I interviewed there. It was extremely challenging, but somehow I passed it. I had a very positive impression of the company and its culture. Recruiters and interviewers were super-responsive.
It was in the early days, so it was a very startup-y attitude, "we're so smart" sort of thing. The engineers were smart, from Stanford and CMU, so it was partially justified. I ended up not taking the offer. Not for a particularly good reason, it just didn't fit with life circumstances.
Looking back, it would have been a bad idea. I didn't understand the product, which is pretty essential when joining a company. The stock was granted as options, so without an IPO it is illiquid. The salaries were all low, but at the time someone could have lived in Palo Alto on them.
It turns out they thought they could tackle this problem of disparate data silos and change the world while respecting privacy. They weren't able to automate away the expensive process of having Forward Deployed Engineers do data integration work.
> They weren't able to automate away the expensive process of having Forward Deployed Engineers do data integration work.
Enterprise in a nutshell.
And honestly, not what the customers want. If they're hiring you in the first place, they generally suck at tech. So they'd much rather have "Stanford grads on site every day" as proof of how they're spending money.
So it's a non-starter for Palantir's management when they're looking at existing customers and their desires, and the continuing trickle of naive tier 1 undergrads. Just keep the company cool enough to attract the crop under Google, Amazon, & FB...
And if the customers don't want 100% software data integration, then why spend a lot of money to automate 85% of it?
It was in the early days, so it was a very startup-y attitude, "we're so smart" sort of thing. The engineers were smart, from Stanford and CMU, so it was partially justified. I ended up not taking the offer. Not for a particularly good reason, it just didn't fit with life circumstances.
Looking back, it would have been a bad idea. I didn't understand the product, which is pretty essential when joining a company. The stock was granted as options, so without an IPO it is illiquid. The salaries were all low, but at the time someone could have lived in Palo Alto on them.
It turns out they thought they could tackle this problem of disparate data silos and change the world while respecting privacy. They weren't able to automate away the expensive process of having Forward Deployed Engineers do data integration work.