Our $445M Series D
oxide.computer516 points by ahlCVA 8 hours ago
516 points by ahlCVA 8 hours ago
Oxide is so cool, I just wish the hiring process was a little less crazy. I spent such an incredible amount of time on my application just to not hear anything for months until I got the rejection.
Sounds like a great company raising money for the right reasons.
Oxide continues to be one of the most inspiring companies in the space, I was just encouraging someone to apply there yesterday. :)
Still waiting for their 10 inch homelab mini oxide servers
I know they'll never do this but, by god, I would line up so fast for a mini oxide that I can homelab out of.
I mean, most of the code is open source. With enough enthusiasm and skill, you could probably make a reasonable home-lab out of that code, and some second hand hardware. And yeah, it would not be _hardware-software-co-design_, but it would be better than nothing, plus you will -- for a brief shining moment -- be the only person on planet earth (who is not formally affiliated with Oxide) who has an Oxide home-lab.
You could be a hero. A legend. The internet might even write poems and sing songs about you.
NixOS is the perfect homelab solution. You don't really want an overengineered VM monstrocity - that stuff is only needed to work around coporate process insanities.
They have one of the best hiring processes in the game. Just all around great people who care.
I was interested in applying to Oxide a few months back. They ask candidates who reach interviews to provide at least 9 hours of availability, normally arranged as three separate 3-hour blocks. Each block contains three 1-hour interview slots, so the standard schedule is effectively nine one-hour conversations. Not including the follow ups.
I got another great offer after just 1 interview that I took, so I never went through their process, but it looks very exhausting to me. Being rejected after investing so much time must also feel awful.
It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.
I’ve also done interviews that were brief 30-60 minute casual discussions followed by an offer during the hiring craziness that happened in a few years in the past. Anecdotally, coworkers at those companies were a completely random range from smart and kind down to the meanest, most clueless people I ever worked with. They had high turnover both because they were always firing bad hires (hire fast only works if you also fire fast) and people were burning out from the perpetual stream of bad hires being randomly injected into the company after they talked their way through the short interview.
Looking back, the interview processes that took the longest were certainly not perfect, but the companies that had them were much better about maintaining a coherent culture and high bar for the coworkers I would get. Every new hire felt like someone amazing who I was happy to be working with.
Everyone has different priorities, but looking back I think the relatively small amount of time I invested into long interview processes (relative to the 2000 hours I work every year) was time well spent.
for me, at least, one interview process being 9 hours isn't a big deal and i agree with you that a company doing that is likely to have a more coherent culture and make smarter hiring decisions.
the problem is that when the job market isn't too hot, you might be applying to a dozens or even a hundred+ positions. if 5-10 of those all have 9 hour processes, well now you have 1-2 full weeks work of unpaid interviewing to do, which is a lot to organize, prepare for, etc.
The only time I see people blitzing interviews and stacking 5-10 different companies interview processes is when they’re unemployed urgently trying to change jobs. In those cases it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to stack interviews.
For normal job changing, people are more selective and interview maybe a couple times per year, spread out over time. In my experience it hasn’t been hard at all to get 3 hours here and there for interviews. Tech company culture is usually forgiving about people leaving for appointments and other things so this isn’t nearly as hard as it is for some of my friends in other careers where it’s PTO every time.
I’ve also not actually seen many cases where people schedule 10 interviews at once and actually get the full interview experience at every one of them. People get rejected at earlier stages of the interview process or they start pulling out if they realize the job isn’t a good fit. It would be very rare for someone to schedule 10 interviews and actually invest the maximum time into every single one of them.
So I understand your concern, but in my observation this pattern doesn’t really happen. People have been doing much more involved interviews (travel, flights, hotels) for decades.
>In those cases it makes sense to do whatever you need to do to stack interviews.
right, people will do it, but then they'll complain on a forum about having to spend 60+ hours (with prep time) for a handful of interviews with no guarantee of a position and i think that's a fair complaint to make.
>I’ve also not actually seen many cases where people schedule 10 interviews at once and actually get the full interview experience at every one of them. People get rejected at earlier stages of the interview process or they start pulling out if they realize the job isn’t a good fit.
sure, but even if you drop out partway through the process, the prep time remains the same, you're still blocking out time and scheduling, you're still occupied for a portion of the day, etc.
>So I understand your concern, but in my observation this pattern doesn’t really happen.
i have observed it often enough with my former students (and sometimes current ones) to be understanding of the people complaining about a 9 hour interview.
> right, people will do it, but then they'll complain on a forum about having to spend 60+ hours (with prep time) for a handful of interviews with no guarantee of a position and i think that's a fair complaint to make.
This is an acceptable filter for me on both sides of the table.
You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Where you work should be a major life decision. These are the humans and craft you’re going to spend your time with/on for 40+ hours a week for years. You aren’t going to get a glimmer of understanding of the culture, people, and work in a single 45 minute interview (short of major red flags).
If all you’re doing is looking for a job, any job, I get this sentiment - and the other side of the table needs to be looking for a butt in a seat, any butt, and then these shotgun interviews work.
But if you’re optimizing for career and quality of life, having an extended diligence process is a pro, not a con. Especially since that means the team you’re joining has passed muster in the same diligence process when they were hired.
A strong diligence process signals the company takes who they hire seriously - and that the people who work there take where they work seriously.
Nobody doing long interviews is doing it blindly. It's because you're already passed some reasonable level of screening that mostly resembles a regular 45 minute type interview.
And how about people who have a job that they just don’t like that much, and would love to escape.
Having 9 rounds of interviews sounds crazy excessive. Why is the 9th interview needed that you couldn’t have figured out by the 8th interview? If regular companies do that, I opt out, it’s a don that they are delusional, inefficient, incapable of making decisions and don’t respect candidates time and potentially different life circumstances (candidates might have family, full time work, hobbies, other interviews).
On the other hand, their company is quite unique, I bet they have enough applicants, so in the end it’s supply and demand, and companies in extreme demand can make their interview process as tiring as they wish…
On the other hand, in my 20 year career the only real interview I did was for my first job. Every one after that was from people I worked with recruiting me to work with them somewhere, and the interview process was more about pitching me on their company.
Sometimes i wonder if I would have a better career if I was more proactive in my job searches, but I do enjoy the experience of being pursued a lot more enjoyable than pursuing.
This is very well put. There are different ways to 'pre-filter' the candidate pool, from quizzes to purity tests. What a many startups don't seem to understand is that the 'culture' is the people and what they do. So taking care in interviews tends to hire people who take care in their work. And unlike the gp comment I never felt 'bad' after a number of hours of interviews and a decline, I had a better understanding of the company, presumably they had a better understanding of me.
Reading the article though it was interesting that having a positive EBITDA was the real news here. Not a single AI company can claim that. That's a pretty big milestone.
> There are different ways to 'pre-filter' the candidate pool
Reading the replies here, most are assuming that every candidate gets the maximum interview duration. I see a lot of arguments that if someone applies to M jobs and each requires N hours of interviews then they're spending M*N hours without knowing they'll get a job.
Usually you don't get scheduled for interviews at all unless there's a good chance that they expect you to pass the hiring bar. When you are scheduled for interviews, they don't go straight to the full gauntlet until the early interviews show promise.
So by the time someone goes through the 3 x 3 hour interviews in this example, there's probably a very good chance that they're being seriously considered as a hire.
I agree with this. Also I empathize with the trauma a lot of tech people are going through in the current market because of my experiences in the 'chip downturn', 'dot com downturn' and the 'economic downturn in the late naughts'. So I'm seeing a lot of 'maxing' like this; "I send out 10,000 resumes and maybe get 1,000 people interested, and 100 people willing to interview me, and this takes 9 months and I've only got a few more months of 401k I can eat up ... ahhhhhhhh!" My experiences going through these sources of downturns changed me a lot, I don't see how it couldn't have.
9 hours is certainly excessive considering there's only 8 hours or less in a work day!
It's over several days. This used to be a pretty normal thing in hiring processes!
That has never been a normal thing in hiring processes. Normal within Silicon Valley maybe, but normal overall in the US? Absolutely not.
I remember before COVID trying to interview multiple places and time it where offers will land at the same time. I remember flying 3 times in one week (!) to make this happen. We have it easy now :).
> It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.
I think part of the reason is that interviews have gotten more adversarial as time has gone on. Ie less respect for the interviewee, more of a power dynamic, more careless wasted time in lazy take home assignments, etc.
I wouldn't mind 9 hour interviews to 3 companies if i knew i'd land the job. It's the 1,000 companies that many people experience that gives them pause after so much disrespect through time.
I've worked as an employee, a contractor, and owned my own firm and hired. Seen all sides.
Until the last few years, the idea of hours and hours of interviews wasn't a thing. I interviewed at IBM and was hired after two, 1 hour interviews. One of those over the phone.
I can't even envision what these interviews are all for. It feels like people attempting over the top risk management, without really scoping the risk. It feels quite disorganized.
I firmly believe it's because someone getting fired, for poor performance, is a huge deal now.
Where I am, exposing someones poor performance is more of an exhibition in the failure of the hiring process and all involved. So, you just keep the under-performers around.
Well, bullshit actually. When I went to Sun in 1996, I was flown out for a full day of interviews (9 hours!) plus both lunch and dinner. (And this was true for more or less every company I interviewed with.)
I'm not sure why people are indexing so hard on the interviews, as we matriculate very few candidates into conversations; if you want to complain about something, complain about the written nature of our hiring process.[0]
Yes, I definitely had some full day interviews back then, including travel time.
The largest difference I have found between then and now is what the interview actually consists of, not how long they last.
btw congrats on the company. i was skeptical at the time but it was never because you wouldn't attract awesome talent and make great hires. your process looks great to me.
Thanks! And don't worry -- there were PLENTY of reasons for skepticism in 2019! We got lucky many times over, hitting on stuff that turned out to be really important in ways that we couldn't know at the time.
The hiring process is a very concrete example of that. What still blows my mind (at least a little) is that our process came directly out of one of the worst moments in my career: making an absolutely terrible hire about two years before we started Oxide. For a while after that, I wished I could go back and warn my previous self to not make the hire that would be so destructive to the organization -- but in the years at Oxide I have come to realize that that terrible hire was in fact essential for the future Oxide: it was the impetus for putting together a writing-intensive process, and there is no doubt in my mind that I had I not made this atrocious hire, I would have continued to hire the (broken) way that I had been hiring. (I described this a bit in my conversation with Gergely Orosz on hiring.[0])
Anyway: don't get me near the time machine -- I'll only screw things up.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/hiring-proc...
I think people are just generally grousing about Interview length, not about your company specifically. Don't worry about it. It's not aimed directly at you.
I know in my case, it's not about you directly.
"Job interviews" in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours. There weren't even quizzes to see if you really could program, let alone leetcode-grinding insanity.
Once a system gets gamed en masse, anti-gaming measures dominate, and ruin, the whole process. See also: ads vs. ad blockers, and the fact that you can't run a fucking email server of your own anymore without jumping through security hoops.
> "Job interviews" in tech used to be casual conversations of a few hours. There weren't even quizzes to see if you really could program
How far back are you referring to? I'm definitely not the oldest person around here, but most of my interviews since graduating college were more than casual conversations.
The exceptions were primarily where I was coming in via a referral or they were hiring me for something that was already proven and verifiable, like open source contributions.
When I was coming up in the 90s what I found was it was mostly conversational, sometimes with some whiteboarding although of a much more relaxed nature than contemporary whiteboarding. It was more a tool to help express your thoughts and draw pictures than writing code.
There were some companies like Microsoft who were starting to become known for being more intense, but I never came across that.
It wasn't until the mid-aughts that I started to see brain teasers, "real" whiteboarding, and other aspects that started to bleed into standard interviews.
my first job at a startup (first engineer after the founders) consisted of 13 hours on the phone with the CTO over a few weeks and then an in person all day interview that included traveling from Chicago to SF and a couple of dinners with the founders. this was 1996. our typical interviews after joining were all day affairs and they people almost all people that were referred in or had worked with in the past (I wasn't).
interviews at twitter back in 2010 were 6 hours and that was true even for me when we had an agreement to acquire my company pending the success of those interviews. at the time they had a lot of ex-googlers and they were setup similarly.
An 8 hour interviewing day plus an hour on the front end (screen) or back end (confirm/double check some things/really meet manager) can make sense.
3x 3 hours sounds -exhausting-.
> An 8 hour interviewing day plus an hour on the front end (screen) or back end (confirm/double check some things/really meet manager) can make sense.
> 3x 3 hours sounds -exhausting-.
I think most people would prefer 3 x 3 hour blocks.
A 3 hour block could be worked into a day without anyone batting an eye at every (tech) employer I've ever had. People go to appointments all the time.
A full 8 hour interviewing day requires taking the day off. It's also exhausting to do it all continuously.
The 3 x 3 hour structure also allows the company or candidate to end it early if it doesn't look like it's going to be a fit. I'd rather lose 3 hours and than take a vacation day, spend 8 hours somewhere, and then get rejected if they knew I wasn't a good fit after the first few hours.
I agree, 9 of one hour interviews is exhausting just imagining it. In my company, 3-4 steps that spans over days were already stressed. Guess I’m too old for that kind of companies
IME those kinds of interviews are a waste for the applicant because you have to do your 5-10 minute elevator pitch and 10-15 minute dive into your experience 9 separate times. It’s terribly exhausting.
On the other hand I like meeting a lot of people that I’d be working with. It’s nice to start day 1 knowing who people are.
In our interviews, the interviewer has read the applicant's detailed written materials, and the candidate has received the interviewer's materials from when they applied. So there is no elevator pitch, no walking through resume, no getting to know you. Just a conversation.
We also advance very few candidates to interviews and hire a surprisingly large proportion of those who interview, so it's not like you're doing all this interviewing for the usual slim chance of being hired. The written materials are the primary filter.
Hiring process RFD: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003
Yep, I had two interview processes that did this... 8 times, at the same time. Both said no after 8 interviews because of one person in the process who didn't like me, everyone else supposedly were on board.
It genuinely took me another year to even consider applying to another job it was so demoralizing.
It's funny (sad) because these are tech companies. Film a single interview and have the others review the video. Would save all involved a huge amount of time and effort while also providing a solid pathway for improving the interview process over time in a systematic manner.
For many places it's unspoken but true, it's about breaking you down and making you reframe your experience, either you constantly excuse the behavior or you'll not fit in with their weird toxic positivity.
They told me I could re-apply in six months and encouraged me (seemingly genuinely) to re-apply for their capricious activity, I just laughed in their face.
You are going to potentially spend a major portion of your life there - so it isn't that weird to set aside a full day to get to know them.
In my experience with this format it isn't like you are coding for 9 hours. It starts with soft HR stuff, ends with a sales pitch to you, and most of the middle is just pleasant conversation with interesting people.
> You are going to potentially spend a major portion of your life there - so it isn't that weird to set aside a full day to get to know them.
Right, but you're not just doing it with them, you're potentially doing it with lots of companies you're applying to. It would be untenable to devote that much time to every prospect. Oxide can only do it because most other companies don't.
There are lots of axes on which to judge a company so I wouldn't write off Oxide for this alone, but it doesn't speak well of their respect for their candidates' time.
When I worked at Oxide, you only get to the interview part if you’re extremely close to an offer. Like, down to one or two candidates out of hundreds.
There's been several mentions of disrespecting the candidate's time in this conversation. Is the expected value of that time investment not worth it? You're trying to land a job. It seems like it would be, even if you have ten such companies.
If most companies take that much time before giving you a rejection or not, then job hunting would require quitting your current job to make sufficient time for it. With ten companies you’d need to organize something like 3-4 weeks of vacation.
That is worst possible outcome thinking.
If you consistently fail (or give up) at the very last interview, there's something rather wrong.
Your median/average should be better.
The reason companies have that many interview hours spread across multiple slots is that then have fallout over the funnel.
They don’t have every candidate scheduled for the entire time of all the rounds. If you don’t pass earlier rounds, they’re not going to waste time (yours and theirs) hauling you through more rounds of interviews.
If you make it to the end of all of those scheduled interviews, there’s probably a very good chance you’re getting an offer.
I understand that, but it's still possible to devote up to 9 hours to this and get nothing in return. And maybe not just possible, but likely. We don't know how eagerly their pipeline rejects candidates. Every candidate has to take that gamble.
9 hours just seems excessive. Other companies have "funnel" hiring processes like this and still manage to do it in 3 hours instead of 9.
You do know: we are telling you. We advance very few candidates to interviews and hire a surprisingly large proportion of those who interview. The written materials are the primary filter.
Great, I'm glad to hear it.
> You do know
No, I did not know when I posted that comment. steveklabnik's comment was posted concurrently with mine, and I did not feel the need to scour the whole thread in case there happened to be an answer to this specific question from an Oxide employee. But thank you for the data point.