Palantir's 2016 Entry-Level Salaries and the Impact on the Software Engineering Job Market

In 2016, new graduates starting at Palantir Technologies typically had salaries ranging from approximately $100,000 to $120,000 per year. This range could vary based on factors such as the specific role location, candidates' educational background, and skills. Additionally, many positions offered bonuses and stock options, which could significantly increase total compensation.

Palantir Technologies Software Engineer Salaries

You can find a lot of useful information reported by employees of companies like Palantir on Glassdoor, including anonymously reported salaries. Here's a link to Glassdoor where I searched for a software engineer with 1 year of work experience. All you need is a job title, and you can do this yourself on Glassdoor too. Glassdoor Link

According to various reports, salaries can range between $130,000 and $150,000. If you are a new graduate and want a career in Data Science, Palantir may be the best place to start. Not only will you work with some of the coolest technology available, but you will also have a real impact on the world. From a career perspective, your time spent at Palantir will open doors for the rest of your life. I recommend that you take the job if they are pursuing you.

The Current State of the Software Engineering Job Market

Right now, the market for great software engineering graduates is fantastically good. A top software engineer from a top school can expect a base of over $110,000 per year, and I have seen much higher salaries. Other components of compensation, including stock, bonuses, and benefits, can push first-year compensation to over $200,000 — which is higher than it has ever been, even accounting for inflation.

One of the reasons new grad compensation is so high is that many new graduates today are better than they were in years past because so many of them started writing software at an earlier age and many have had some great summer internships during both their sophomore and junior years.

The Impact of the Changing College Recruiting Process

However, this does not account for the huge rise in compensation. In many cases, the cost of hiring a new graduate is MORE expensive than hiring someone with the same background but with three years of additional experience!!! The main reason for this is the change in the college recruiting process that has happened in recent years. Today, colleges are actively encouraging students to collect many offers before making a decision. In fact, some of the best schools like Harvard do not let any companies make offers that explode before December 1. If companies violate the rule, they get excluded from future recruiting on campus. That means that college students have ample time to collect offers.

For example, last year, Fall of 2014, six of the students I gave offers to had eight or more offers! Of course, when someone has multiple offers, the bidding for them increases dramatically. This is why software engineers with experience should quit their current jobs before looking for a new one. Doing so would significantly increase the chance of them finding the right job.

Recruiting Strategies for Start-Ups

If you are interviewing software engineers and you are a startup, you might not want to recruit out of college anymore. If a great software engineer out of college has 8 offers, and a great software engineer with three years of experience has just three offers, and they are the same price, it is going to be a much better use of your time to focus on the software engineers with experience. This is because, 1 the more offers someone has, the more likely they will reject your offer. 2 you will have a higher likelihood of wanting to give an offer to a resume with more experience, everything else being equal. So that means you and your other employees will have to spend WAY more time interviewing college seniors than if you focused on more experienced engineers.

And if you add in the cost of your time interviewing, the cost of a new grad now significantly exceeds one with experience. Of course, if enough people follow this strategy, the price of college graduate software engineer relative to one with a few years of experience will fall to more historical levels, and then it might be a good time to focus on college grads again.

Conclusion

All this said, it is not a good strategy for a new grad to optimize for compensation. In fact, if you do have eight offers, I would advise as a simple heuristic to not take the highest compensated offer. Instead, you should be optimizing for growth and should try to not consider compensation as part of the criteria, especially for your first job.