It is a very interesting article, but I'm a little horrified at the amount of effort going into military projects to kill more efficiently.
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The employees seem to be laboring under the idea they're a family and the author sure seems to think so, but the 10% desired attrition rate and the weeks without sleep is really just an indicator they're expendable resources. They don't love you like that, man.
My experience with the latter is very outdated but assuming Andruil is at a similar phase of growth as Palantir was a decade ago, you pretty much nailed it
Someone correct me if I’m wrong:
Underpaid compensation, with a justification that they are only hiring people who are “mission driven”. Heavily military based culture with a “need to know” approach to projects and overreliance on acronyms to align thought. Perks are golden age startup perks with full meal service, massages, fitness classes, laundry because of you are looking for a 9-5 then this is not the job for you
One can also believe multiple things at the same time, like:
* Waging war is immoral
* If someone wages war on you, it's acceptable to defend yourself instead of allow them to kill you
* Enabling war for personal profit (by selling weapons) is immoral
* Making weapons for self-defense is acceptable
i.e. during WW2, many countries repurposed existing industry in order to build all the weapons that were needed to win the war. That's a very different thing from spinning up a new startup with the stated goal of making weapons to sell for money. You can personally think it's okay but it seems totally reasonable to me that someone would believe "weapons should not be manufactured for personal profit the way we manufacture toys or food".
Skipping your paternity leave to release a shitty SaaS for a startup is already dumb shit, but doing so for the US military is some sociopathic behavior.
Also, for all their jerking off: congrats, you reinvented Skunkworks. Inevitably, in a few years, Anduril will be captured by political interests greater than them, and will become the same kind of crap company that Lockheed Martin is. And the world will be better off knowing there's fewer people making things to bomb brown people.
(And before any "uuuh but what about ukraiiine" response: the US will. never. be. attacked. Its conventional force is plenty enough to threaten any adversary. You can relax, the Chinese aren't coming to conquer Alaska, put down the power armor)
Just woke up one day and thought fuck it and never went back in. Took 6 months off, went on holiday, slept on my parents sofa and eventually got a shit job wrangling C. Best job ever that was. Better money, unlimited decent coffee, 9-5 hours, a window, a phone on my desk and my own SPARCstation 20.
That doesn’t seem super fun to me.
Some projects are OPSEC-restricted, yes.
No massages, classes, laundry.
Many 9-5 people.
This has to be an FCC violation of some sort.
This just makes me so, so sad.
This person no matter what they may or may not achieve has all their priorities upside down.
America has, for decades, has been trying to bilk Ukraine into forgoing free Soviet surplus to buy NATO-standardized equipment, only to remotely disable their material while they're using it. Because America was so fickle in providing defense, we've guaranteed that all future peace treaties (eg. one in Ukraine) necessitates direct American intervention, and not vague "security" agreements. That's probably why Trump is brooding over his options right now instead of arranging a ceasefire - he can't get peace without trading away something absurd like US naval assets or direct satellite intel.
I’m sure it’s appealing to the Grunt Style vets and sweaty Call of Duty cosplayers they’re scooping up to build weapon systems.
That's what the Romans, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the British said. There's no need to attack an 'empire' that implodes from within.
1991-1994: They nuke Moscow.
1994-present day: American strategic deterrence takes over.
If any part of that is unclear to you then I urge that you reread the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances and return to the discussion with the rest of the context.
Anduril does not manufacture strategic deterrents. If you think they're the solution to the Budapest Memorandum then you're the sort of armchair YouTube General that the Army filters out in officer school. It's not hard to understand, anyone can Google the difference between strategy and tactics.
This feels like something I’d read on twitter, not HN. Literally zero substance, just designed to be as controversial sounding as possible
Edit: oh I see, you only support strategic deterrence which equates to “standby until we have to nuke them.”
Ukraine had physical possession of the nukes, but their ability to actually use them was highly suspect. They might have been able to circumvent the security measures given enough time, but if anything such an attempt would have sparked an international "peacekeeping operation" to make sure the nukes didn't fall into the wrong hands.
https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/news/budapest-memorandum-myth...
WW2 was probably the last time you could fight a war, and do things like convert your local industry to produce weapons and tanks that were relevant. And even then, it only really happened because the US mainland was not contested territory during the conflict - it had the luxury of choosing when to enter the war.
Ukraine is simply not a "normal" looking modern conventional war. Both sides have receiving significant external imports which are various reasons are mostly untouchable by kinetic strikes till they cross the relevant borders (in this way it is much more like Vietnam in logistical respects). So you see assumptions like "mass production of drones will be key to the future!" in a context where the bulk of the critical components - microprocessors, cameras etc. - are not produced in the countries in conflict, and are imported from factories which are in no danger of ever being directly targeted.
So cheap mass producable systems have held the line in areas, but they're obviously drop ins for something you'd prefer to use instead - i.e. artillery - but there's a shortage of that. But conversely they haven't moved the line in a lot of areas - some of the biggest strikes of the war have been from conventional exploitation of defensive failures - i.e. the Kharkiv breakthrough, or from espionage operations which might be notable for using a lot of drones but the real accomplishment was getting them in position and the real success was still very typical: Operation Spidersweb taking out a large number of Russian long range strategic bombers.
Now people will point to the latter and say "see! strategic bombers are useless!" ... and yet that can hardly be true if a substantial operation to destroy strategic bombers was worth doing. A system being vulnerable in a way it previously wasn't does not make it ineffective (i.e. if strategic bombers at airfields intact would endanger the Ukranian position, then they're still an obviously necessary system, but they now need better protection then they had - or Russian counter-espionage just sucks).
I guess it comes down to betting on the IPO then?
The two recent data points I have are from one person who interviewed, got an offer, and his only reaction was “lol, not a chance”. The other person I know who works there now (according to LinkedIn) was a coworker who was cut for underperformance when we worked together years ago. I’ve heard so many different stories about what it’s like that I don’t know what to believe any more.
Calling Anduril comp “significantly higher” than Google does go completely against what I’ve heard from others though. I’ll have to go look again.
EDIT: The levels.fyi data looks great for juniors but definitely isn’t higher than Google for L5+: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/anduril-industries/salaries...
Using what, Field Marshal?
I wonder if religious "saints" (nearly all of them were terror-mongering scum) of old had such confidence. Funnily, you'll even find "post-religious" liberals and Protestants defending their supposed enemies if they were killing/raping and plundering the "heathens" (forget Xtian-saints, they'll defend Islamic rampages and skull-mountain-building exercises the likes of which would have made both Genghis & Mohammed proud.)
"St. Xavier had already recognized on the need to start a inquisition against the heathens of Goa to maintain the hegemony of Christ so that the evil heathendom could not flourish any more in the piece of land Christ had promised."
Oh yes, we're so proud running 1000x foreign bases and dropping bombs on innocent civilians around the world for "freedom" - we definitely need to preserve our "hegemony".
Serious question - are Americans really this stupid ? I can remember 5-6 wars in the past 2 decades that all turned out to be regime-change ops because they wouldn't play ball to US diktats. Atleast British colonization of the world was honest (and those that were colonized were British subjects), without all this 3-d chess propaganda non-sense.
Still about half of what a senior role in big tech would amount to.
This is an interesting trend for a bunch of newer companies, pay competitively for junior roles but significantly below industry for experienced candidates.
Good for them. Sounds like a hell of an experience riding that train as employee #20. Haha, at $250 m one would have thought a lot of the growth was baked in. But it 100x from there. Very nice.
It's pretty reasonable choice.
Ideally there are no hegemons and we live in a multipolar peace, but if there must be hegemonies then you can't do much better than this.
Wow such high impact work. Surely making the world a more better place than those Silicon Valley leftists
- Anduril is overstating the effectiveness of their cheap and cheerful elbow grease solutions, and for example, you can't replicate the functionality of a Mach-whatever interceptor like the Patriot to shoot down a cruise missile with a cheap and slow drone that just tries to 'stand in its path'
- Anduril is replicating the cambrian explosion of combat systems (drones, jammers, whatnot), we've seen in the Russian/Ukraine war. These are made out of largely commercial components, or stuff that can be built in any well-equipped machine shops and commercially available components, and a country of .
Both can be true at the same time, but especially the latter should be concerning to the defense industries and militaries of the world. It means, that if systems build out of commercial components for hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars can either replicate or counter a large chunk of million to billion dollar systems, then that means that, huge parts of the defense expenditure conferred no advantage. Considering we saw columns of both Russian and Western tanks blown up, each worth millions, this I'm confident is true.
The other thing is that this means the US has lost its technological edge when fighting even third-tier militaries who decide to procure and manufacture these system. I'm sure after the war, the expertise to build these will be readily available on the market, and the components (both used by Anduril and these smalls shops) are nothing special.
But they weren't trying to shoot down cruise missiles. They were shooting down drones.
Consider the challenge of defending vast territories against cruise missiles. Conventional systems, like Patriot PAC-3 and NASAMS batteries, typically cost millions of dollars per installation. So we asked ourselves a simple question: What if we could create a forcefield of low-cost drones to intercept cruise missiles worth millions?
The concept seemed absurd at first, even to our team—the overmatch appeared too extreme. But we stripped the problem again to its fundamentals. Cruise missiles are fast, but they follow predictable flight paths. If we could accurately determine that flight path using two ground-based IR passive sensors (what we called Wide-Area Infrared System for Persistent Surveillance, or WISPs), we wouldn’t need expensive targeting systems on the interceptor itself.
We modified our Anvil drone to carry no sensors at all—the drone would simply position itself in the projected path of the incoming missile, aligning with where the missile would pierce our virtual “force field.” Despite the initial skepticism, we demonstrated the concept successfully, destroying a target that could fly an order of magnitude faster than our interceptor.
Mission driven is very important.
Significant former military representation.
Anything DOD related is going to have need to know baked in due to DOD requirements. I’m not sure what your issue is with acronyms, they’re used a lot everywhere in defense. They’re not magic incantations, merely shorthand.
Meals yes, the rest of that no, it’s definitely not Google.
There are plenty of 9 to 5 jobs, and plenty that aren’t. Depends on what role you’re filling.
> highlighting how quirky Palmer is
Ironically neither of those things sound "fun" to me. They sound fun for Palmer, who can stroll around his office feeding his narcissistic fantasies but not for anyone else.
People that started a year ago at Anduril are today making slightly more than they would be had they stared at Google. People that started 2 years ago are making far more than they would be. And it keeps growing – exponentially – from there.
Source? The fact that you can't remember this period _now_ does not mean it has no impact on a child's development.
He's more macross than missile, a flamboyance you can ascertain from Hawaiian shirts or the smell of microwaved pizza rolls. If you put him in a life-or-death situation, he'd simply pray to be reincarnated as a Gainax employee. Luckey is an SBF-tier grifter who I don't trust with my taxpayer dollars and especially distrust with the lives of my family members serving under America's flag. I pray for another "last supper" in Congress by the time this admin is gone.
Russian is top down innovation with a thick layer of corruption. No matter how much you want to claim strategic depth, they are always several steps behind Ukrainians. No matter how many advantages due to size they have.
Sorry you picked the wrong team.
I'm talking about mass manufacturing, not design. Russia has had capability to hit any Ukrainian factory since Day 1 of the war, that's why they've successfully dispersed and hidden their production so much. Also, I've always been pro-Ukraine.
>they are always several steps behind Ukrainians.
That's not true anymore, both sides have plateaued because all innovations are quickly copied. Anti-recon quadcopters were another Ukrainian innovation that took the Russians roughly 6 months to catch up to. The only advantage they have is size and strategic depth. There isn't much else.
Additionally your comment ignores the whole context of what was ging on in Goa at a time but even the most scolding protestants do not see m to qualify St.Xavier to Genghis lmao.
For context:
The 26 Martyrs of Japan (Japanese: 日本二十六聖人, Hepburn: Nihon Nijūroku Seijin) were a group of Catholics who were executed by crucifixion on 5 February 1597, in Nagasaki, Japan. Their martyrdom is especially significant in the history of the Catholic Church in Japan.
A promising beginning to Catholic missions in Japan – with perhaps as many as 300,000 Catholics by the end of the 16th century – met complications from competition between the missionary groups, political difficulty between Portugal and Spain and factions within the government of Japan. Christianity was suppressed and it was during this time that the twenty-six martyrs were executed. By 1630, Catholicism had been driven underground. When Christian missionaries returned to Japan 250 years later, they found a community of "hidden Catholics" that had survived underground.
St. Xavier was likely just seeing the writing in the wall with that comment and probably wanted to avoid something akin to what happened. Similarly perhaps maybe you have a bad concept of the inquisition based on years of (ironically enough) anglo imperial propaganda.
As a matter of fact the inquisition and similar catholic structures were preferred by people as they were more fair than the usual local court.
>I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.
>When the skies brighten, though, the drones return, and so too does the fear.
Zubair, 13 yrs old https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2013/10/saddest-words-c...
Though, just judging from the comment you left, you seem more upset with Anduril's reputation than any of what I said. Or your own karma, one of the two.
Our entire Social/Economic/Psychological value system has been completely remade to value only Money and Power. Humanity/Ethics/Morals/Community/Individuals are only useful in so far as they sustain the system in pursuit of the above objectives else they are all just a hindrance and must be manipulated/overlooked/removed.
Our very mastery of Science and its consequent Technology has enabled the exercise of all "our" (i.e. Individuals/Groups/Corporations/Governments/etc.) powers in service of Money/Power to a degree unimaginable before the Scientific Revolution. Nothing matters but only the sustaining of "The System" which has taken a life of its own independent of the Humans (and other life forms) who inhabit it.
To explain using pop-culture references, you are mere disposable "Soylent Green" in "The Matrix" all of which are embedded in omniscient "The System".
References:
1) Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_Nationalism
2) Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by Kathleen Taylor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing:_The_Science_of_T...
3) Reflexive Control - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexive_control
4) Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_M...
5) The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Technological_Society
If Ukraine had the physics package, why couldn't they deploy it? Barring launch codes from the Kremlin, there's still enriched uranium in the warhead that you can turn into a simpler one-stage bomb. I doubt they could have gone thermonuclear, but simply leveraging the ICBMs and fissile material seems well within Ukraine's wheelhouse.
If your tenure as GI has shown you anything else, then prove me wrong and forever preserve Luckey's honor. I only ever knew him as the guy who gooned to Asuka porn and collected floral clothing. He was really keen on making sure I knew him for that, but how did you know him?