What’s the latest about Anduril’s work environment? They’ve been pushing vibes-heavy approaches to recruiting like making videos sneering at remote work and highlighting how quirky Palmer is, but the last I heard it wasn’t a great place to work. When I start seeing PR puff piece journalism about a workplace to make it seem extra fun, they’re usually compensating for something (low pay, long hours, bad work environment) in my experience.

With all due respect, those who monitor the war in Ukraine will tell you that Anduril is overengineered and expensive. New Russian drones, produced in the thousands every day, are kits, assembled in minutes on the battlefield. Nothing fancy, crappy looks, nothing exciting, but it works and it's cheap and it manufacturing can be ramped up in no time. Not to mention that Russian innovate on the battlefield, everybody tries different modifications, and what works is communicated back. Also, commercially, there are tens and tens of private and government companies working on drones in Russia - one company can't do better than many in a competitive environment. So, unless there are 10-20 Andurils competing on speed of innovation, costs, materials, simplicity, and manufacturing speed, this is no match.

What is a cocaine-fueled "amusement park" to Silicon Valley techbros is another humans hell. I look forward to you guys joining it.

>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...

"Amusement Park" has to be one of the worst headline choices here. So these people are amused by building killing machines? They are amused that their work is directly related to death & destruction? They are monsters if so.

I can draw only 2 conclusions from this story:

- 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.

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.

This sounds like such a sad and awful place. Some brilliant yet naive young people are being taken advantage of. (source: I was just like that at that age)

An amusement park that kills people.

That doesn’t seem super fun to me.

>On a Saturday afternoon in April 2024, I was on the rooftop pool deck of a Marriott hotel, setting up radar equipment aimed above the Hollywood Hills in Burbank, California. My five-year-old son, still damp from swimming, darted around as I calibrated the system.

This has to be an FCC violation of some sort.

Ironic that everyone talking shit about "building killing machines" probably also has Ukraine flags next to their PFPs. How you think Ukraine fighting their war right now fam - with sticks and bottle rockets?

The point of war is to make the other dumb bastard die for his country. I think everything we make to kill should kill efficiently and well. Then we can choose not use the device. But whichever arm it is that is meant to do the job should do the job well. Then the civilian government arm can choose to not fight a war or engage in whatever.

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.

> I spent my paternity leave developing a 3D radar system

This just makes me so, so sad.

This person no matter what they may or may not achieve has all their priorities upside down.

Anduril employees think they're Tony Stark, but they're just cranking out cheap shit that kills people. America's enemies or whatever.

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.

The amount of variants of "I missed <X> important event of my life to build a drone made to [kill people|break shit|arrest small time drug dealers]" in that article makes me think of complete fucking insanity instead of amusement park, but sure.

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)

"The Amusement Park for Engineers"

A company which needs you to build things to kill anyone and everyone with AI. BIG FUN! /s

But maybe I am the only one who thinks this is just SICK.

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The author seems to be really happy helping Israel commit genocide.

> Palmer and his team had already recognized the need for better defense technology to deter a greaey't power conflict and to maintain American hegemony.

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.

> That makeshift tower, which we built on our own dime to prove what was possible, helped intercept nearly 1,000 pounds of marijuana and led to dozens of drug trafficking arrests—ultimately earning us a pilot program with Customs and Border Protection

Wow such high impact work. Surely making the world a more better place than those Silicon Valley leftists