[jjice]

I want Oxide to do so well. The product is a breath of fresh air in the era of cloud providers. As an engineer, I'd kill to get to work with their hardware.

Not to mention that working at Oxide sounds like a modern Sun Microsystems with the ideology that team has. Highly recommend their podcast "Oxide and Friends", and their original "On The Metal" show.

I've attempted to apply to their company multiple times over the years, only to be stun locked by the application process. Not because it's a bad process, but because I feel I'm not up to par as an engineer. Maybe one day I'll go through with it.

[EvanAnderson]

Oxide certainly sounds cool. It reminds me of when I dealt with DEC gear back in the late 90s. That stuff felt more like "real computers" than any of the IBM PC-derived drek I'd worked with. Things were actually made to work together. Configurations were tested. Firmware was made for the integrated system and the system behaved like it was meant to work together instead of being the manifest behavior of all the edge cases of all the off-the-shelf disparate components plugged-together to make the resultant machine.

I don't need to work there (nor do I feel like I'm smart or talented enough to)-- I just wish I could work with the Oxide gear in Customer engagement, too. I don't work with businesses big enough to need it, sadly. It looks so sweet.

This is what I think of when I think of utility-scale compute-- not racks of Supermicro / Dell / HP boxes with tiny ISA buses hiding on traces on their motherboards for "baseboard management controllers" to plug into to pretend to be PC AT keyboards.

[Fordec]

There are two companies that I want want to work for. Oxide is one of them. Many places I'm still willing to work for, but in a more neutral way. They're just mostly not hiring for my role/location as far as I can tell, so it is what it is.

[krkckktkwnwk]

Please don’t leave such a question unanswered.

[hagbard_c]

And the other company you want to work for is ___________ because they ____________. Inquiring minds want to know.

[thraway3837]

Just a gentle reminder that a company may portray itself as cool to customers, but is not cool to their own current or future employees.

Their interview process was shady. There was a post here about 1-2 years ago that was a link to their interview process and how open and transparent they were. The post itself was from an employee and a fellow commenter who was gaslighting folks was also an employee. Several folks complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted. One of employees repeatedly rebutted that claim in the comments, and they did this for quite a few commenters. Was a not a good look. I doubt much has improved since then as seeing the comments below confirms the same mess.

Don't spend time being amazed by folks who won't treat you right. It just ain't worth it.

[bcantrill]

I'm not sure what "mess" you're referring to -- that we have a writing-intensive hiring process? That we get a lot of applicants? That we therefore end up rejecting a bunch of people? That we read application materials thoroughly? That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)?

To state clearly what I feel we have said many times: Yes, it's hard to get a job at Oxide. Yes, we get a lot applicants. Yes, we ask a lot of applicants upfront. But the payoff (and the reason it's worth the risk and the work for the right person!) is an extraordinary and uplifting team -- one that I daresay each of us counts as being of unparalleled breadth and depth in our careers.

[contingencies]

Baby got backplane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X53ZSxkQ3Ho&t=80

[mrcwinn]

I understand that all employees have equal salary pay (apart from sales people who can earn more and are valued higher). Do all have equal equity and voting rights, at least within common stock?

And since transparency is a core value and principle, will you commit to sharing your cap table publicly?

[bcantrill]

I appreciate that our approach to compensation leaves some with overwhelming feelings of whataboutery, but no, we (of course?) do not have equal equity: as we have said (several times?) equity broadly compensates for risk -- and risk has gone down over time. (I used to tell people to "value the equity at zero"; I don't say that any longer because it plainly isn't.)

In terms of the cap table: that's a bit of an odd request? On the one hand, there are no real secrets hanging out on our cap table -- but on the other, based on your tone, it doesn't feel like the request is terrible earnest? (And, I hasten to add, transparency is a value -- not a principle.[0])

[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002

[segsehhjehj]

"But the payoff (and the reason it's worth the risk and the work for the right person!) is an extraordinary and uplifting team"

people who say stuff like this are a social cancer.

"And, I hasten to add, transparency is a value -- not a principle."

Jesus Christ. Inside the rot of Western civilization, a chittering nest of people like you.

[dijit]

Hey man,

You’re not getting across a reasonable point here. Maybe take a step back and think about what you really want to say.

Clearly something is landing wrong, but exactly what is not being well communicated.

[dijit]

Devils advocate (really not affiliated with oxide, but I have worked for a “desirable” employer before).

How would you handle a few thousand applicants for a single role?

I think no matter what you do it will feel inhumane, we can argue that a few hours of work for a take home test is inhumane too, being ghosted after doing one definitely wouldn’t pass my personal bar of acceptability, but if its the first stage and the task would take a properly qualified applicant less than 30 minutes then I can’t fault.

How would you do things? remember that it has to scale and you cant leave any gaps based on human fallibility (HR/Hiring Managers are humans and will forget if there are too many things going on at once).

[jaggederest]

There's a simple answer, if someone is doing a substantial amount of work for your interview process, pay them an amount of money that is more than zero but less than "do job interviews for a living". Or provide that amount times two to a charity of their choice.

I've done this for hiring before, for people who reached the "put substantial effort in" stage (in my case basically 2nd or 3rd round work sample stuff), and it was a great way to make sure we got good signal and they felt respected.

[dijit]

“put substantial effort into it” is such a personal thing.

DDG hires like this, actually, and if I recall correctly I would be paid a flat fee, it would take a week, and the work I did would be part of something genuine in DDG, maybe a bug or something.

Now, that probably sounds good to you, but taking a week out of my current employment is not going to happen- there’s an incentive to go “over the hours” inherent to the ask, even if you’re paying me a flat rate, I might lose to someone equally qualified who puts in 1.01n into the task, so I should put 1.02n (etc; ad infinitum).

Which is part of the issue with all take home assignments. I have given out take home assignments (given to HR to be administered) which should take a qualified candidate 20 minutes to finish beginning to end (as in, including syncing the project, setting up their editor, exploring the problem, googling around about things, trying it out and then following up with the email to HR). I don’t doubt for even a moment that someone has spent several hours on this problem- because they’re not qualified.

Passing the HR barrier in that case will not help them unfortunately, because they’ll get to talk to me, and I will disqualify them in all likelihood, and candidates are told that it should take not more than a half hour, but en masse: people don’t listen.

The trouble is, theres thousands of applicants, a handful of HR, and one me.

Not to be on some kind of pedestal (I’m not), but the problem doesn’t scale, you need only apply the tiniest amount of systems thinking to see it.

[jaggederest]

Thousands of applicants reaching the substantial work stage is a failure of the systems thinking you're talking about. Hundreds of resumes nearly always gets narrowed down to perhaps a dozen or two at most at the screening stage.

And I would make it very clear that putting in more than 30 minutes of work, timed, is a disqualifier, and I would sleep well at night clearing all those people out of the queue.

[dijit]

Hundreds of good applicants can’t be whittled down to a dozen without being very picky about things in the resume which may just be a poor representation.

You will bias heavily along some kind of axis, preferred previous employers or location, age, etc.

You add a lot of bias into the system by trying to further scrutinise otherwise meaningfully qualified people on paper.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

>should take a qualified candidate 20 minutes to finish beginning to end (as in, including syncing the project, setting up their editor, exploring the problem, googling around about things, trying it out and then following up with the email to HR

So about six minutes for the problem itself, then?

[IshKebab]

Yeah I just got a new job and they sent me swag for getting to a certain (quite early) stage in the interview process. Awesome idea.

It was for an investment bank though and they have essentially unlimited money. I can't imagine any of the other companies I've worked for would be remotely generous enough to do the same.

[jaggederest]

Hiring is expensive linearly to the salary of the people you're trying to hire, so if any of the companies you've worked for were trying to hire well, it'd be a rounding error. Back of the envelope is 90 days of salary, minimum, is the cost to hire, so there's no reason to be miserly about it - if you can't afford it, you can't afford to hire at all.

[fred_is_fred]

From a legal and financial perspective it seems like it would be difficult to pay people to do interview homework. There's tax implications and other issues like state labor laws.

[icedchai]

People do contract / temporary / 1099 work all the time. It's very simple.

[throwaway219450]

If you truly believe you’re “scaling” you do it the Google way and have a strict loop with a good rubric for the interview so applicants are comparable. The whole point of that system is thousands of people and hundreds of interviewers, and a very standard process. I’ve always found it pretty fair even with some randomness in scoring.

You shouldn’t be giving take homes unless they’re either short, or the applicant passed a screen and you’re investing time. Otherwise how are you “scaling” the review? Claude? Hidden test suite (not bad)? Some sort of leaderboard (bad, rewards people with time), something else?

[dijit]

I’ve been through the Google process and I wouldn’t consider it to be the opposite of inhumane.

[throwaway219450]

Well “humane” and fair aren’t necessarily the same, and some people hate loops.

I like programming problems, spending a day at Google was fun, they put me up in a fancy hotel, and the interviewers were nice. Like it was clear a lot of time and money had gone into the process (6-8 hours of dev time is not cheap), not a zoom and ghost like most companies.

[DANmode]

Use less negatives.

[dijit]

it was intentionally this way

[marshray]

I'm seeing the phrases "tremendous amount of homework", "substantial amount", and "few hours".

Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?

[jamesmunns]

My materials probably took 4-6 hours to write the first draft (I did most of it over two evenings, maybe one more just skimming the questions to figure out what things to talk about for each question), probably 2-3 hours or so to edit, then probably another hours over an evening just skimming it too many times before I hit submit. My materials were 16 pages or so, some of that was the original document (which has been linked in this comment section).

It's a fair bit of writing to ask for, but for a mostly remote and prose-driven company, you do a lot of long-form writing in the day to day work. The public RFDs and github issues/comments/commits give a good flavor for this.

As others have said, lots of my work is open source, and I have public writings and talks, so finding those were much easier for me than it might be for someone with only closed source works.

[steveklabnik]

The process is open, you can go to https://oxide.computer/careers and look yourself. Here is the direct link to the materials: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-mi2Bgf3SSNf2AUKTBxBHPiu...

I don't remember how much time I put into mine when I applied.

[sunshowers]

My successful application took around 12 hours of writing and editing across 3 days, though I was lucky that most of my portfolio was already open source or otherwise public. Some people spend more, some spend less.

[wmf]

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003

[oytis]

With every interview process you say "yes" only once and "no" many times. Where there are a lot of candidates, then many more times, while spending less time on each candidate. There is no way to design a process that will not leave the majority of candidates disappointed - as soon as they are up front with the amount of work you'll need to do, it sounds ethical to me

[convolvatron]

I've gone through the same process, not so much that I don't think I would be worth considering, but serious code and documentation examples aren't something I can really give out given that they're proprietary. this last winter I started a whole guest-kernel based syscall intermediation and distribution framework in rust just for the application. with all kinds of design documents. I was about 30% finished by the time I landed a job somewhere else :)

but I still applaud the intent. I self-selected out by giving into scope creep

[TZubiri]

I'd be interested in the context if you'd be willing to share.

It sounds from the outside like Oxide has an interview process that requires some low level engineering work to be delivered? Maybe I got that wrong.

[convolvatron]

no, they want a questionnaire, a coding sample, and an example of technical writing. there's a reasonable interpretation of that that doesn't involve writing a distributed unix.

[TZubiri]

Sounds approachable, and something that would be evaluated based on merit.

As usual, I'm assuming the assignment is evaluated based on a reasonable time-commitment. From what the recruiting experts tell me, it's a good strategy to spend as much time as possible, the deliverable is better, and the optics aren't bad either, it signals investment into the application instead of signalling spray and pray application broadcasting.

[Melatonic]

Seriously - looks so cool