Pros: There are two big reasons to work at Palantir (in addition to a myriad of smaller ones): * It's the sharpest group of people you'll ever get to work with. * You'll be working on some of the most important problems society has regarding technology. One of the cool features of Palantir that differentiates the company from the walled-garden (and useful, not knocking them) experiences one gets at Google, Dropbox, Facebook, etc., is that Palantir deals with problems in the messy world, in a wide variety of industries—healthcare, law enforcement, disaster relief, energy, fraud, etc.—and puts a lot of responsibility on individual employees to map new problems in the messy world to sets of existing or not existing (and needing to be built) pieces of software, to solve the problem. It's really empowering and an exciting change of pace from what much of Silicon Valley considers important.

Cons: The downside of interacting with the messy world is that you can't easily construct a narrative about your business and expect it to remain unchanged (e.g., Dropbox being the place you store your files, or Google categorizing the world's information). As a rapidly growing company, Palantir has been forced to constantly refine its mission and why it operates the way it operates. This can lead to a lot of ambiguity and anxiety, as the unknown always has a tendency to do.

Pros: Great salary. Working with some of the smartest people. Prestige.

Cons: Still a job. Could earn a lot more working a few years and then starting your own company. Long hours. Can't work on side projects or investments.

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.