Comment by 7urk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 7urk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Disclaimer: I'm a student at MIT

Here's a company employment dataset from the University of Waterloo showing where students go from one internship to the next: https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~vlyubine/co-op

In this dataset, ELO is employed such that companies earn points if they "beat" another one, which loses points as a result. That is, if someone hops from Company A to Company B, Company A earns points and Company B loses some.

Among Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., it was found that Palantir was the only company that never lost a student to another one. If you go to the companies dataset here and sort by ELO: https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~vlyubine/companies

You'll note that the rankings are: 1. Palantir Technologies 2. Twitter 3. Facebook 4. Google 5. A9.com

It appears that Palantir also beats out fellow big corps as well. I think the consensus among Ivy leaguers I know and Stanford/Waterloo is that Palantir's strict hiring criteria and unique culture make it the newer Google of today.

Palantir though in my opinion is kinda like a cult. I visited their offices (sick by the way), and they all had this mentality like they were the Seal team 6 of developers. The do not even call their devs devs, they call them "forward deployed engineers" or something like that. They all had "Go bags" from the Red cross to contribute to this allure. They have all 3 meals cooked there, DJ booth, rooftop parties in evenings, free gym membership down street, and unlimited vacation time*

To me it seemed as if the employees lived there practically. I wonder what would happen if you tap into that vacation time when the other guy is working 14 hrs a day with no time off. They also have a salary cap that is BELOW wages at other high tier employers. Again sickest office I have ever seen but it seems that they attract employees due to their "exclusivity" and great office. They are very successful recruiting young college grads due to this but I suspect when they get a bit older they will realize that the salary and interesting work are more important than a swank office they want you to live in.

If you start thinking of Palantir as an consultancy agency that specializes in identifying, recruiting, motivating, then caring for software engineers who are contracted out to MNCs/NGOs while mimicking the intelligence community and defense industry culture--indirectly also a context to their company mission to motivate themselves--as a means of marketing and securing their services for said contracts then it will all be clear.

Err...

Although I do not work at Palantir, the work is the main reason people go there over $BIG_CORP. Government intelligence and anti-fraud problems are far more interesting than the work that FB/GOOG seem to offer to new grads these days.

Also, as far as I heard, the salary cap is now gone as of this year.

Yeah, what more fulfilling job could one wish for than monitoring political dissent. /s

I had onsite interview with them (for software engineering intern position). I was rejected and their feedback was like that: your technical skills are very high but we are concerned that you wouldn't be passionate about our projects and clients. Actually their projects were interesting, I guess wasn't enthusiastic enough.

I still haven't shaken the image of Palantir as the outfit gunning for Wikileaks and building illegal surveillance equipment.

Shouldn't the comparison be intern to full-time hops, not intern to intern hops? Maybe some companies are more welcoming to younger co-op students.

I'd love to see this done on a bigger scale. Even just this limited subset is fascinating - poor Blackberry... :-(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com