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: Top-tier talent and people. Exposure to huge problems from the get-go. Palantir is working with some of the most impactful companies in the world. Ability to grow and form your own path.

Cons: Can be intense depending on what customer you get paired with and the members of your team. Company has little structure when it comes to growth path. This can be good or bad depending on what you're looking for.

Pros: - Young people - Nice culture - Okay compensation

Cons: - Little room to switch teams / low structure - Constant support burden - Ethically ambiguous