No, Palantir. Your internships are not worth 5 months, 8 interviews,... | Hacker News Reader

No, Palantir. Your internships are not worth 5 months, 8 interviews,...

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Someone in a related thread (I followed a few links to get there) commented that

> Every time this comes up we say give them a contract quote for the time. I vividly recall one guy that did, this year or last, and the company said "sure" without hesitation. He made like $400 interviewing to work there, because he asked one question.

> It's simple, you just say "8 hours seems a little excessive to do for free, but I'm happy to do it at a billable rate of say $75/hr. If that's okay with you I can start within a day." That's it. If they still want the work but won't pay for it, that will tell you a whole lot about them.

I'd be interested in hearing peoples thoughts about this!

Laws of supply and demand apply.

If the person is in demand, and the supply of identical applicants is low (or, zero, if they really want this one person), then the applicant can command way more than most people expect.

If you are a college student applying for an intership, I would tend to believe the opposite applies. Supply is massive. I think asking for any compensation for time will be met with a quick end to the process.

If the supply is so massive why are all these companies paying so much for tech interns?

Supply of potential candidates is high, supply of highly qualified candidates is low.

If only there was a way to convert potential candidate into highly qualified candidates without relying on universities or bootcamps.

Sorry, let me elaborate what I mean by "potential." I don't mean candidates that have potential to do the job extremely well, but candidates that apply for positions with adequate signals but without the capabilities to do the job well.

Bootcamps and Universities don't convert potential candidates into highly qualified ones in this model, they convert non-candidates to potential candidates.

The highly qualified component comes from more than just education, I knew a lot of people that got excellent GPAs through diligent hard work but didn't comprehend what they were learning in a way that would allow them to leverage the knowledge. I've met C students that were so fascinated with the topics they studied that they screwed off on school work to cover more breadth (building cars, satellites, etc.)

A bootcamp/university wont take someone that is diligent and transform them into someone that's passionate. It can take someone that's passionate and give them the qualifications to get to interviews though.

Because the vast majority of the supply doesn't meet the company's standards.

It is a selection (of few) process. If applicants are plenty it may not be economically wise to pay for everyone's interviewing hours.

Probably because everyone else is paying interns crazy amounts of money?

Every other business I've ever been in, interns got minimum wage or we would pull them through Manpower and they got some basic scale that way.

You're halfway there. Now why is "everyone else" paying those amounts?

By "all these companies," you're actually referring to a sub-group at the top of the tech sector. Pick any sector and the top companies pay interns well.

A 99th percentile candidate doesn't have much leverage if the alternative is a 98th percentile candidate.

The whole point of having a society is to have counter-cyclical structures that protect us from the vagaries of supply and demand such as famine and other economic disruptions. Not paying interns just means you select for relatively well-off kids that don't need to pay rent. It's a cultural rather than an economic choice.

I think it comes down to proof. If you have either some publicly accessible proof of competence, or a trusted 3rd-party who will vouch for your competence, there are many scenarios where people (including myself) were paid for their time on the initial interview.

The rub is that a degree (rightly) does not carry the same weight of proof.

How can a company be a such a high-profile govn't contractor if they illegally employ part of their workforce (aka not paying their interns)?

Weird. Palantir isn't just wasting the student's time (which is shitty, but par for course), but the time of its own engineers and recruiters. How many engineers' hours have gone into interviewing and reviewing this candidate?

And all for an FDE role. I take this as another countersignal to the quality of Palantir and its trajectory.

This problem extends beyond Palantir and internships. Every job interview I have been through, you have to go through a recruiter screen, a hiring manager phone interview, another phone interview with a senior person, first day onsite with 5-6 people, second day onsite with a homework presentation. ARE YOU KIDDINg ME ?? I have another job, and I have to constantly lie to find time to interview with ONE company. Then these guys all complain about talent shortage and unable to fill up their vacancies. May be, you don't need 20 interviews to determine if a person is a good fit for your role.

Wow, that's fucking terrible.

I've been incredibly lucky to either have two short interviews with companies on separate days or just a 5-6 hour interview. I wouldn't tolerate having to jump through so many hoops.

Yeah, don't try to get a job at Google, then. They basically make you do the HR + HR quizzing you on tech trivia they don't understand ("that's not the answer I have in front of me") + 2 tech phone screens + full-day onsite. The real rub is that you go through this entire months-long process 2-5x to convince them that you really want it. Their recruiters frequently won't tell you what's going on; weeks of radio silence is the norm with them, missed interviews on their side, last-minute re-schedules, long delays and dropped balls everywhere. Then you'll get a rejection with no clear reason, and they'll encourage you to try again, even setting up another interview 6 months down the line "when you're ready" (basically, after you've studied how to pass the Google Trials). They now have a standardized salary for all new employees, and in the end they make their money selling ads. Once you do get hired, you'll be doing Orkut support or Google Apps password resets. They have tons of crazy over-qualified engineers working on basically oiling the gears of the advertising money machine. You could try to do something very impressive (on the surface) to get promoted to middle management, then never get the chance to maintain it...this is a big part of why so much stuff they launch doesn't improve beyond v1 and just gets shut off a couple of years later.

Spot on. It is amazing that after 20 rounds of interview, you get a generic rejection email "We have decided to not move forward at this time, although we liked your profile blah blah blah". If I recall correctly, Google actually started this trend of over interviewing. I remember my friends started bragging about how they got a job after 17 rounds at Google, or how they cleared 22 rounds, but were rejected at the 23rd round. I wonder if this is truly about weeding out or just that no one wants to make a decision and just punt the ball to someone else.

It's the generic rejection email without feedback that's particularly egregious. If there's such an issue about not provided feedback, b/c mythical litigious rejected candidates would sue b/c of alleged discrimination, then someone should try to fix that. Institute some sort of legal disclaimer that allows candidates to receive feedback if they promise not to sue.

Yeah, the more that I hear about interviews at the Big Four, the more I'm glad I've stuck with smaller companies and startups. My experience has been so much better and I've learned tons from having to be more bootstrapped.

Meanwhile, family and friends that are traveling nurses (ie a job that ACTUALLY effects life and death) have 1 phone interview with a hiring manager that can last 20 minutes to an hour. That's it.

Then they receive a decision within a week (though often within a day or two).

That is amazing. Would kill for an interview experience like that

Right? A family member was out with me at a wine tasting a year ago, stepped outside for 30 minutes to take a phone interview, and came back. She received an offer two days later.

I think it all boils down to being in a profession that's in very high demand.

Sounds like an escalation-of-commitment filter. It's like: Hey they made it through the interview gauntlet. Now we can really haze them!

The sort of person who wants to work at Palantir deserves this anyway, so score one for karma.

"Forward deployed enginnering role" - I so much laugh at this sales bullshine used these days in US by all marvelous super star human capital development managers (ie HR people).

P.s. Its dreaded ordinary support, for anyone curious.

The rumor is that Palantir kind of sucks and the only reason most people are sticking it out is the hope of an IPO soon-ish.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Palantir-Technologies-Revi...

Wow yeah. These Glassdoor reviews look terrible.

"Cons Very immature staff, no work life balance if you're a bit older than a recent college grad."

"The company also suffers from systemic poor leadership, which creates a political, distrusting environment that said leadership refuses to believe exists. This isn't necessarily a dealbreaker though, just something to be aware of. I ranked culture & values low, because while Palantir has a great cultural manifesto, it's almost 100% not reflective of conditions inside the company."

"Cons - Low pay + illiquid equity = Don't plan to stay here if want fair wage at silicon valley - Expectation for work-life imbalance - Great place if you are a fresh grad, not so if you are progressing in your career"

Looks like they're another company that thrives off of soul-sucking fresh college grads. Disgusting.

Palantir tried to recruit me a while back before Peter Thiel came out as a Trump supporter. Their pitch is basically "work more for less pay!" hidden behind buzz-speak.

In this day and age, why is it that companies drag candidates that far along? For all the talk of a lack of engineers, you'd think companies would be a bit quicker about it.

When the startup I was working at went belly-up in July, I had to scramble for a position. There was one local I applied at, I had a handful of contacts at lean on the HR to fast-track me, etc. By the time they got back to me for a phone screen several months had passed and I found a good job with another company.

Having little understanding of HR practices, why is this?

"Better safe than sorry" is the enemy of efficiency. Jobs are more temporary than ever and many people who aren't high skill developers are scared of losing their positions. This has caused in my estimation less autonomy in the work place. Every decision no matter how small requires the sign off of an entire chain of command so that you might "cover your ass".

I would say in cases like that it's probably other people who also have little understanding of HR practices. I think the smartest thing my company did was hire a professional recruiter to supplement the HR team - she brought me on, as well as maybe 25% of this office, solo. She contacted me within about a day of me responding to a reasonably well written linkedin JD, stayed on top of me almost daily, and had sold me on the company, with an offer in hand, within 2 weeks of initial contact.

Just having someone who's job it is to recruit, and who's good at that job, can make a world of difference. I know a lot of startups just have the engineering manager or CEO themselves do it, which is a shame, because you can easily contract it out for something like a 10-20% finder's fee to a good recruiter/agency. Say what you want, there are good ones out there.

I know a few folks who work at Palantir, and when they do talk about work (not often) it sounds like every other company that does IT consulting. I also don't recall those folks complaining or even mentioning an overly arduous process for hiring, but I guess that doesn't mean there wasn't one.

Someone else mentions this, but it meshes well with what (little) I know about Palantir, and it sounds like this person interviewed with a bunch of different teams, because the recruiter thought they'd be a great fit for the company, but none of the teams were willing to pull the trigger. This is also a massive waste of time for the recruiter and the company, so they wouldn't do it unless they were convinced the candidate would (eventually) find a home.

Maybe the recruiter could have been more transparent about what was going on with the candidate, but those kinds of things happen everywhere, right? Again, nothing specific to Palantir, except maybe the fact that the candidate was willing to go even as far as they did.

IMHO they have a process problem. To my certain knowledge they haven't followed up and asked why when very very talented people have gotten so sick of the recruitment process that they have opted out. But if you don't take the trouble to figure out what is putting off such candidates your HR is messed up. It's a huge fail.

Economically speaking, for whatever pool of applicants that they treat this way, they will only get candidates who really want to work for them, and they will have their pick of those candidates.

I'm glad to read that the poster had already moved on.

What's the appeal of interning at a company like Palantir, especially merely as a "FDE"? It seems like if you're at that level there are way better opportunities out there for you.

Big dreams of being a government contractor?

It seems to me that they waste a lot of time (and money!) on these lengthy recruitment procedures. They could at least let the candidate have a roadmap so that he could decide right away if it's worth his bother.

Sure sounds like the recruiter is trying to find a team that wants the candidate.

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