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Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

explorer.oxide.computer

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Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#191

Post by steveklabnik »

effisfor wrote: post #165
bcantrill wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry if this sounds like a letter to Santa Claus Bryan, but when you do really well in this market, do you have any plans to build something this well rounded for small dev agencies, faculty-level education, etc?

Not Bryan, but historically, the answer here is "not any time soon." The design is inherently about the scale of building an entire rack as a single unit; smaller sizes are just an entirely different product. Eventually, I expect they'll branch out in some ways, but there's so much work in producing, and demand for purchasing, their current product that it doesn't make business sense to do so.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#192

Post by q3k »

steveklabnik wrote: post #189
zapu wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I left Oxide a long time ago, I don't know about q3k's specific case (though I agree six months is a very long time), but it is just true from the numbers that it is very, very hard to get a job at Oxide. The number of applicants compared to the number of positions is a very intense ratio. When I was there, there were often very tough decisions, where we had one opening, but five or even ten excellent final candidate…

I don't mind the rejection (I know I'm not _that_ good, I understand there's tons of applications and I'm fine with that), but the wait and lack of clear feedback sucked.

The response was particularly unclear - was I rejected outright? Did I slip through the cracks and then the role got filled by someone else? Should I reapply, or am I not a fit for company culture? Or just maybe not a fit for the role? If I reapply, should it be with the same interview packet, or should I rethink it? Like, is it me or is is it you?

Even when I applied to Google (a famously 'bad' recruitment experience according to most) I was able to at least regularly talk to a human who would give me feedback from interviews. And when there was a lack of team fit they'd tell me so clearly and help me look for another role. They treated me like a human! Like, I could talk to someone! Oxide just gave me a canned answer without a signature attached and no way to actually talk to anyone.

Oh well, in the meantime I've actually found a meaningful job where the recruitment experience didn't feel like I'm just throwing messages in a bottle into the ocean and hoping to get a response.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#193

Post by steveklabnik »

bflesch wrote: post #153
bcantrill wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wer…

Not at Oxide anymore, but

> and their backdoors

One thing about Oxide's product is that it significantly eliminates a lot of these sorts of vectors. Pretty much every part of the rack that can be is open source, for example. That BMC from other vendors that have a full OS running inside, where you have no clue what it's doing? You can go look at what does that job over here: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris

The root of trust means that you know that nothing has been tampered with, and that attestation is threaded up through into the host OS, which pretty much nobody else that I know of is doing.

I don't know what the current thinking is around this issue all of the events you're talking about happened after I left. But the stance was always that it's your hardware, you own it, and you should know what's running on it. That's also why there's no continual licensing fees, you're buying this, not renting it.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#195

Post by ksec »

I didn't know they started shipping Zen 5 already. Hopefully they will be on Zen6 soon after its launch.

The Computer Sled is an 2U unit. I am wondering if they could further shrink it to 1U to further increase the compute density. It will probably need a redesign that is water cooling only.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#196

Post by aabhay »

ykurtov wrote: post #179
aabhay wrote: post #170

I simply don’t see the value here. At the cost of these systems its inevitable that you hire at least one person full time to manage your rack infra, and that person would likely prefer the customizability of commodity hardware. Source: I run a startup that recently did our datacenter buildout. At no point were we at all interested in a single integrated vendor.

You don't need oxide, you can't afford it, and you're not a target customer.

This is equally true of a company with a bad product?

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#197

Post by steveklabnik »

q3k wrote: post #192
steveklabnik wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left Oxide a long time ago, I don't know about q3k's specific case (though I agree six months is a very long time), but it is just true from the numbers that it is very, very hard to get a job at Oxide. The number of applicants compared to the number of positions is a very intense ratio. When I was there, there were often very tough decisions, where we had one opening, but five or even ten excellent final candidate…

I don't mind the rejection (I know I'm not _that_ good, I understand there's tons of applications and I'm fine with that), but the wait and lack of clear feedback sucked. The response was particularly unclear - was I rejected outright? Did I slip through the cracks and then the role got filled by someone else? Should I reapply, or am I not a fit for company culture? Or just maybe not a fit for the role? If I reapply,…

I'm glad you found a job you like, truly. It's rough out there right now for everyone. I have people close to me that have been looking for work for years, and it's very demoralizing.

I think that there's a certain deeper truth in what you've posted, which is that hiring is very hard, and different people feel different ways about different things. I also applied to Google once upon a time, and it was spectacularly confusing and bad. Yeah, I could speak to humans, but that wasn't particularly helpful. I regularly received contradictory information, and the stalling and back and forth went on so long I completed several other processes during the wait, and ended up at Cloudflare instead. That doesn't mean that you're wrong that you had a better time than I did, it just is what it is.

I know you're not looking, but to give you my take on the biggest question here, in case anyone else is curious:

> If I reapply, should it be with the same interview packet, or should I rethink it?

In general, resubmitting with the same materials isn't a good idea. If they didn't get you in the first time, they won't the next time, and also in general, time has passed, you've probably done other things since then... naturally, this means the answers will end up differently.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#198

Post by steveklabnik »

tptacek wrote: post #111
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 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…

> 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 not just that: it's an avalanche of very high quality applicants. If it were a lot of poor ones, that would be easier! I'm sure yinz get lots of great ones too, but I do think that there is a meaningful difference between "thousands of resume spam people you'd never hire" and "hundreds of good applicants, dozens of great ones". It's more than just the numbers, though the numbers do matter.

> That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it)

I fully agree, both in that it's not an excuse for ghosting, but also that the reality of things is that sometimes things take longer than they should, even though that sucks. And while you can try to avoid it, and Oxide does, startups are very difficult.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#199

Post by dgroshev »

steveklabnik wrote: post #188
dgroshev wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably 16 hours all in between research, writing, and editing, spread over a week. That might be a bit more than average, since English is my second language, and I make many passes to make sure the text works. Got boilerplate-rejected with zero human interaction three months later.

> three months later. This is long for sure, but this is the guidance given on the Careers page: > All candidates will receive a response, but this takes time: multiple Oxide employees review every candidate and their materials. We process applications in the order received, and so the length of time may vary. 4-6 weeks is pretty normal, but it can be longer than that for positions that are particularly oversubscribe…

I don't mean a conversation. I understand the process and how front-loaded it is at Oxide. I mean just having an actual human being on the other side of those rejection emails, instead of sending them from an unmonitored address. Oxide's own RFD 3 says

> Candidates may well respond to a rejection by asking for more specific feedback; to the degree that feedback can be constructive, it should be provided.

…but in practice it's just boilerplate and silence. Good luck asking when no one's listening [1].

Lots of companies do that, too. The problem is that this approach feels even more unfair than when it's a more "regular" hiring flow. Oxide asks for a very high level of effort from their applicants, but you can see in these comments that at the same time they are quite far towards the lower end of how much visible effort they commit back to the applicants (delays, boilerplate, ghosting).

And sure, as you say it's hundreds-to-thousands of applications, and potentially dozens-to-hundreds of emails to reply to. But the additional time it takes to send a one line reply pales in comparison to thoughtfully reading 12+ pages of materials, which they say they do. I just don't think that adding a few percent on top of that massive effort is unrealistic. It's an active decision to save time and money on people who didn't pass the first stage; I think it's an unethical decision, but then I'm not nearly as successful as Bryan Cantrill.

[1]: To be fair, Bryan kindly advised to "DM" him for feedback in a similar thread half a year ago. There are no DMs on here, so I DM'd on bsky and tried to guess his email, but I probably guessed wrong and he doesn't check his bsky DMs.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#200

Post by steveklabnik »

ksec wrote: post #195

I didn't know they started shipping Zen 5 already. Hopefully they will be on Zen6 soon after its launch. The Computer Sled is an 2U unit. I am wondering if they could further shrink it to 1U to further increase the compute density. It will probably need a redesign that is water cooling only.

Oxide's sleds don't conform to U sizes directly, IIRC. And even though I'm not there anymore, I can say for sure that it's not going to shrink to 1U: the larger size is very important for other reasons. For example, the larger sled size means larger fans, which means that they can be run at lower speeds, meaning less power draw, less wear and tear, and less noise.

> water cooling only.

There's some comments above about water cooling, I doubt this will happen, but we'll see I guess.

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