Ask HN: Palantir or Facebook?

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.

Really if you want to get into Palantir's industry, there is, of course, no better choice. But if you want to get your feet through the door, there's no better option than Facebook right now, and that has nothing to do with the quality of either engineering teams.

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.

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