You hear quite a bit about Bay Area companies paying top dollar for fresh CS graduates from top ranked schools. I wonder what compels a Stanford CS grad to take a job doing non-exciting work with a company that prides itself on paying below market rate.
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.
I had a similar experience as well. They put me in a very fancy hotel and let me charge anything to the room (don't worry, I absolutely did take advantage of this). On top of that, they sent an S550 to pick me up on the day of the interview...
McKinsey flew me and a few other fresh grads to Dubai for a week because I was helping run the entrepreneurs society. 5* hotel, mock case study for 1/3 of the time and the rest tourism.
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.
> 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.
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?
Data privacy issues can keep head hunters from accessing such databases. Secondly, many, many recruiters (and consultants, too) are given company e-mail addresses to give the appearance of being an employee but are actually contractors that might as well be external recruiters.
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.
I agree they they spent a ton of money on recruiting, but many of my interview questions were absolutely terrible trivia questions. They were strictly questions that had a single answers regarding knowledge of shell command line functions. Not familiarity with usage, like when to use grep or ps aux, but things like how do you unzip and search with 5 keystrokes (zgrep)? For a new grad, it was a complete waste of time.
Right. As soon as I hear mission statement bullshit from a company, I plot the mental exit strategy. Amazing how those Jedi mind tricks work on the supposedly "best and brightest". I could see it working for a cancer research or fusion energy team, but work focusing clicking on ads or spying on people as a mission is bullshit that you cant polish from my perspective.
It helps that their primary competitors are explicitly about selling ads.
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.
* 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.
In a tiny fraction of the schools. I hadn't even heard of them while working in a top research university at the time (this was Europe so maybe I was just missing out on a SV circle jerk).
In Silicon Valley, European schools aren't really considered among the top 10 engineering schools. I'm not saying that's right, just telling you what the perception is.
There's a reason Google has an absolutely massive office in Zurich. Anecdotally, some of the sharpest Googlers I have ever collaborated with are in Zurich.
People in SV probably have heard of it, but don't know it well enough / haven't interacted with its graduates much. Same for Cambridge/Oxford (except that everyone has heard of them).
True, but the number of non-us schools that any American in computer science can name tops out at like 20, and that's only if they've been grad school or recruiting long enough. Let's see how I can do at naming perceived good foriegn schools. I'm not going to google anything, so the any misnaming is an accurate representation of the data in my head. These are listed in no particular order.
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.
I will say that, at least in CS academia, everyone has heard of IIT / Tsinghua, because it feels like 30+% of the PhD students came from there, so they are certainly held in high regard by CS people.
ETH Zurich is in Switzerland, not Austria, and "the one in Lausanne with the french name" is Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the other Swiss federal institute of technology.
I think it's more that they're considered impossible to judge, and so they kind of get passed around with a blank "Hey, have you ever heard of this place?" Ironically, I think you do better if you're from China. There's enough Chinese immigrants to educate you about Chinese engineering schools. Europe is just too diverse to build up this
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.
The offer letter includes the stock/salary options based off of the current and projected valuation of the company. It's hard not to be impressed when you see the eye-popping values of stock options after they vest (4 or 5 years).
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.
I think Palantir has been overtly committed to avoiding an IPO for a while.
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.
It's the ability to do board-sanctioned sales of stock to buyers. It's basically an equity follow-on sale to previous investors (or new investors if there's a round concurrently underway).
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.
Do you regret not taking that job? (Granted it's hard to answer without having all the information available, such as how happy you would've ended up being there over the past five years.)
Yes and no, I chose not to take the job since my spouse didn't want to relocate to Virginia from central Maryland. The job I had at the time was fantastic as well. I have no doubt the position I would have fulfilled at Palantir would be intellectually challenging and rewarding. The salary was also competitive for the DC area (not at all for Palo Alto).
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.
Oh, similar story! I used to live in Montgomery County, and I interviewed with Palantir precisely because it was a top-tier tech company that I wouldn't have to move for (albeit the commute wouldn't have been amazing). I didn't take interview preparation seriously though and flubbed the interview, so nothing came of it. I did end up relocating to NYC to work a different top-tier tech company that has an engineering office here but not really one in DC.
I've basically taken every good job offer I've had in my life, and I haven't regretted one jump.
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.
Maybe it's the code names?