regs

I’ve personally been in a room where you were very much not keeping quiet about it!

That's how they get you! (I used to run recruiting marketing there as a side job and good pizza was part of the playbook).

I don't think he missed the point. You should probably read all of this (which the Hole Hawg bit is an excerpt from) to a whole picture of this school of thought:

http://people.cs.georgetown.edu/~clay/classes/spring2010/os/...

Unlike a human, you can usually just reboot the computer and try again.

Could you cite some actual sources here?

Care to cite an example?

(I'm the author of that post)

Agreed on where the devil resides. I'm working on a follow up post that delves into that detail - it should be published in the next few weeks.

For the record, I'm not a recruiter (and was sad to see myself labeled as such). I've worked on the recruiting problem pretty extensively for Palantir, but I'm actually a software engineer. These days, my work tends towards writing about our technology and occasionally speaking in public but I'd hate to go down in history as a recruiter. (Not that there's anything wrong with recruiters).

... and, honestly? Not much has changed. The cultural zeitgeist of both SJ and SF are very much the same.

And to add to the point above, Yelp ratings are not well-normalized across markets. The things that people care about in the 'burbs is different than in the city and places get voted up or down for odd reasons.

For example, Joya in Palo Alto is a pretty amazing restaurant but only gets 3.5 stars. The Cheesecake Factory (which is a pretty crappy chain) gets a 5. This is not really good data.

Some of this list is just plain incorrect.

For example, Rangoon Ruby in Palo Alto is a pale imitation of Burma Superstar in San Francisco, a restaurant is openly models itself after.

Claiming that the best independent coffeeshop is in MV is really going out on a limb and ignoring the myriad of amazing coffee houses in SF - like Sightglass or Blue Bottle.

As someone who's lived in the city and in Sunnyvale and Palo Alto and Menlo Park, I pretty much agree with every that jwz has said and not much has changed.

It's true that there are some great places on the peninsula, but there's no critical mass. And often those places are in a strip mall and severely lacking in ambiance and atmosphere.

If you're working on a problem that you can solve alone, you need a bigger problem.

Have you considered that stable currency is a service performed by the government? Feel free to accumulate wealth, just don't use government backed currency.

A good complement to our other post last week, How to Rock an Algorithms Interview - http://blog.palantir.com/2011/09/26/how-to-rock-an-algorithm...

It was much cooler to be jaded about the interview process last year.

But in all seriousness, I'm sure there are companies like the one you described and there are many that aren't that way. I'm certain that your blanket characterization of 'the interview process, at least in Silicon Valley' being broken is incorrect.

You don't need to come up with weirder and harder questions. You just want to give them something in a form that they haven't seen before. It makes them listen and think, which is what you're looking for.

I always look at an interview to be more like a code review than a unit test: it's not about getting the right answer, it's how you get there that tells me what kind of an engineer you are. In fact, if you get the answer too quickly or jump to it, even if I don't think you're cheating, I need to ask another question or make you explain yourself in depth so I can probe how you got there.

You'd be surprised at what people will do to game an interview. I've had people give me the correct answer to a question I didn't ask (but from our list of questions) - clearly having gotten from someone else who had interviewed earlier.

Note that algorithms interviews are just one part of a larger inventory that one takes of a candidates, one dimension. Take home and/or whiteboard coding can be a part of that process as well, but each has its downsides.

What we look for, in particular, is methods that have a very low false positive rate. In person algorithm interviews, where the point is not the 'right' answer but hearing about how someone thinks are in that category. You can't really fake it.

I think you're correct that for certain types of apps, this sort of knowledge is pretty useless.

However, once the number of things you're dealing with gets up to, say, the millions, algorithmic complexity can really bite you in the ass and no matter how much hardware you throw at it (rented or otherwise), if the work that a single node needs to do is unreasonably complex, your whole app will be slow for every user, even if you have enough capacity to handle many simultaneous users.

In the mobile space, you can think of algorithmic complexity being a proxy for battery life - if you can make it cheaper to compute, you do less overall work, and the battery lasts longer.

Whoops - yeah, we're working on that problem right now - at the moment it's back up.

Fixed!

Dear Soupy,

You've certainly got quite a quandary on your hands. Having an offer from either place is a great opportunity, but I'd be happy to highlight some of the more unique aspects of a Palantir internship:

We do most of our product management as a distributed task across all of engineering. Rather than the traditional "product management tells engineering to implement this specification", we hand out problems to our engineers to solve. This means designing solutions to real world problems, writing specifications, and then implementing those solutions while giving guidance to QA on testing and to docs on training & documentation. This experience is what you will learn on your internship at Palantir - our interns sit on the engineering team as full engineers for the summer, working on the same pool of problems as the full-time engineers.

At the end of the summer, you will have learned to invent new technology, manage the product cycle, and translate requirements between cooperating teams - all useful experience for someone who wants to run their own company some day.

Some interns, however, have a very unique experience. Consider Michael Kross - he came to Palantir as a front-end engineering intern in the summer of '09. During the summer, he worked (alone, but with the original prototyper as a mentor) on building a fully-functional flows visualization to be used inside the Palantir Government platform. His work shipped as part of a regular release soon after he left for the summer.

But in June of '10, six months in to his tenure as a full-time dev and about a year to the day after his internship had originally started (he was a December grad), he had an interesting surprise: work that we had pioneered (including the flows tool) for recovery.gov in fighting fraud in the stimulus money was being applied to Medicare fraud. Vice-President Biden held a press conference where the flows tool was being used as the backdrop where it was announced that Palantir would be used to help reduce a $65 billion / year problem - not bad for a summer internship!

Finally, to address your thoughts on networking: you will have a great deal of visibility at Palantir, both in meeting people on other teams, working closely with the people on your team, and in being noticed. You'll have full access to the team of people that built the Palantir teams and products up from an idea to a shipping product and to the people that built the infrastructure to grow the company from idea to institution.

At the end of the day - you can’t go wrong quite honestly. We think Facebook has a great product, a great engineering team and respect their work tremendously. The key decider for me personally would be the type of problem you want to work on, how you perceive the impact of the work you’d be doing at each company and the size of the company you’d be joining and hopefully becoming a part of after you graduate. You’ll have a great time, learn a lot and be challenged in either environment.

Best of luck with your quandary,

Ari Gesher Senior Software Engineer - Palantir Government

My name is Ari and I'm a senior software engineer at Palantir. I was the second member of the Palantir Government backend team so I've been with the company almost five years. I've seen this place grow up around me.  To describe me a bullish about this place would be an understatement.  

I can categorically confirm that this is not BS: we don't have sales people, we don't have marketing people.  This doesn't mean that we don't have people performing those functions -- of course we do!  However, the people performing those functions are all technical folk who have stepped into the breach to do the needed work to grow our business.  As a commenter in the TechCrunch article mentioned, "I'm the founder at my startup.  Just because I sweep the floor sometime doesn't mean I'm the janitor."

I think what we said got a little garbled as it was distilled into the TechCrunch article.  When we said, "we have no sales people", what was meant was that we don't have people who know nothing about the product, worrying about their commission and their quota and adding essentially zero value to the process. The people who come up with our marketing messages are not people with marketing degrees -- they're engineers who intimately understand our technology and the benefits that it brings to our customers.

Even I've stepped up into that role: along with writing our backend data importer and authoring our XML formats and processing pipelines, I also run our college recruiting program, and write for and edit our tech blog .  Does that make me a recruiter or a blogger?  Not in the sense of the word that most people would use it.  I'm an engineer, proud of it and my technical achievements, and anyone who calls me otherwise better do it when I can't hear them. I'm an engineer that does recruiting and blogging, just like we have other engineers that do sales and marketing.

I look back over my time here and I marvel at the amazing place that we've built.  It's an engineer's fantasy land that really exists - I can only think that this is what Google was like, circa 2000.

But don't just take my word for it, come and check us out for yourself.  Shoot me an email to [email protected] and I'll set up a visit, a proper interview, or whatever is appropriate for your situation.

Palantir is hiring: https://www.palantir.com/careers/positions

I'll be the first to vouch for the fact that this is the most amazing place to work. Interesting technical work, huge impact on real problems in the world, great culture, talented coworkers, and stock options that mean something.