Engineering Culture

Engineer as Artist

“It’s the only job I can think of where I get to be both an engineer and an artist. There’s an incredible, rigorous, technical element to it, which I like because you have to do very precise thinking. On the other hand, it has a wildly creative side where the boundaries of imagination are the only real limitation.”

Andy Hertzfeld, on programming

Palantir is a company built by engineers. We are solving problems in the abstract, crafting software that solves a whole class of problems rather than operating a website. It’s software written without a priori knowledge of what it will be used for. Working on this sort of problem leads to an interesting outcome in team self-selection: we’ve attracted a team of engineers who like doing their own product management. Our engineers (and this includes interns) are problem-solvers and solution designers not just specification implementers.

At Palantir we believe that product management is best done by engineers. We know that this is a departure from the way things are done in other places but it’s a system that works and has produced the software that you see today. We work in small functional teams composed of software engineers, quality assurance engineers, and documentation specialists. Our teams have full ownership of what they’re delivering, from imagining a solution, communicating the design and specifications, building, and ultimately shipping the feature they’re responsible for.

So the upshot is that our engineers get to really spread their wings and act as architect, hacker, and artist. It’s a fulfilling way to work and we believe that our results speak for themselves.

The Foundations of our Culture

We’re certainly proud of the culture we’ve built at Palantir – it’s an amazing place to work. We love formal systems, so let’s think of the culture in terms of axioms:

The best idea wins
Nothing is permanent
Keep focused on the mission

The best idea wins

“There are no prima donnas in engineering.”Freeman Dyson

It doesn’t matter if you’re a director who’s been with the company since the early days or an intern starting your first project – we hire people to have an opinion and be creative. We’re intolerant of politicking, ego, and power brokers. If your idea makes the most sense, that’s what we’re doing, regardless of the seniority or role of the person presenting the idea.

Nothing is permanent

“Successful software always gets changed.”Frederick P. Brooks

Inventing the future requires detaching yourself from the past. While we ship a couple of polished product families, we’re just getting started when it comes to building the full ecosystem of technology we’ve imagined. As a result, the best idea today will not be the best idea tomorrow.

Since we use iterative development to learn more about the problems we’re solving, components are supplanted by new, better solutions as they become apparent. For the people that have built the thing being discarded, this is a cause for celebration not sadness. Replacement is viewed as success: that component did its job of getting us to the next plateau of functionality and design.

Keep focused on the mission

“The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.”Fredrick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man Month

Our work is incredibly complex, touching on almost all areas of computer science, data science, and software engineering. It would be easy to get distracted by some cul-de-sac of development and spend way too much time and resources on perfecting something that’s good enough already.

We view software as a means of affecting change in the world, not as an end unto itself. Our mission is to help our users, the people doing the hard work on complex, real world problems. It’s true that we do this by writing software, software that enables effective data analysis against complicated, data-driven problems.

By staying focused on the problems our users are trying solve, it clarifies our thinking on the right way forward.