Pros: The primary reason I joined Palantir, and continue to work at Palantir, is the opportunity I have to learn and grow. Palantir highly encourages technical growth, and I have often been paired with another developer on projects in order to further my skills. This sort of learning also happens through self-organized, informal efforts, such as: * Reading groups * Hobbit Academy (internal classes and mini-workshops) * Pizza and Papers (order a bunch of pizza and discuss an academic paper) * Others One of the primary criteria for choosing where to work was how much I would continue developing as an engineer. At Palantir, I have not only improved significantly, but also continued learning about interesting new developments and technologies. In addition to this, I’ve found that Palantirians tend to be well-aligned in our goals and objectives, which makes it all the more gratifying to work as part of a team. Everyone at Palantir is focused on the same outcomes — delivering the most value to our customers in the most effective way. Palantir seeks to give as much context as possible to everyone at the company and strives to make sure everyone understands the decisions that affect them. This way, with everyone on the same page, it truly feels like working towards a shared vision.

Cons: As a rapidly growing company, we often find processes that once worked in the past no longer do so. Process changes can be painful, and it often takes some experimentation and iteration to determine what the new best process will be. This is somewhat mitigated by the leadership's transparency around new initiatives and a willingness to admit failure when things don't work.

Pros: The compensation is above average at the start. You get exposed to many production responsibilities quite early. If you are a new grad (and everyone is), this is a good way to learn good industry standards and practices about software engineering. The office is amazing, but you get indifferent to it quite fast. Your peers are often interesting new grads like you are.

Cons: The compensation does not grow adequately (20% after 18M + 5%/y). The organization is chaotic, political, and non-meritocratic. The so-called "architects" are mostly there for historic and political reasons and are not impressive, but they really believe they are. They often take unexplained, untransparent, and authoritative decisions that serve their agenda. The horizons are always short-term. The vision is always at most a few months away. The codebases are quite poor and hard to maintain, having been written fast at first. They are often slow and buggy. As long as it mostly works, the original author will have moved on to a new shiny project. Refactoring, improving performance, and correctness are seldom rewarded, even though the services do not scale for the vast majority. What matters only is to start the project. Projects done in-house are reinventing the wheel of better existing open-source alternatives. There is no project with significant depth. It is mostly about building shiny apps for the platform. Your peers are all new grads like you, and very few have industry experience. Clueless people are often the most pretentious.

Pros: Good done, hard work. Busy.

Cons: Lots and lots of work. Busy.