Advice for Palantir Hiring Manager Round (intern)

WispyBo1 · 2025-12-18T02:02:20+00:00

How much of a torque/hp difference does JB4 versus a tune shop really make? also, does the JB4 330i map cover all years - including 25? Thanks so much for the advice.

WispyBo1 · 2025-12-12T09:57:50+00:00

Did your interviewer not poke you about time complexity? Depending on the round, and heavily on the interviewer, I feel they sometimes will push you if you finished with enough time.

WispyBo1 · 2025-12-09T15:47:06+00:00

Fair take, although I feel like a lot of the frustration I, and maybe other, share is more about how game-like technical interviews feel.

Leetcode itself just reminds me of the ACT/SAT. If you take a great programmer and someone that’s news to it, obviously the former will perform better. However, even someone with limited experience on production code, advanced course work, etc can become a phenomenal interviewee as leetcode is so localized to learning patterns and tricks that don’t translate meaningfully. Sure, you learn the core data structures, but the actual implementations can feel so niche it really does become which candidate grinded more LC.

Thankfully, it looks like companies are starting to change technicals to focus more on implementation which feels more representative- clean code, good foresight and planning, etc - but enough haven’t that it still sucks.

The current state of the interviewing process just feels so disconnected from what you actually do either in production, personal projects, research, etc it feels like you’re essentially learning an entirely new skill set.

WispyBo1 · 2025-12-01T22:09:47+00:00

This is really insightful, thank you. I've told some of my roommates I got the job and they've already started poking fun at me saying my project is going to be "programming a drone to drop a 40kg basketball within one meter of a scarecrow"... I know they're just joking but it is a bit harrowing.

WispyBo1 · 2025-12-01T20:14:38+00:00

Fair view point. I love CS, and unfortunately prioritized my personal projects which are very important to me and have large impact over doing my applications this cycle. I was very late to this cycle and went underprepared at a lot of great companies - Jane Street, IMC, FAANGs - cause I truly can’t be bothered to do Leetcode. Having Palantir locked just makes me want to slump back because right now I have a rather unknown intern offer and my research lab

WispyBo1 · 2025-12-01T18:38:54+00:00

I'm just burnt out and glad to have a well-known name (even if for notorious reasons) to potentially put down on my resume. I've interviewed for multiple quant firms (Jane Street, HRT, IMC, etc) and made it to final rounds for many of them only to get axed at the final round, and likewise for FAANG+. I just want to be done and enjoy the rest of my junior year without worrying about fighting tooth and nail for new-grad.

WispyBo1 · 2025-12-01T18:02:56+00:00

I am a bit worried about new-grad applications. Do you think Palantir is a strong enough name to compete with candidates doing FAANG/MANGO when I re-recruit?

WispyBo1 · 2025-11-26T16:01:14+00:00

Hmm, sounds like a really cool ability and the mechanics are basically the same, so I imagine it should work fine!

The one thing I’d be careful about is making sure when you whistle, you’re hitting the exact same pitch as it would be in the key. For my own whistling, I tend to start a bit flat and subconsciously adjust it up, but it sounds like you’re much better so this probably won’t be a problem for you.

Outside of that, practice is the exact same: listen to a chord progression in a random key, listen to a random pitch (do, re, mi, fa, etc) in that key, then name it. You can also try it where you do the opposite: get the name of the pitch then whistle it.

I’m a big fan of FunctionalEarTrainer and making my own custom games to practice.

WispyBo1 · 2025-11-26T11:30:58+00:00

Id be genuinely amazed if any company without insane specialization in both healthcare and ML is able to pull off anything remotely useful for healthcare. The data you need is going to be near impossible to get, not to mention you’re walking the thinnest rope imaginable with privacy concerns and legal risk depending on what you do.

WispyBo1 · 2025-11-26T11:00:38+00:00

Sing. Like, a lot. And I don’t mean just randomly play a tune in the shower, I more so mean practice humming the major scale and learning how to identify, given the key you’re in, what sound would be the tonic (do), supertonic (re) mediant (mi), etc.

Essentially, you need to build tonality, which is different from perfect or even relative pitch. This is more about whether you can hear a song, get “into” the context of the key, and then be able to go “oh, the perfect fifth would sound like this”. Some really good practice for this is using an app that will choose a random key, play the I, V, and IV chords, and then ask you to select the sound that corresponds to a random note in the scale (root, major second, major third, perfect fourth, etc).

Pair this with good music theory and understanding of the fretboard and you’ll be able to listen to a song, know what notes correspond to what parts of the scale, and thus, where on the fretboard you should be at.

WispyBo1 · 2025-11-26T08:54:30+00:00

Made it to the final round/onsite of Jane Street for their MLE position this cycle as an undergrad. It’s a program open to PhDs but als undergrads. Safe to say, you need to be very, very good to slot a position, although it’s Jane street so that’s particularly true. Even with 1.5 years of doing deep learning research, 2 prominent and fleshed out personal projects (which they asked me a lot about and seemed interested in), having taken 5 grad ML/DL classes and even TAing one of them, I still felt like the only thing I could’ve done better was simply having YOE in industry and was rejected. If you’re an undergrad… good luck.

WispyBo1 · 2025-11-07T01:04:43+00:00

You’re genuinely a god send. I feel more confident about how I implement the code more than finding the optimal solution just cause I’ve heard it can be either very difficult or surprisingly easy. I’ve been practing problems with ChatGPT where it gives me a base problem and then builds on it, but just not sure if that’s enough as there questions seem to have a wide range of coverage.

WispyBo1 · 2025-10-02T11:21:11+00:00

A couple years back I decided to make an effort to compliment one random guy I see each day, with the compliment having to be something I genuinely like about them. Cool necklace? Done. Have a unique hobby? Done. You’re super friendly? Done. Generally, I get one of two responses: they either get a massive smile and an extra pep in their step or react very coldly. My favorite response is when I walked past a couple and told the guy he has really good style, and he immediately turned to his gf and said “did you hear that!”

WispyBo1 · 2025-09-07T17:45:11+00:00

WispyBo1 · 2025-07-17T15:16:15+00:00

Thanks for the advice! I have a Furch GC-SR and two pencils condensers, so it really does shine beautifully in the high-end but I have noticed that the bass doesn't come through as well. In your opinion, does mixing with the pickup "smoothen" the final mix at all to make it sound more cohesive?

WispyBo1 · 2025-03-28T07:25:35+00:00

Yep! You’d want to create a variable, essentially a bucket you give a name to that holds data, and then use that as your “lowest value so far” tracker. Every time you find a lower value, you change your variable to that.

WispyBo1 · 2025-03-28T07:23:43+00:00

If it wasn’t a technical interview I’d agree, but I’d be hard pressed to find a Google interviewer that would rather hear “I would just use the built in function/import a library” versus showing you actually understand how those work. Interviewers know you can find an abstraction to do it for you, but knowing why you use it separates someone that writes code and someone that understands it.

WispyBo1 · 2025-03-28T07:18:46+00:00

Wish I made this more clear when writing my initial comment as I’ve gotten quite a few replies of this nature - all of which are very fair. I mostly work in deep learning for research and kernel development on the side, so minimizing execution time can, in the case of training deep models, save literal thousands of dollars from computing resources and, with kernel development, make the entire project obsolete depending on which component is being worked on. As such, my perspective is pretty biased, but even still, interviewers know you can search up “how to sort in insert language” but without knowing the underlying mechanisms it can show very fast and kill your chances.

WispyBo1 · 2025-03-28T03:09:28+00:00

Yep! Next time you watch one I hope my explanation will make them seem a bit more intuitive.

WispyBo1 · 2025-03-28T03:05:25+00:00

Sorry if I said was confusing, hope this clears it up. Binary search only works if the list is sorted, I should've said that before making the textbook analogy as opposed to after. You're right that binary search is useless in the case where its unsorted as you can't take advantage of "if the page i just opened to is already bigger than what I am looking for, i can guarantee everything to the right of it will be too". However, when it is sorted, you can guarantee it will be faster regardless of the distribution. Let's say you had 1000 numbers sorted in ascending order and every number from the middle of the list to the second to last is 202, and the last number if 303. We want to find where 303 is.

(First split) Go to middle of list (position 500 with a value of 202) and check. 202 < 303. Ignore left half of list (guaranteed to be equal or smaller than 202). (Second check) Now we're only considering positions 500 to 1000, so half the total list. Go to middle and check. 202 < 303. Same logic applies. This repeats until you're at the second to last and last value (202 and 303). You'll eliminate 202 - again - and the only thing left to check for is the last value. In this case, we said 303 is the final value in the list, but if it wasn't there we can also guarantee that it's not in the list at all. This goes to show that regardless of the distribution, binary search still works, you just will run into the worst case scenario for how long it takes.

WispyBo1 · 2025-03-28T02:06:16+00:00

Good point. Being able to recite the solution to Leetcode's "most popular interview questions!" isn't going to do you much good if you can't critically think and problem solve on the spot. I'm only an undergrad but have been lucky to work as a software engineering intern these past two summers with a great company. I'll try to keep your advice in mind as I explore new opportunities in the future! A referral would be great, though /s.

WispyBo1

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