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Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

explorer.oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#111

Post by tptacek »

thraway3837 wrote: post #21
jjice wrote: post #6

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…

I have some qualms with Oxide's hiring philosophy (I will have opinions on anything I allow myself to have opinions on, and "opinions on hiring processes" are part of my personal identity) but I want to call this complaint out.

You can see from this thread that Oxide is a company with an online fan base. If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open. It is extraordinarily difficult to service those kinds of candidate flows. That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it) or other unfriendly/unfair practices --- which are rife across the industry, most especially at companies that don't have the reputation Oxide is trying to cultivate --- but it does give some context to it.

Long story short: you can't really predict how a company treats its team from the first-contact inbound candidate experience. It's a signal, but it's a small signal among a great many others.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#112

Post by EvanAnderson »

wmf wrote: post #102
EvanAnderson wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cabling, plumbing, etc, aside, all the "blade servers" I've ever worked with were still glorified IBM PC's. They still have BMC's strapped to legacy interfaces pretending to be decades-old hardware allowing for "headless" operation of a platform originally intended to be a single-user computer on a desk with a monitor and keyboard, etc. That's what's so cool about Oxide's boxes to me-- the legacy garbage is gone and…

FWIW the original IBM BladeCenter platform was developed before BMCs so it had a much smaller service processor per blade connected over an out of band RS-485 management bus to a chassis management module. It was closer to Oxide than what's being sold today. And then "Windows needs VGA" kicked in.

IBM gear, aside from Thinkpads and the EduQuest PCs, have never been a thing I've gotten to interact with. Their documentation was always very good (which I think implies a certain level of overall competence) Given their massive legacy in datacenters I can imagine their PC-based server gear probably benefited.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#115

Post by NewsaHackO »

dijit wrote: post #56
jaggederest wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands of applicants reaching the substantial work stage is a failure of the systems thinking you're talking about. Hundreds of resumes nearly always gets narrowed down to perhaps a dozen or two at most at the screening stage. 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.

Hundreds of good applicants can’t be whittled down to a dozen without being very picky about things in the resume which may just be a poor representation. 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.

Yes, people don’t realize that’s why a lot of desirable jobs/grad schools become filled with people from top universities and previous employment. Pedigree is probably the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to shaving off a good chuck of applicants to a level that at least you know would be adequate.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#116

Post by db48x »

FireBeyond wrote: post #104
bcantrill wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Several folks complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted. > That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)? Your response is not a response to the OP's claim. The OP didn't claim you didn't provide specific feedback, it was that they were entirely ghosted mid-proces…

> The OP didn't claim you didn't provide specific feedback, it was that they were entirely ghosted mid-process. And that others said the same.

Eh, if even a small percentage of those emails end up in a spam folder then there are going to be people who think that they were ghosted. They didn’t ghost me. Alas, they didn’t hire me either.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#117

Post by sgarland »

dijit wrote: post #56
jaggederest wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands of applicants reaching the substantial work stage is a failure of the systems thinking you're talking about. Hundreds of resumes nearly always gets narrowed down to perhaps a dozen or two at most at the screening stage. 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.

Hundreds of good applicants can’t be whittled down to a dozen without being very picky about things in the resume which may just be a poor representation. 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.

As long as you aren’t biasing for any protected classes, why does it matter? If you as an employer have found that graduates from Foo University is a generally positive signal, then why wouldn’t you bias for that, if it’s saving you significant time, and introducing minimal false positives?

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#118

Post by q3k »

bcantrill wrote: post #57
thraway3837 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#119

Post by FireBeyond »

db48x wrote: post #116
FireBeyond wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Several folks complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted. > That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)? Your response is not a response to the OP's claim. The OP didn't claim you didn't provide specific feedback, it was that they were entirely ghosted mid-proces…

> The OP didn't claim you didn't provide specific feedback, it was that they were entirely ghosted mid-process. And that others said the same. Eh, if even a small percentage of those emails end up in a spam folder then there are going to be people who think that they were ghosted. They didn’t ghost me. Alas, they didn’t hire me either.

Sure. But even then Bryan says people have no right to be upset because they are “quite explicit” that they don’t provide feedback, while a candidate applying for a job reads that the company prides itself on not ghosting anyone and providing whatever possible feedback.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#120

Post by e40 »

jjice wrote: post #6

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…

Thought of the same, has a big Sun Microsystems vibe.
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