There was an initial online coding challenge on HackerRank, which was pretty standard.

Afterwards, they gave me a phone call asking about my interests and some other standard questions:

• Talk about past work on my resume
• Why do you want to join Palantir?

The online coding challenge on HackerRank was quite standard. They provided a time sequence of stock pricing and a list of buys/sells for several people at different times. The challenge asked to identify trades that led to a large gain or avoided a large loss within three days of the trade.

Afterwards, they called me to discuss my interests. For some reason, the conversation didn't seem very productive. Perhaps we just didn't get along well, which the phone call format (instead of Skype or face-to-face) might have contributed to.

They asked many "why" questions:

• Why did you study CS?
• Why did you choose to work on xxx?
• Why do you not like xxx?

To me, there aren't good "whys" for many of these things. I do what I like, and I either like something or I don't. I would have preferred if they had directly asked about the fields I am interested in, or examples of projects I would and would not be interested in.

In the end, they sent an email stating they didn't have a suitable position for me. This was unfortunate, as Palantir was one of the companies I was most interested in at that time.