I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies in Jan 2014
Interview
An employee submitted my resume, I got a call from a recruiter, scheduled non-technical interview with a senior recruiter, after that a technical interview with a Forward Deployed Software Engineer.
I was not impressed with the interviewer. When I started asking questions about the programming project, he was not giving straight answers and finished with: "Just write the program". Strange - the process of elaborating the specs should be an important part of a programming interview.
As other people already noted, there is a striking change in the recruiter's attitude after you've been rejected. She sounded very sweet when she was interested, but the rejection letter which I received in response to my inquiry was just a formal canned letter from the company. This makes me think that "friendly atmosphere" is only for show. I did receive rejection letters from other companies before and they were personal and friendly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical interview was quite simple.
1. What you've been up to lately?
2. Describe HashMap for a layman
3. RAM vs HD for a layman
4. Write a program in any language to capitalize words in a string. Used callabedit.com
Had a chat with HR and then a technical interview with an engineer. They gave some some quite normal leatcode type questions that I had to answer to continue to the next steps.
I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (New York, NY)
Interview
I have so far completed the 20 minute recruiter call, which was an easy behavioral. They asked me what I'm looking for in a job and what I do at my current role.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (New York, NY)
Interview
Quick call with recruiter then technical interview. First call was easy, fit of company etc... Technical interview was leetcode easy and code walk through. Overall, much easier than what I had read online.