Purpose, autonomy & mastery - Forward Deployed Software Engineer Palantir Technologies Employee Review

Hyper intelligent people, interesting problem sets, amazing technology, three meals a day, flexibility

Pay is below market, workload is exceptionally high

- Most talented, smart and industrious group of people I've ever worked with. Unfortunately, smart people can be easily deceived.

If you are in Business Development (BD) - i.e. Delta or Echo - this job will be your life. They deliberately underhire - they claim it's to maintain the culture, but really it's to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of you. You are thrown into chaotic situations with no way out but to "chew glass and excrete product". Don't let the flat heirarchy and encouragement of confrontation / open debate deceive you. Karp has majority founder shares and calls the shots. The company is a dictatorship, not a democracy. Resourcing is a black box. If you are a U.S person without a clearance, you will be bait-and-switched into defense even if you thought you could avoid it. With clearance, you'll end up on something much worse. Trust your gut - the company's leadership are not wise, nuanced philosophers - they are spineless, shifty edgelords with no ethical red lines. As a FDE, you will spend half your time working around stupid limitations in the platform you could not foresee when making grand promises to the customer. Foundry is not a cutting edge product, just like Microsoft Suite is not a cutting edge product. Its just too broad for any other company to easily copy it. Palantir just brought middle-of-the-road Silicon valley tech to old-school government, slapped some AI integration onto it and shrouded it in a veil of mystery to make it seem cool and mysterious and appeal to retail investors.