41–50 of 224 posts
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 th…
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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), an…
From a legal and financial perspective it seems like it would be difficult to pay people to do interview homework. There's tax implications and other issues like state labor laws.
I'm a bit surprised that this kind of incredibly engineered hyperconverged rack system isn't doing some form of liquid cooling.
This design feels very obvious-in-hindsight . Consolidate power adapters and networking, replace cabling with pluggable slots. It's something similar to what IBM mainframes or Sun cabinets could've looked like. Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why? Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart…
> Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, 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
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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 pa…
I’ve been through the Google process and I wouldn’t consider it to be the opposite of inhumane.
This design feels very obvious-in-hindsight . Consolidate power adapters and networking, replace cabling with pluggable slots. It's something similar to what IBM mainframes or Sun cabinets could've looked like. Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this, even at their peak in 2000s or during cloud boom in 2010s. I wonder why? Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart…
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
I'm a bit surprised that this kind of incredibly engineered hyperconverged rack system isn't doing some form of liquid cooling.
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 th…
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 c…
Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?
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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…
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), an…
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.