Palantir Technologies Reviews

Pros

Phenomenal mission, combine with incredible autonomy.

Cons

Lots of autonomy may not be the right thing for some people.

Pros

- Opportunity to work in many different industries and companies - Role has a lot of variety and gives you chance you learn a lot of new things, e.g. data pipelining, consulting, stakeholder management, sales, team management, use case scoping etc - People and teams are very motivated and have a lot of energy to build great things - Lots of travel opportunities (before Covid) - Good salary & benefits - Smart people

Cons

- Bad work-life balance --> unrealistic expectations, really need to set clear boundaries in order to take vacation or work at reasonable hours - Limited mentorship & growth opportunities, especially for people with work experience - So-called "Flat hierarchy" really leading to a lot of power plays, unfair practices of how projects get assigned and limited opportunities for newer people or people with a small network --> this leads to a very competitive work environment & "Tech Bro Culture" - No clear strategy from leadership. They say that it's part of culture to let people freedom, but this just leads to a lot of inefficiencies & lack of direction - Very corporate working culture given that Palantir works with a lot of very big corporate clients

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 pandemic and with constant cost-cutting that started in advance of 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/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.