it "flat structure"; in practice, there are few unofficial "power clusters," centered around people who are actually important, and their decisions are enforced. Some got this authority by merit, others just by being close to founders/directors, "tenure," or being good at office politics. The result is low transparency on decisions affecting you, wasted effort, and frequent reinventing the wheel. If you are extremely unlucky, they might put you on BD (business development). The main purpose of engineers there is to help customers use Palantir products, especially when they break (and boy, do they break often). Once you are in BD, Palantir will not let you "escape BD" until you quit.

Pros: People are amazing; the hiring quality is out of this world even for the Valley. Projects can be extremely interesting. Tech stack (especially on the Foundry side) is modern and fun to use. The software is real and works unlike most enterprise technology Palantir competes against.

Cons: Work/life balance is highly project dependent. Long hours trend towards brutal if your project is fast-paced or the customer is overly demanding. Your project may not be all that interesting, and you'll hear about everyone else doing world-changing tech. If your project is uninteresting and has long hours, you can burn out fast. Some of the Gotham codebase is archaic and hard to understand. Palantir changes over time, and you'll need to adapt or reinvent yourself if you stay longer than two years. This can be fun but stressful, and the pace never slows down.

Pros: Great teammates, engineering standard, and ownership. The company is still growing - definitely a good place to be at the moment.

Cons: Compensation can start to stagnate for more senior people.