Palantir rejection and current motivations

One thing I learned this month, aside from the entirety of javascript.info and dozens of practice decomposition scenarios generated by Claude, is that I am absolutely horrendous at interviews. After my first interview with Palantir, I told people that it felt as if my brain operates at 75% during an interview, and after my second one the number dropped to 65. Truthfully, it’s likely lower and the significant drop in my chess.com rating this past month is a testament to that.

Granted, I wasn’t in “interview mode” when my process with Palantir began. I wasn’t looking, I had no resume, but out of the blue a childhood friend messaged me asking if I was interested in working there. I replied that “everyone I hate in politics, hates Palantir - sign me up” and from then began a month-long interview process which included arduous crash-preparation and reeling in my head post-interviews thinking of how bad it went.

I’m not going to go into detail about the process. But the first one was a technical debugging session, which I thought I bombed. I answered all the questions just fine but had made mistakes: The first five minutes I chased a wrong thread, I later implemented something that could’ve been done better, etc, etc. Yet to my surprise, I made it to the next round - decomposition. I spent the week leading up to it asking Claude to generate scenario after scenario with it acting as the interviewer. It was the only way I knew how to prepare, and I thought I was improving. Yet under the pressure of the interview I froze, and I couldn’t absorb the new case. The rejection email came the following day.

The rejection crushed me for several reasons. 1) I felt behind, and I never like feeling behind and 2) The more I thought about it, the more I wanted it. My goal is to eventually work for a defense-tech company, a field which Palantir is tangentially related to. No, a job at Palantir doesn’t guarantee that you’d be working with drones or submarines, and, yes, it’s possible and likely that I would have been deployed into some medical supply chain snoozefest, but it would have brought me closer to my goal.

So after that rejection I realized I needed to be better. Specifically: a real understanding of System Design, built through mini-projects. Building things purposefully wrong, evaluating why, and implementing the proper solution. This blog is my diary through that journey - posting my musings throughout and the created projects along with it. And you can absolutely expect those projects will be geared towards the defense-tech industry as well.

So - to motivations, purpose and the future:

Motivation - Rejection, and the feeling of incompetence

Purpose - Track my journey/thoughts/explorations as I submerge myself in system design and related areas

Future - Prior to this Palantir engagement, I’ve been studying for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate level exam for ~2 years now. Yes, 2 years. And it’s not that I cannot absorb the information. It’s that I can spend days with an AI fully understanding every nook and cranny of a topic, incapable of moving on until I have understood it all and taken notes on it. I’ve probably spent weeks going through BGP with an AI. So, my short-term goals that myself (and Claude) have set for me are as follows: two more months of studying with a target exam date of early November, while working on this website/blogging, while working fulltime, while exercising, while buying a condo in Fort Lauderdale with my boyfriend of three years, and, finally, while reading some of that system design book whose name I cannot currently recall but which everyone and their grandmother has read.

Long Future - Work on actual system design projects geared towards my desired industry

Long Long Future - Hopefully a job at a defense tech company, if I can somehow ever get my interview nerves under control

These will continue to be a really informal, vomit of the mind kind of posts. Expect grammatical mistakes and sentences that not of even an LLM can decipher. I’ll do my best, but I’m just writing what comes to my head.

Final thought — if your engineers are “forward deployed,” then they’re just consultants. Sorry, Palantir!