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.
Also best/brightest worship needs to stop. It correlates to nothing. This coming from MIT/harvard grad.