Comment by jjice
1 day ago
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.
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.
The downside is that when you need to replace a DIMM or a storage drive or upgrade the network interface you have to buy certified compatible hardware from the manufacturer at 3x pricing instead of commodity items.
Oxide is literally the only company where I have found zero reasons why I would be unhappy to work there. I have listened to many, many podcasts, read RFDs… it always seems like a place I would thrive. To that end, I have applied twice in the last few years; unfortunately declined both times, but to be fair, the first time I didn’t know any Rust, and the second time, I was learning it.
I will apply again at some point when an interesting job comes up, and I have a stronger skillset.
I tried applying to Anthropic twice. Rejected. Then I see people with way less skill getting jobs there.
Network with people at the company and third time may be a charm. Maybe.
Oxide's process is uniform, even the founders went through it, together, when they started the company. There is no internal referral system at all.
That doesn't mean this isn't bad advice overall, but it doesn't give you any structural leg-up with Oxide specifically.
I'm pretty sure I'm not talented enough for Oxide, but just asking myself the application questions has been a fun exercise. I'm not in love with their problem space, but I am really into the way they work and do business.
Greatest hope: their approach catches on outside just Oxide, and I get to work somewhere with a similar ethos and practises one day.
Greatest fear: the way they work only makes sense for the most elite and well-capitalised of companies.
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.
And the other company you want to work for is ___________ because they ____________. Inquiring minds want to know.
Tailscale, decent developer focus
Please don’t leave such a question unanswered.
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.
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.
I don't know Brian or anyone at Oxide, but for the record nearly every place I have ever passed an interview (and later enjoyed employment at) has had people complain about the process online. Partly I think that's down to nearly everyone having an imperfect interview process. It's hard to do right and you won't fail as a company because you passed on a good candidate. You optimize for rejecting the people that will cause disaster, because those are the people that could cause you to fail. Some of the saltiness I see online must be sour grapes.
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The particular 'mess' I've encountered was I applied (wrote 11 pages of interview material) on 2024/09/29 and then received a canned 'yeah whoops sorry for taking this long, not interested' on 2025/03/24. That's almost 6 months of delay from submission to first contact.
Terrible process. You need to give feedback early if you're not interested in someone, not leave them hanging for nearly half a year.
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Baby got backplane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X53ZSxkQ3Ho&t=80
Brian, you need to step off your high horse. Few people can go around saying that they are the best, and you’re not one of them.
It was also embarrassing to listen to the podcast episode where you humiliated that Eastern European guy you had invited. All very off putting and it really tarnish the brand.
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> Several folks complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted.
> That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)?
Your response is not a response to the OP's claim. The OP didn't claim you didn't provide specific feedback, it was that they were entirely ghosted mid-process. And that others said the same.
But even beyond that, your response doesn't align with your own careers page's "Hiring Process":
> If candidates aren’t advanced into interviews by the process outlined in [rfd147], an explicit rejection should be sent. The level of oversubscription for Oxide roles means that this rejection will likely be non-specific — which is naturally frustrating for applicants that have put a lot of energy into their materials. Candidates may well respond to a rejection by asking for more specific feedback; to the degree that feedback can be constructive, it should be provided.
Which would be in alignment:
> Decency
> We treat others with dignity, be they colleague, customer, community or competitor.
Here you just come off quite defensive, and argue that you at are Oxide are "very clear about" things that you say quite the opposite about on the very directions you tell candidates to read.
If what you say is true - and I can absolutely believe it is - fine, update the docs and the site. But don't come here and gaslight people into "I don't understand the problem. We're very clear, we've been very clear, people should not be complaining about this."
Source: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003
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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?
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wow. If I am correct, this is the cofounder and CTO of Oxide. This is a very defensive and agressive response. This explains everything I need to know about your workplace and leadership structure. Hardest pass. No thank you.
In case it gets deleted, I've quoted what bcantrill said below.
"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."
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I have some qualms with Oxide's hiring philosophy (I will have opinions on anything I allow myself to have opinions on, and "opinions on hiring processes" are part of my personal identity) but I want to call this complaint out.
You can see from this thread that Oxide is a company with an online fan base. If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open. It is extraordinarily difficult to service those kinds of candidate flows. That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it) or other unfriendly/unfair practices --- which are rife across the industry, most especially at companies that don't have the reputation Oxide is trying to cultivate --- but it does give some context to it.
Long story short: you can't really predict how a company treats its team from the first-contact inbound candidate experience. It's a signal, but it's a small signal among a great many others.
> If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open.
It is not just that: it's an avalanche of very high quality applicants. If it were a lot of poor ones, that would be easier! I'm sure yinz get lots of great ones too, but I do think that there is a meaningful difference between "thousands of resume spam people you'd never hire" and "hundreds of good applicants, dozens of great ones". It's more than just the numbers, though the numbers do matter.
> That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it)
I fully agree, both in that it's not an excuse for ghosting, but also that the reality of things is that sometimes things take longer than they should, even though that sucks. And while you can try to avoid it, and Oxide does, startups are very difficult.
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).
Communication is key. Think about a restaurant high in demand. There is implied communication that the initial experience might not be great in A) lines out the door, B) reservations are days/months out.
Once you're in the door, service should be good/great.
All companies have to do is just be more transparent. Ie, we have a backlog of 1000 applicants. Or just give a time expectation for the resume to be reviewed.
Ghosting people who've "gotten in the door" and spent a considerable of time interviewing is extremely disrespectful.
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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.
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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?
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I'm seeing the phrases "tremendous amount of homework", "substantial amount", and "few hours".
Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?
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.
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.
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.
It is worth keeping in mind that we write a _lot_. If you don't enjoy the process of writing, you might not like working here.
I don’t remember for my first application; probably a few hours. My second application was 27 pages, of which you can attribute a few to the pre-existing template. I spent probably 10-15 hours on it, spread across several evenings.
https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003
Probably 16 hours all in between research, writing, and editing, spread over a week. That might be a bit more than average, since English is my second language, and I make many passes to make sure the text works.
Got boilerplate-rejected with zero human interaction three months later.
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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
Thought of the same, has a big Sun Microsystems vibe.
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
Oxide is one of very few companies where I felt that it is a company I really want to work for one day. I spent a decent amount of hours answering the questions and sent in the application, but never got any feedback and this was like 2-3 years ago. Spending time at regulated environments, I were in a similar situation that I could not really give out relevant information from the past. However, I have no regrets at all spending the time, as it was very useful for me personally to reflect over each question.
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.
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.
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Many years ago, I quit the technology industry because I thought a company like Oxide could never exist. I want to work for them but I'm not sure I'm qualified. Maybe one day I'll apply.
Oxide is the only company I can think of that carries the torch of what silicon valley used to be in the 90s. Actual, awesome, cool technology! I wish massive success to Oxide.
Seriously - looks so cool
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