Comment by dgroshev

I don't mean a conversation. I understand the process and how front-loaded it is at Oxide. I mean just having an actual human being on the other side of those rejection emails, instead of sending them from an unmonitored address. Oxide's own RFD 3 says

> 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.

…but in practice it's just boilerplate and silence. Good luck asking when no one's listening [1].

Lots of companies do that, too. The problem is that this approach feels even more unfair than when it's a more "regular" hiring flow. Oxide asks for a very high level of effort from their applicants, but you can see in these comments that at the same time they are quite far towards the lower end of how much visible effort they commit back to the applicants (delays, boilerplate, ghosting).

And sure, as you say it's hundreds-to-thousands of applications, and potentially dozens-to-hundreds of emails to reply to. But the additional time it takes to send a one line reply pales in comparison to thoughtfully reading 12+ pages of materials, which they say they do. I just don't think that adding a few percent on top of that massive effort is unrealistic. It's an active decision to save time and money on people who didn't pass the first stage; I think it's an unethical decision, but then I'm not nearly as successful as Bryan Cantrill.

[1]: To be fair, Bryan kindly advised to "DM" him for feedback in a similar thread half a year ago. There are no DMs on here, so I DM'd on bsky and tried to guess his email, but I probably guessed wrong and he doesn't check his bsky DMs.