Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour(explorer.oxide.computer) |
Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour(explorer.oxide.computer) |
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.
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.
but I still applaud the intent. I self-selected out by giving into scope creep
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.
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.
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.
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).
Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?
I guess the world of atoms is still hard enough that you can publish an interactive spec of your product and not have to worry about it being immediately copied.
Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!
We need to get it cross-linked from the main site still.
I don't want to subtract from the demo too much, b/c I do love oxide, but I do see this as a trend that more people will use to garner attention until it's too overdone - at which point, 3D will revert to being used for more practical use-cases
EDIT: typos
It's part of the reason I'd waited so long before making this, I knew it was going to be a lot of work. There's parts that Claude was especially useful for, like perf testing, debugging and animation. But the first half of the project was done almost entirely by hand.
Human effort as a proxy for quality... that ship has sailed. And that makes me feel frustrated.
If I recall when comparing to competition, it was premium priced, for sure, but it's more that it's so dense that you had to compare 1 Oxide rack to like 4 commodity racks. Spec for spec I recall that the premium for the verticality wasn't that high.
Not so sure about this one. HCI (Hyperconverged) rack units (where storage and compute live in the same racked systems) and "blade servers" have been a thing for a really long time now; compute sleds aren't what's novel here.
Rack-level DC conversion is also not particularly novel, although underutilized IMO. It was pretty popular in HPC style density applications for awhile (see HP/SGI Altix 4000 for a good old example).
What's unique about Oxide is that they went all the way down to the firmware and then back up, rather than doing commodity hardware integration or reselling - for example, you can get something like a Supermicro EVO:Rail, but it will be running VMWare, not a fully integrated platform.
There are systems which have similar overall hardware designs, but they are usually integrating a large amount of hardware and software from multiple vendors. Oxide is much closer to "everything is produced by Oxide."
I wrote this back in 2022, and it's still fundamentally relevant today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
Dell and HP both have "blades" that plugged into a blade-chassis. The chassis had all the lights out mgmt as well as power/networking integrated so the blade was basically a metal box with compute/memory/storage and it just slid in to the dock.
I am sure that supermico had something like this as well
They all did. HP had Super Dome and blades and Synergy. Dell had similar.
I don't remember how much time I put into mine when I applied.
And since transparency is a core value and principle, will you commit to sharing your cap table publicly?
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])
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Hint: you don't even need to evaluate most candidates at all. Random sampling is sufficient and provably bias free.
> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash
> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.
What do you send them as a response "sorry, we're going ahead with other applicants" - "you have not been selected this time" -- what happens if you start needing to dig through that pool of now rejected candidates?
Peak humanity.
I acknowledge that I am reaching back out, and they may not be available.
Like a human does.
> Reminds me of something I heard once.
>> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash
>> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.
I was actually about to make the same joke.