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Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

explorer.oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#151

Post by nwienert »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #125
FireBeyond wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I thought about applying. Investing 6 hours into applying for a position should warrant a response beyond 'we are going to pass'

It's so disrespectful to not give feedback to people you reject, companies that do it should be shunned.

Have some respect, be human.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#152

Post by menaerus »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #88
dijit wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“put substantial effort into it” is such a personal thing. 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…

>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 So about six minutes for the problem itself, then?

Yeah, speaking of bias ...

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#153

Post by bflesch »

bcantrill wrote: post #87
dorongrinstein wrote: post #16

I met Bryan Cantrill the CEO of Oxide many years ago. He's awesome. I am rooting for Oxide to become as big as Dell.

Thank you for rooting for us! One important point of clarification: I am the CTO -- the CEO of Oxide is my co-founder, Steve Tuck. Long before we know what we wanted to do (or had a name for the company!), Steve and I knew we wanted to do something together; it's worth getting to know Steve (and our collaboration) in his own words![0][1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY [1] https://www.youtube.com/watc…

Your product and company look really cool, I hope you succeed. In the youtube video you've shared there's an interesting section about your values and how trust is needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY&t=4899

I wonder how Oxide plans to gain trust with European customers who are forced to witness toxic behavior by US elites on a regular basis?

In the past, the DELL/CISCO hardware and their backdoors were accepted because our definition of "national security" concerns was aligned around lawful behavior and human rights.

But for procurement of new hardware from a startup like Oxide in 2026, European customers are forced to accept that US elites have unilaterally changed their definition of "national security" to also include things like invasion of Greenland/Canada, destabilizing tariffs, the idiotically executed Iran war and the Epstein files coverup. That's some seriously bad PR, not even mentioning the religious fundamentalism and Epstein's ties to Thiel and other US old money investors.

You guys know how the sausage is made from your time at DELL.

How is it possible for a US startup with honest leadership to shine through all this bullshit?

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#154

Post by whazor »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #15

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…

Meanwhile a Hetzner rack: https://i.redd.it/u3o410rwdt6h1.jpeg

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#155

Post by jabl »

XorNot wrote: post #86
baby_souffle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Blades basically died out is the thing - AFAIK no one really wanted them and honestly the same is a risk for what Oxide is doing too. Blades have the basic issue of "how often do you want an unpopulated chassis?" - answer, never. So really they're solving for replacing a failed piece of hardware. But how often do you need to do that, what's it worth to you? If it makes sense then the statistical window where it does…

I work in HPC and at some point we had a dozen or so racks with blade systems in our cluster. IIRC it was HP c7000 blade enclosures, 16 nodes in a 10U chassis. We had 4 such chassis in each rack. So reasonably dense, and there was a bit less cabling compared to individual servers.

OTOH, much of the cost saving of less cabling was eaten up by the vendor charging higher prices for equipment like HCA's or switches compatible with the blade enclosure. And unless you went for a fully non-blocking IB fabric there were a bunch of unused IB switch ports.

Also, while the blade enclosure had this fancy web GUI for management, at scale we had built our OOB management automation around IPMI anyway, so this wasn't a feature worth much for us. If anything it was a bit of a chore, as in the cases when we needed to do something which IPMI wasn't capable of, there was an extra step of figuring out the node->chassis mapping to know which chassis to connect to, and then figuring out which blade in the chassis corresponded to the node in question.

For the next generation we got these "twin" systems manufactures had started coming out with, with 4 nodes in a 2U chassis. A bit more cabling than the blade systems, but in the end it was somewhat cheaper.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#156

Post by ithkuil »

Kevcmk wrote: post #149
thraway3837 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow. If I am correct, this is the cofounder and CTO of Oxide. This is a very defensive and agressive response. This explains everything I need to know about your workplace and leadership structure. Hardest pass. No thank you. In case it gets deleted, I've quoted what bcantrill said below. "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?…

I am not seeing the issue here

Damned if you reply with empty corpspeak, damned if you don't

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#157

Post by zapu »

q3k wrote: post #118
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…

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.

Hah, oh no, if they (practically) ghosted q3k, then most of us have no chance.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#158

Post by IshKebab »

jaggederest wrote: post #64
IshKebab wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I just got a new job and they sent me swag for getting to a certain (quite early) stage in the interview process. Awesome idea. 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.

Hiring is expensive linearly to the salary of the people you're trying to hire, so if any of the companies you've worked for were trying to hire well, it'd be a rounding error. Back of the envelope is 90 days of salary, minimum, is the cost to hire, so there's no reason to be miserly about it - if you can't afford it, you can't afford to hire at all.

I agree, but some people are just miserly. "Why spend money when we don't have to." is probably their thought process.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#159

Post by kaashif »

bcantrill wrote: post #82
mrcwinn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that all employees have equal salary pay (apart from sales people who can earn more and are valued higher). Do all have equal equity and voting rights, at least within common stock? And since transparency is a core value and principle, will you commit to sharing your cap table publicly?

I appreciate that our approach to compensation leaves some with overwhelming feelings of whataboutery, but no, we (of course?) do not have equal equity: as we have said (several times?) equity broadly compensates for risk -- and risk has gone down over time. (I used to tell people to "value the equity at zero"; I don't say that any longer because it plainly isn't.) In terms of the cap table: that's a bit of an odd re…

Some earnest, light feedback: to my ears, "kick butt" sounds about the same as one of those euphemistic substitutions for swears like "gosh we darn well try our darndest".

It's just very funny to lead with that is all.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#160

Post by kaashif »

esseph wrote: post #141
NewsaHackO wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reading this makes me want to throw up. Do not mix up opportunity and capability.

You do realize that the person you're replying to is not making a value judgement and probably agrees with you.

If you have two groups of people, one with a low but nonzero signal that they can do something, the other with no signals, is it still a good idea to use that signal?

You'll get fewer bad employees, but you also discard many capable people who haven't had the opportunity to even try for your signal.

It still is a signal, albeit a weak and highly inequitably distributed one.

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