

Ask HN: Amazon or Palantir? - nargles

Hey HN,<p>I'm deciding between an internship with Palantir or Amazon and I've been going crazy trying to decide which experience would be better. I was hoping to get some help from anyone who knows more about Silicon Valley than I do(I'm an East coaster). This will be my last internship before I graduate so I'd like to intern at a company where I'll learn a ton of new stuff.<p>I'm currently leaning more towards Palantir because I think they make some extremely interesting software but I feel like I might learn more at Amazon because they are so much bigger. I have friends that work at Amazon as well. They're both big Java companies so that doesn't help my decision either.<p>I'd really love any and all info you guys have that could make my decision clearer. 
Thanks
======
johnyoh
I have worked fulltime for both Amazon and Palantir and interned at Amazon
during college. Amazon is a good place to learn new things, but you don't get
to choose what team you are on or what projects you work on, and it is hard to
make an impact there or really innovate. It is a large company, and you
definitely feel that.

At Palantir there is a big opportunity to innovate and write something
impactful right away. Productivity is much higher and there is much less
internal friction in the company so you can be much more agile. Your peers at
Palantir are going to be rockstars, so you never have to feel like you are
picking up slack, and you will always have more to learn from them.

One anecdote of how fast you can innovate is my intern last summer. He
singlehandedly wrote a tool that was deployed to production in one summer and
worked with one of our designers to make it one of the most polished features
we have. I can't go into detail about the project here, but if you contact
whoever extended you your Palantir offer, they will be able to put you in
touch with former interns.

------
relaunched
Congrats!!!Both companies are very prestigious and anyone would be lucky to be
at either. They couldn't be in more different spaces, but both have some very
interesting problems to solve, with overlapping technologies, in some places.

I'm assuming you are some flavor of software engineer. If so...I'm sure either
company would put you in a great position 3-5 years from now, technically.
Palantir has more upside, in terms of market cap, which is to say they are
less mature. However, Amazon trades a ridiculous premium, and if anyone
deserves it, they do (40-50% rev growth at their size, for 10+ years).

However, you can do anything within Amazon and, personally, I find it more
interesting to work on products / projects I'm interested in. I don't know if
that's a concern for you.

Have you visited both places? If you don't mind Seattle, SLU is the city that
Amazon built.

If it was me, I'd pick Amazon.

