Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour
explorer.oxide.computer448 points by darthcloud 4 days ago
448 points by darthcloud 4 days 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.
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.
Also even if one were to approach some theoretical perfect interview process there will always be people who feel miffed and complain
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.
Holy crap. This just keeps getting worse. Link to podcast? See if you can find a mirror if possible, these guys may actually try to scrub this off the internet once their company realizes they have a lose cannon in their senior team.
It was not THAT bad, but it really feed my impression that there is an institutional god complex at Oxide.
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.
Disclaimer: I have never applied nor worked at oxide, but nevertheless have a bit of an odd thought.
Having looked at the process (RFD 3 and original post on dtrace.org), and contextualizing it with the oversubscribed-problem (which was mentioned somewhere else in this thread), I cannot help but think that there is a kind of solution that can help both the applicants and oxide and (yes) the industry as a whole.
The kinds of materials that the RFD asks for, seems like it would make for very interesting reading, regardless of whether it is read by a hiring-manager or a computer nerd. So why not, instead of (or in addition to) writing 11 pages, and sending them to the inbox of someone who (even without the additional responsibility of sorting thousands of applications in order hire-ability) is already extremely busy (this is, after all, a very demanding job), you publish them on your webpage?
In addition to taking some of the pressure off the oxide hiring-pipeline, you also get more exposure to people, who may work at organizations that would benefit from such a pipeline, but cannot afford to burn the political capital to replace the old pipeline. In a way, people who would appreciate your materials would, over some amount of time (and time should not be an issue, because it seems like it takes (at least sometimes) a long time for oxide to respond anyway), find them and possibly reach out.
I am basically a nobody, but if people started publishing things in the format of an oxide application, I would _totally_ read them. I am not saying I would necessarily _like_ them, but I would certainly read them[1]. Also, if disclosure is an issue, people can be published pseudonymously.
[1]: If for no other reason, than to see the multitude funny ways in which other people are wrong ;)
Hah, oh no, if they (practically) ghosted q3k, then most of us have no chance.
I left Oxide a long time ago, I don't know about q3k's specific case (though I agree six months is a very long time), but it is just true from the numbers that it is very, very hard to get a job at Oxide. The number of applicants compared to the number of positions is a very intense ratio.
When I was there, there were often very tough decisions, where we had one opening, but five or even ten excellent final candidates. The math means that you are inherently turning down some excellent people.
I don't mind the rejection (I know I'm not _that_ good, I understand there's tons of applications and I'm fine with that), but the wait and lack of clear feedback sucked.
The response was particularly unclear - was I rejected outright? Did I slip through the cracks and then the role got filled by someone else? Should I reapply, or am I not a fit for company culture? Or just maybe not a fit for the role? If I reapply, should it be with the same interview packet, or should I rethink it? Like, is it me or is is it you?
Even when I applied to Google (a famously 'bad' recruitment experience according to most) I was able to at least regularly talk to a human who would give me feedback from interviews. And when there was a lack of team fit they'd tell me so clearly and help me look for another role. They treated me like a human! Like, I could talk to someone! Oxide just gave me a canned answer without a signature attached and no way to actually talk to anyone.
Oh well, in the meantime I've actually found a meaningful job where the recruitment experience didn't feel like I'm just throwing messages in a bottle into the ocean and hoping to get a response.
I'm glad you found a job you like, truly. It's rough out there right now for everyone. I have people close to me that have been looking for work for years, and it's very demoralizing.
I think that there's a certain deeper truth in what you've posted, which is that hiring is very hard, and different people feel different ways about different things. I also applied to Google once upon a time, and it was spectacularly confusing and bad. Yeah, I could speak to humans, but that wasn't particularly helpful. I regularly received contradictory information, and the stalling and back and forth went on so long I completed several other processes during the wait, and ended up at Cloudflare instead. That doesn't mean that you're wrong that you had a better time than I did, it just is what it is.
I know you're not looking, but to give you my take on the biggest question here, in case anyone else is curious:
> If I reapply, should it be with the same interview packet, or should I rethink it?
In general, resubmitting with the same materials isn't a good idea. If they didn't get you in the first time, they won't the next time, and also in general, time has passed, you've probably done other things since then... naturally, this means the answers will end up differently.
This contradicts your earlier statement, "we had one opening, but five or even ten excellent final candidates," and ignores the criticism: "is it me or is is it you?"
Although I suppose you're saying that promising candidates are kept on file for later?