from Hacker News

Anduril banned from recruiting on NixOS forums

by OuterVale on 4/4/25, 4:23 AM with 75 comments

• by alexey-salmin on 4/4/25, 6:48 AM

  Why is this flagged? Regardless of the side you take on Andruil (or the war machine in general), this is a relevant piece of news.

• by joshcsimmons on 4/4/25, 8:37 PM

  I worked with Travis on the Electromagnetic Warfare Team at Anduril and he's one of the most phenomenal engineers I've had the pleasure of working with. Nix is already such a niche software it's absolutely baffling they'd prevent one of the few companies hiring Nix experts from advertising jobs because of a few loud individuals with anime avatars.

• by mellosouls on 4/4/25, 4:49 AM

  Wording in the final post [1] fwiw:

  ...the Steering Committee is banning Anduril from recruiting on Discourse. We will leave this specific thread up and locked (to record this decision), but the moderation team has been instructed to remove future Anduril job posts on Discourse.

  [1] https://discourse.nixos.org/t/anduril-industries-electromagn...

• by braza on 4/4/25, 4:45 AM

  As a former military person now working with tech, it's a bummer to see that the "neo" defense industry outside Ukraine (for obvious reasons) is trying to play the "Silicon Valley recruitment tale" without understanding the difference between the kind of people that you want to attract versus the class of people that have "mental elasticity" (sic.) to be willing to work for you.

  When dealing with very important but abstract/distant terms in our daily lives like nation, war, death, patriotism, and patriotic sacrifice, you require some sort of people that are definitely not like your regular SWE.

  One thing that I learned in military/defense is that the spectrum of people that ends there is between the "I went for the wrong reasons" and "hyperpatriotic on the border of being a zealot". Damn, we had guys in my Company that just went to the Army because they watched "Rambo: First Blood" and found it amazing.

  Seeing the Anduril folk in the thread trying their best to recruit people in a completely different vibe related to tech, it's not only unintentionally comic but also shows how the defense tech is drunk with the VC/LP lore of "Let's get the best talent in the market and pay them well".

  Edit 1: Anduril is going to learn the same thing that most of the professional military services in the world have already known for decades: Forget this misleading nerd Silicon Valley archetype and go to the Rico's [1] of the world: People willing to do things for the wrong reasons and/or naive enough to occasionally become the people that you want.

  [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b07887ZzKiw

  Edit 2: I hit submit early and I reframed my post, sorry for the confusion.

• by ordinaryradical on 4/4/25, 5:23 AM

  If you don’t want your software used for things you don’t approve of, don’t give it away for free.

• by bsnnkv on 4/4/25, 4:40 AM

  I think the only company I know which spends more time than Anduril getting embroiled in completely unnecessary drama is Automattic.

• by gnabgib on 4/4/25, 4:49 AM

  Title: Anduril Industries’ Electromagnetic Warfare Team is Hiring

  First comment: This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

• by m00dy on 4/4/25, 4:41 AM

  side question:

  Why do I use NixOS instead of Ubuntu + ansible combo ?