Ask HN: Palantir or Facebook?

[Soupy]

Hey everyone,

I know this may come off as kind of an odd question but I am truly very confused and stressed and would love to hear your opinions. I am deciding between an internship with Palantir or Facebook and cannot bring myself to decide. I was hoping to get some insight from those of you who are more hooked into the startup scene in the Valley to shed some light and your opinions on these two companies. I am an upperclassman CS major so really what I am looking for in the internship is a chance to learn new technologies and skills and to network with people in the startup industry.

Right now I feel like I am more passionate about the work that Facebook is doing but I feel that I would learn more and gain a bigger network at Palantir, given that is has only 300 employees vs. Facebook's 2000. My dream is to one day create my own startup (possibly right out of college), so I feel like this is an important aspect to consider.

Should I even be worrying about these factors at this stage? Am I just overthinking this decision? I really appreciate any insight that you guys can give me on this.

[regs]

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

[mkross]

Minor nitpick: I graduated in Dec '09 and came back to Palantir in Jan '10. After working on interesting problems and writing stuff that people not only use, but are willing to pay for, I was hooked. School, by comparison, was a lot less interesting and probably less useful.

[nostrademons]

Do you want to do a consumer startup or an enterprise startup? That's the obvious dividing line between them. FaceBook will prepare you to do a consumer web startup, because that's what they are, 6 years down the line. Palantir will prepare you to do an enterprise startup, because that's what they are, 6 years down the line.

Ignore everyone who says that FaceBook will look better on a resume: that's only true if you work outside of the valley, and you don't want to start a tech startup outside of the valley. Among people who matter (investors and key early engineers), Palantir's reputation is at least as good as FaceBook's.

Smaller company doesn't necessarily mean you'd learn more. Interns learn a shit ton at Google, with its 25,000 employees, and I think you'd learn a lot at both FaceBook and Palantir. The important variable here is how flat and open the internal culture of the company is. There are startups where you have 10 people but the CEO never tells you a damn thing, and then there's Google where you have 25k people but full-timers can access just about everything (and even interns have pretty broad access and get exposed to a wide variety of technologies).

Really, I think the biggest decision is consumer vs. enterprise, and I don't think you're equipped to make that until you've worked for both (that's what internships are for :-)). Personally, my first job out of college was a startup that sold enterprise software very similar to Palantir's to hedge funds. I hated it - I wanted nothing to do with the financial industry, I found the enterprise sales cycle to be capricious and demoralizing, and I didn't like the feeling that we were beholden to a few very powerful and questionably moral customers. I wanted to do consumer stuff, and I'm much, much happier now that I'm at a consumer company. But I have friends that have gone the other way: they felt that consumer stuff was frivolous and mundane, and liked the algorithmic challenges of building industrial-strength software for very wealthy enterprises.

[kes]

I'm going to disagree with the people on this thread and vote for Plantir.

It is cool to say that Facebook is doing 'world-changing' and 'revolutionary' things -- while I believe such is true on some levels and that we can't ignore what it is -- but a company like Plantir has a much better opportunity to do things that are simply mind-boggling.

Finance and the Government are not popular things, especially amongst the hacker crowds, but the US Government is capable of doing incredible things. The power wielded by the State is huge, and directly affects hundreds of millions of people a day. Facebook may have become a staple in some peoples lives but they [as a company] are not responsible for keeping citizens safe, regulating commerce, building infrastructure, waging war or brokering peace.

Facebook is a company that finds better ways to serve up advertising. That's not all they do, but that's how they make money.

Plantir is in a unique position to change an increasingly inefficient/ineffective system. US politics suck right now. We can all agree on that. But a company like Plantir operates on a different level than the fork-tongued politicians.

You say: network with people in the startup industry and create my own startup which tells me (and I might be wrong, please correct if so) that you enjoy the idea of disrupting the status quo. What better place to do this than Big Government and Big Business/Finance? This might seem backwards but as these institutions crumble at their seams there is no better place to be.

[catch23]

I'm going to have to disagree with your disagreement.

If you want to get into startups with enterprise customers, then maybe palantir is the right choice, but otherwise you'd learn a lot more about customer acquisition at facebook since there are probably a few hundred startups that all use facebook for customer acquisition.

I also don't see how palantir makes the US government more efficient -- they're mostly a big data mining company. They make fancy predictions which help locate terrorists, allocate finances, and other cool things, but the only thing that will make politics efficient are effective politicians. Data mining won't mash out all the filibusters that happen at the house.

I would say if you want to learn about data mining and machine learning techniques, palantir is the right choice.

If you want to do a startup later, facebook is the right choice. Facebook tends to buy out many small startups, so there will be many at that company who have the same mindset as you do. This is important should you decide to look for cofounders who have the same startup passions. I can't really think of any startups acquired by palantir.

I'll also mention that it's easier to placate investors if you tell them your startup team consists of ex-facebook or ex-google employees. A startup with ex-palantir employees just doesn't have the same homerun ring to it, and when investors are making that gut judgement call after looking at 2 slides from your 5 minute pitch, they're going to go with the team with ex-facebook employees.

[toadstone]

What are you talking about? Palantir isn't reinventing government or finance, they are making extremely niche data analysis tools for the intelligence services and trading tools for wall street. If those institutions crumble, Palantir has no customers.

[CoreDumpling]

My dream is to one day create my own startup (possibly right out of college)

Be careful with who you say this to. Although this probably won't be a problem with an internship, an employer may be reluctant to consider someone who demonstrates a lack of commitment.

I was told of a student who said to one of his interviewers at Electronic Arts that he "wanted to be the next Jenova Chen." (Jenova Chen left EA to found thatgamecompany.) Needless to say, the interviewer was not amused.

[_delirium]

Games is a particularly odd area because the big companies actively don't want designer/entrepreneurial type of people much. Everyone wants to be a game designer, but realistically, EA needs like a dozen top-level game designers, a few dozen designers of subsystems of games, and a whole hell of a lot of programmers, artists, and testers. They want to hire the next "pumps out thousands of lines of animation code", not the next Will Wright, because there isn't really any advancement path within the company to move up to be the next Will Wright, and if you hope there is, you're likely to be disappointed (or leave). Exceptions for a very few areas, which are usually direct hires by important people; e.g. Will Wright himself likes to hire a few, often junior, people to help him design and prototype his games. But a normal EA recruiter is not hiring for that kind of job.

I get the feeling that the situation isn't as skewed at many other tech companies; e.g. Google doesn't feel threatened by people with entrepreneurial / run-your-own-project kinds of instincts, and tries to channel them where possible. Also, when my brother got hired at nVidia, the recruiter actively was trying to sell him on the idea that nVidia was a great first company to have on his resume. Followed up with the usual we-hope-you'll-stay, etc., but didn't have any illusions about the fact that the kinds of people they want to hire often plan to move on or found startups, and that's fine.

[sp4rki]

Jesus you shouldn't even have to ask this question. Facebook all the way. It not only carries more weight, but you're more likely to work with new cutting edge tech. Remember Palantir is mainly a Java shop in the finance and gov sectors, while Facebook is the "next big thing", just like Google was.

[nostrademons]

Among highly-skilled engineers in the valley (i.e. the ones who'd be working at FaceBook/Palantir/Google), Palantir is at least as highly regarded as FaceBook, and quite possibly moreso. They aren't all that well-known outside of the valley, because they do enterprise software, but the caliber of their engineering team is pretty legendary.

[colinsidoti]

Between your current two, I would say Facebook because it sounds like you'll enjoy yourself more there.

That said, you also say: "My dream is to one day create my own startup (possibly right out of college)"

In that case, I would recommend a funded startup with something on the order of 5 employees. I've never worked at a larger company so I can't bash them, but I could say my experience at a small company still in "startup mode" helped me tremendously with my own startup.

[jchonphoenix]

I'm in a similar situation that you are in. The pros and cons I currently see.

Both:

Have a great company culture. Have awesome smart, employees and have interesting problems to work on.

Facebook: Is a rather large company now so you won't learn as much. It does have extremely interesting problems though and does have smart people so you will learn a lot. However, facebook is most likely overvalued, so if you join facebook, it is highly unlikely you will get rich off of the stock.

Palantir: Has one of the most excellent engineering teams I have ever met. They have the best team I have seen in terms of algorithmic problem solving ability. They have an awesome company culture and great perks. Whereas facebook is the current hot place to work, I could see Palantir being the next hot place to work.

The one major downside of Palantir is that they work on enterprise software and thus, the product isn't as cool to the general consumer. Most of the people on this thread have no real idea what Palantir does and just assume that since they work for the government, their work isn't interesting. You'll have to deal with this because truthfully, their work isn't well understood and isn't as sexy as facebook.

[bwh2]

I would choose Facebook simply for name recognition. Having Facebook on your resume would carry more weight with many potential employers and partners.

[eugeneiiim]

This is like telling someone 3-4 years ago to work at Google instead of Facebook. The people who joined Facebook then, before the brand carried any weight, came out way ahead.

[CPops]

Unless there's an overwhelmingly great reason to go with another one, I would get Facebook on my resume and set myself up to easily get jobs for life.

[bkrausz]

Palantir stock at the point will be worth a lot more given a likely exit scenario.

Also, they don't ice each other. Gotta be a plus.

[andrewacove]

> My dream is to one day create my own startup (possibly right out of college)

If you're going to start your own right out of college, the most important thing will be having people to do it with you. You'll get great work experience at either company. Go to the one where you think you'll be able to make more, stronger connections with other interns. Leave your internship with a list of potential cofounders. I'd probably choose Facebook based on the number of interns, unless you think that culturally you'll bond more with the people that Palantir attracts.

[white_knight]

They are both really good companies, and I've met really sharp people at both. Palantir's mission is pretty exciting and their employees are generally quite passionate about it, while with Facebook you can say "I work at Facebook." Both companies will treat you very well and I bet you will have a good experience at both.

While your grandmother may never have heard of Palantir, anyone in Silicon Valley who isn't living under a rock has. If your goal is to experience a more startup-like culture, between the two I would go with Palantir given its size and potential.

[endtime]

>I am more passionate about the work that Facebook is doing

Well, there's your answer. You're not going to be constrained by working at a company with ~2500 employees.

[nphase]

Very surprised nobody has mentioned this: A Facebook internship, if converted into a Facebook job, can be extremely valuable if/when they IPO.

Of course, money isn't everything. Palantir has some extremely smart people (two of my friends work there, and I have a ton of respect for them), and seems to move at a pretty quick pace. Going there could be very interesting from both an experience and an ops perspective.

[eugeneiiim]

See the Quora question "Why would an engineer want to work at Palantir instead of Facebook / Google / Twitter?": http://www.quora.com/Why-would-an-engineer-want-to-work-at-P...

[bool]

PalantirTech.com or Palantir.net? Two very different companies...

In 5 years, would you prefer to say:

I worked at Facebook for 5 years. or I worked at Palantir for 5 years.

Plantir doesn't have the same brand recognition as Facebook. I personally think Facebook will look better on a resume.

[dzlobin]

I vote palantir; I have a friend who works on the finance engineering team and he loves it. If you want me to put you in touch, let me know.

[Sean97]

Go facebook it has so many people using it