Palantir

Your coworkers are going to be incredibly competent. I've been here for a year and a half and I haven't yet encountered a coworker who wasn't good at their job.

The culture is very fast-paced; it sort of feels like early Facebook's "move fast and break things." If you're self-motivated and enjoy ambiguous, high-impact problems, Palantir is for you.

In all things, Palantir minimizes process. You get to define how things get done, and it's up to you to make it happen. If you enjoy a lot of structure and process, Palantir will probably be really painful.

The culture is really fast-paced and intense. If you're bad at taking time off and unplugging from work (and most Palantirians are), Palantir won't stop you from overworking. For this reason, there's a good amount of burnout.

The culture also is built around being a self-starter. It's not okay to be blocked by other people, and you'll be expected to think outside of the box to solve problems and get yourself unblocked. If you don't like ambiguous or difficult problems, you're going to have a bad time. If you're bad at unplugging from work, you're going to have a bad time.

I think the competitive atmosphere is healthy and spurs people toward excellence, but the turnover is counter-productive.

If we invest more in advocating for sustainable work/life balances, we'll reap the benefits of keeping people around for much longer (which far outweighs the cost of having them work a few less hours each week).

It doesn't mean we won't have crazy weeks, but it means those won't be the norm.