Maybe it's the code names?
I can tell you that at least at the time the impression given during the interviews was that of a deep, intellectually enriching place. Mostly everyone I talked to went to Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, or a similarly ranked school. Many of those not straight out of school had come from Google or Facebook. The interview questions were among the hardest and most technically demanding I was asked. You're told of working on problems of massive scale involving true "big data".
On top of this, the budget for seeking out top engineering talent seemed to be without bound. I was flown out and put in a really overly nice hotel room. I was treated to a very expensive steak meal for lunch. I was just one of a very large group of candidates being luxuriously herded through their HQ that day and seemingly every day without end.
These kinds of things play with your ego especially if you're not mature enough to have ever experienced something like it before.
It was a holiday for the McKinsey guys running that thing as well, they appreciated being paid to go waterskiing and BBQing on the beach. For me it was luxury unlike anything I experienced until then - the rooms were so big we had to almost shout to be heard across them, and there was a sofa on the balcony! I took home loads of Hermes toiletries and cologne (I didn't have enough money on my bank account for the room deposit, and one of the consultants had to deposit with his card). In fact we even missed our Paris connection to Dubai, so McKinsey sent a consultant over to baby sit us, which meant taking a Mercedes to the Brasserie La Coupole for an epic feast followed by a night in a neighbouring 5* (I think in the Tour Montparnasse).
Unfortunately, I did not graduate with high enough grades (2.2 on the BA, cutoff was 2.1) for McKinsey, which is why they rejected me the first time. So by the third time they tried to headhunt me, I just told them upfront that their system/HR would reject me because of my grades and it was not worth our time continuing the discussion. They insisted, and it happened as predicted, making me wonder why they still care about that for more senior hires.
There was also a period of time in my life where I accepted conference speaking slots if the hotel was nice enough and close enough to my home. Can't resist a proper 5* hotel lunch buffet, especially if they have giant prawns and olive-roast beef and a decent beer on tap. I made my talks increasingly ridiculous, I think by the end I was explaining Starcraft cheese to middle-aged CTOs and quoting Delta Force founder Col. Charlie Beckwith before following up with droid-driven tractors (all relevant to ML in e-commerce, I promise). They loved it, got voted "best talk of the conference" a couple of times, not hard when 90% of the other talks were "so here's the 3Vs of Big Data" verbatim copied from Wikipedia.
One wonders how a company as rich as McKinsey could have such piss-poor data management. Why not, I dunno, check that the person you're headhunting is already in your database?
Big, cash-loaded companies tend to enact policies more about protecting their wealth and reputation than to actually grow a company or even to keep it efficient. "Good enough" growth and revenue projections are enough to keep people happy and the bonuses coming in. Nobody goes into Big Four style consulting trying to actually change the world unlike at least a fair share of entrepreneurs globally.
Their pitches of "We only hire the best and brightest" and "Our work truly changes the world" sold me on them.
* Making hedge funds richer didn't actually feel like changing the world.
* I never really clicked on the codebase, didn't understand what was going on in the code, and didn't contribute much. (I don't think the code was easy to understand, and my mentor wasn't much help)
* I wasn't interested in making Palantir my full life, and there was a lot of pressure to have work be life. One of the leaders in my group basically said "yeah, I don't spend time with my pre-Palantir friends anymore."
* I also didn't click with my coworkers. I was about 27, and felt like an old guy. There were a bunch of other things socially that didn't work out. Strong culture that I didn't jive with.
* I got the signal that my 9-7 schedule wasn't enough.
The Government group may have been a better fit for me, I'm not sure.
Also best/brightest worship needs to stop. It correlates to nothing. This coming from MIT/harvard grad.
It's so tone deaf it blows my mind.
Palantir can at least pretend that your work will be "changing the world" since they do have some government and NGO projects with real impacts. Of course, only a very small select few will work on those projects—not that they mention that in recruiting.
North America and the Caribbean excluding the United States
- Canada: Simon Frasier, Waterloo, UBC, Toronto, McGill
- Mexico et al: nada
South America
- mas nada
Africa
- South Africa: I one time had a CS professor from the University of Natal, but that's all I really know about it.
Australia and Oceania
- New Zealand: Weka came out of University of Waikato or something. That's popular, so I guess it must have something going on.
Asia:
- Japan: University of Tokyo
- Taiwan: National Taiwanese University? That's shown up a few times I believe. Taiwan also has a Tsinghua, but that's not the good one, so don't count it. I on;y mentioned it because...
- China: Tsinghua University is very good. It's "the MIT of China." Peiking University is also a good school, but they're not as engineering focused. There's something called Beiha or something in Shanghai or so, that one's good. There's another school with a long name that's in Guangzhou or something that's on the coast but not near Shenzhen that whose colors are white and green that's good. Maybe it's Fujian?
- India: I know about IIT, but in all honesty I don't remember seeing any papers or anything like that come out of it in my field, so I'm biased against it, even if it's "the MIT of India."
- Israel: Haifa, and Tel Aviv
Europe:
- UK: Cambridge and Oxford are famous, but I've never heard anything about their engineer schools, so I'm going to put them in the impressing-looking-degree-but-actually-only-average-or-less pile with Harvard and Yale CS grads. (Sorry Harvard boys and Yalies. Should have gone to Cornell.), Aberdeen shows up from time to time, so that's a plus. There's Open University, which might be okay, but I don't really know. I know people that went to Southampton in HCI, so I'll say yes for HCI. Swansea exists, but I don't know.
- France: University 6 or something. Although, I think it recently changed it's name, so if you're using the new name, you're out luck, because I don't know any other schools in country.
- Switzerland: There's the school in Lausanne. The one with the french name, and the four letter acronym ECPI or something. The first word is Ecole or something. That's got a good CS and math program.
- Austria: Zurich
- Germany: There's the Max Planck Institute, but I don't think that's a school. There's a university in Cologne, but I can't tell you anything else about it. Other than that, I can't name anything, which is a real shame, because Germany is famous for engineering. I heard the all the schools took a nosedive after the Nazis killed the Jews, but I don't know if it's true or not.
- Finland: University of Helsinki was good enough for Linus, it's good enough for me.
- Russia: Moscow Technical University or something. That's the good math school in Moscow. but there's more than one university in Moscow, and so it's hard to remember which one is which. It's even harder, because I can't actually name the other schools. I think St Petersburg also has STEM school, but maybe I'm just making that up.
And that's pretty much the international STEM post-secondary educational system. So 25 schools that I'd call good. (Mentioned, but not good: Oxford, Cambridge, Cologne, Taiwan's Tsinghua, IIT (sorry India)) And even though Max Planck isn't a school, although if you have it on your resume, I'll be impressed.
I'm sure I missed a ton, but that's kind of my point.
Either way, you end up not looking at what foreign school they went to, but rather what graduate program they got into in the US.
At least that was my experience in 2011. Had I taken the offer I would have had no problem affording a Bay Area house today, given Palantir's current valuation. That also assumes a liquidity event.
So on one hand I made my wife happy but who's to say buying a house in cash might have made her happy too.
My colleagues that went there for the most part enjoyed the work. One of them got burned out but I'm confident that was self-imposed and not due to excessive pressure from team leaders.
I've basically taken every good job offer I've had in my life, and I haven't regretted one jump.
Yes, the "liquidity event" mentioned in the article is extremely vague. I'll reach out to my colleagues that are still at Palantir to find out what that actually meant.
This is significant because private companies typically have clauses in their option agreements that you can only sell shares pre-IPO if the board approves. So, a company like Palantir structures things so that, before an IPO, you can only make money off your options if you're still working at the company. Oh yeah, and if you leave and want to exercise your options so they don't expire (so that you can have a nest egg that vests when they IPO), be prepared to pay AMT on the difference between the strike price and the current value.
They call it "golden handcuffs" for a reason.
Or are you making a general statement about companies similar to Palantir?
Here's one of the founders a couple years ago https://www.quora.com/When-will-Palantir-go-public?share=1
They've been signalling that an IPO is imminent for a long time.
Several friends turned down offers from Facebook/Google/etc. for (much) more money to join Palantir because they "didn't want to sell ads" and somehow thought that Palantir's work would be more fulfilling. The government and NGO work certainly sounds compelling (you're going to be finding terrorists and improving public health) until you realize it's a soul-crushing job mostly pushing low-level data around.