A New Hope - Reflections After My First Two Years in Tech

I recently left Palantir, and spent my first two and a half years after graduating from college there. Some of the most useful lessons I learned had nothing to do with the work itself.

Palantir is one of those unique places where you are given ownership of a project on day one. You are put on a very small team, you work with a very focused customer, and you really live and breathe forward deployed all the way through. But given that level of ownership, you don't necessarily understand how the world around you works. You become an internal missionary. You put all of your eggs in one basket for a customer and try to do extremely well, but you don't understand the greater, almost shadowy, hierarchy that surrounds you.

Many companies claim to have a flat corporate structure and I do believe Palantir meets that claim fairly well. There is much opportunity and the environment feels open. You can learn from people who are more tenured, grab coffee with anyone, and have visibility across the entire organization. At the same time, as a missionary within the organization, you don't learn how to play the game unless you come from a school or background where you've already been exposed to it. In college, I was quite heads-down and didn’t get involved in the circles and clubs to learn early. So the past two years in tech have been eye-opening.

Here I have broken down five things I have learned and reflected on from the past two years: in summary, the realities of what it takes to give yourself the best opportunities to learn, advocate for yourself, and push yourself into positions of higher ownership and growth while still being kind.

1. Finding the right person

Finding the R2-D2 to your C-3PO - an unlikely pair working together.

The first part is finding the right person. As a concept, it's quite ingenious, and I think Palantir positioned itself for success partly because of it. Internally, we have concepts called Deltas and Echoes: pairs within the company that work very, very closely together. Delta is your conventional FDE title. Echoes are what we hired as deployment strategists. But at the end of the day, you're both forward-deployed engineers with different spikes. Some are more technical, some less. Some are better with customers, some not. Some are great at organizational things, PMing and operations. You're basically operating like two co-founders within the enterprise of Palantir.

During my two years at Palantir I had a great partner. We worked very well together and became friends outside of work as well. Finding the right person, someone who pushes you, makes you learn, and increases your drive to perform and win the customer you're working on, is extremely important. That sort of relationship means you're both in it together, working toward something. When I interned at Palantir, there wasn't really a concept of this. But coming back, I noticed that people with a stronger partnership quite often outperformed those who didn't have one with their pair.

Part of this is being introspective enough to understand what you have that the other doesn't, and what your partner has that you don't. It really is like founder pairing. My spikes at the time were technical execution: sitting down, getting the problem done, building the thing that has to get built regardless of the timeline or the difficulty. My partner's were operational and change management: how to think about the deployment and its scale, and how to get the valuable information from the users so we could build the right thing. Over time, because of how closely we worked, I learned a lot from her, and she learned a ton from me.

That introspection, understanding where you are, what skills you have, and where you lack, is necessary to grow and to start feeling comfortable in very uncomfortable situations. For me, that was initial conversations with customers, deployment scoping, and understanding requirements. After watching my partner do it a couple of times and practicing back and forth with her, I grew the ability to do the same and was able to lead those meetings on my own. That wouldn't have happened without two things: working with someone who had those skills, and understanding myself that this was something I should work on.

Which brings me to feedback and openness with your partner or teammate. It's essential for both of you to grow, and for the problem you're working on to succeed. How you perform is a reflection of both of you and the combined effort you've put in together.

2. Finding the right mentor(s)

Yoda vs Palpatine - a disciplined, honest mentor vs the one who uses Anakin.

The next is finding the right mentors, which may seem straightforward, but isn't really. During my time at Palantir and previous internships, I realized mentors come in all shapes. Many look out for you. Many don't. And some look out for their own self-interest and can easily take advantage of you. Identifying the difference matters, because it shapes not only your growth within a company but also how you grow outside it.

One figure who may end up in your vicinity is someone who's interested in you only out of self-interest. You can identify these people because they're quite strategic, even manipulative, in the way they lead or mentor. They often won't be involved in your day-to-day, until it's time to present something to someone of tenure or greater importance. Suddenly they want to know everything you've been working on so they can speak to it themselves. After the meeting, they'll give you a pat on the back and say you did a great job. But in reality, you never got to present your work or speak to the effort you put in, and the other person has taken a lot of credit for it. These people aren't mentors. To them, people are agents who execute tasks, not mentees to connect and grow with.

The best mentors are selfless. If you walk up and say, "Hey, do you have five minutes?", they might look at their computer for a bit, then look at you and say, "Okay, what do you got? Let's talk about it." They might have twenty different things going on, but they'll still make five minutes for you. They might not be the loudest in the room, but they're definitely one of the smartest. They might not have a title, but their visibility runs across the org in many different forms.

3. Friendship vs. partnership

Han Solo in A New Hope - a rare instance of friendship of utility turning into virtue.

From the handful of times I read Aristotle back in college (UChicago required it for some Core classes), he describes three kinds of friendship. Friendships of utility exist because each person gets something useful from the other, friendships of pleasure exist because the company is enjoyable, and friendships of virtue exist because each person cares about who the other is for their own sake. I’ve realized most work relationships are friendships of utility. My mistake was treating them like friendships of virtue.

With the Delta and Echo pairs at Palantir, that closeness often forms friendships of virtue. But outside the pair, and at most institutions, not just Palantir, being someone who genuinely enjoys getting to know people can leave you exposed. You talk to people out of curiosity, a little naively, and assume they're doing the same.

The other person isn't always there for the same reason. Sometimes they want information, sometimes they're networking, sometimes it's a foot in the door. And sometimes the conversation simply stops once they've decided you aren't useful. When you've just graduated, anyone who's nice to you feels like a friend. But some people already know which of their relationships are virtue and which are utility, and they move between the two with ease. The problem is that you don't always know which one you're in.

The name for this is information asymmetry. Whoever knows more holds more power, and people who hold information others don't are more likely to bend the truth in their favor. Information about who’s leaving, which projects are getting attention, or what others think of you moves through tight networks, and the people who know how to use it tend to come out ahead.

It’s necessary to be careful about what you share and how you share it. Information is access, opportunity, and judgement. That doesn’t mean you should stop being open. It just means being more thoughtful.

4. Playing the game

Obi-Wan’s “from a certain point of view.” - convey the truth in a way others listen.

Every workplace has rules no one writes down. If you're a diligent, hardworking, and honest person, the unfortunate reality is you'll most likely do well at your job, but you'll look around and wonder why you're not doing better. You might be one of a handful of people left in the office at midnight, the lights on your floor clicking off row by row, while everyone else is out in New York with friends.

Early on, the heads-down approach works. You learn a lot, and in many ways you outperform. But eventually I realized the work doesn't speak for itself, and caring more doesn't mean anyone notices. I learned how this worked by being embedded in customer organizations, where the hierarchy was much more visible. I watched how decisions actually got made there, who people listened to, and how projects got pushed through. Without realizing it, I was learning how the game works everywhere else.

I still think it's important to be honest and hardworking, and those are the best types of people I’ve worked with. Advocating for yourself and speaking up can be hard to learn and hard to do. But it's needed if you don't want to get trampled in these environments.

5. Being kind

Luke in Return of the Jedi - refuses to give up on the good.

The last one is simply being kind. Kind people are sincere and they're kind because that’s who they are.

Early in your career, it's easy to get caught up in the chaos. Coffee chats and growing your network. Doomscrolling tech Twitter at midnight, reading about who raised what, who got promoted, who's building the next big thing. Polishing your LinkedIn, chasing the next shiny opportunity, and comparing yourself to everyone around you. Some of that is useful, and some of it is part of playing the game. But it's easy to mistake the noise for the work.

When you strip all of that away, what people remember is how you treated them. The best mentors I had weren't the ones with the biggest networks or the loudest takes. They were the ones who looked up from their computer and made five minutes for me. My best partnership wasn't built on strategy. It was built on two people who genuinely cared about each other and the problem in front of them.

Being kind is what lasts.

Luke leaves Tatooine taking everyone at their word. By the end, he’s lost a hand, learned some harsh truths, and seen how the galaxy and the people running it actually work. But he never stops believing in good and a hopeful future.

That’s the version of growing up I’d aim for: less naive, not less kind.