Palantir

Overall:

• Good perks, especially house subsidy and free food (go out and buy whatever you want reasonably).
• Smart and energetic colleagues.

I worked for two different teams, and my experience was very different:

Team 1:

• Experienced lead with great technical knowledge, very good communication, and quick, actionable feedback.
• Workload is reasonable.
• Colleagues are very friendly and great to work with.
• Probably one of the most pleasant teams to work with.

Team 2:

• The work is more interesting than Team 1's.
• The product is used by several important organizations.

Overall:

• "Flat hierarchy" is a joke; leads with absolute power are big dictators. You will never have a chance to talk to the lead of your lead, and there are 3 or 4 people on the top of the hierarchy if you are a software engineer.
• Way understaffed.
• Devs in the satellite office are very dependent on devs in the headquarters.

Team 1:

• The project is a bit tedious, not very distinctive from what many other startups are doing.

Team 2:

• Possibly the worst software management I have ever experienced.
• Very inexperienced, political, terrible, close-minded, and hypocritical lead: doesn't understand the tasks technically, constantly sets unreasonable expectations, judges people at every detail inside and outside of work, thinks documentation is a waste of time, and takes constructive feedback very personally. I am not sure why he is in the tech industry; Wall St may suit him better.
• There is little to no mentorship when you get into a new team.
• Every word you speak can be used to go against you when needed.
• Frequently burnt out due to unreasonable expectations (working up to 5 AM to meet the lead's expectation is a norm).
• Many egoistic colleagues are close-minded, unwilling to help, and unwilling to debate for better ideas.
• Literally no documentation; you will waste most of your time comprehending code that is done at 2 AM without any support.
• The work itself is not hard; it is hard because you are going to work alone without any documentation.
• Testing and release process is a joke.
• Performance Improvement Plan is an absolute play. If your lead doesn't like you, even if you complete your PIP successfully, he will extend it until he can find a small fault (or maybe not even a fault) to force you out. If you are ever put under a PIP and feeling your lead doesn't like you, make sure to choose to quit for better benefits, as you will be fired at the end anyway.

Advice to new hires: avoid the PG Infrastructure team unless you want to be burnt out and to waste your time learning bad-quality codes.

Promote more experienced leads with good morals. Never ever put an FDE to be a backend dev lead.