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Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

explorer.oxide.computer

121–130 of 224 posts

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#121
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…

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Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#122
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two companies that I want want to work for. Oxide is one of them. Many places I'm still willing to work for, but in a more neutral way. They're just mostly not hiring for my role/location as far as I can tell, so it is what it is.

And the other company you want to work for is ___________ because they ____________. Inquiring minds want to know.

Tailscale, decent developer focus

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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[dead]

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#125
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, I thought about applying.

Investing 6 hours into applying for a position should warrant a response beyond 'we are going to pass'

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#126

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'

On my last job search, I got to a few final rounds. In two cases, companies offered me a 15 minute "debrief" with the hiring manager, which I found invaluable - both gave sincerely good advice, and also helped the "what am I doing wrong?" with a "you were hireable as-is. but someone was moreso."

But generally, the more demands you put on a first round, the less likely I am to apply. I've seen companies asking for 8-10 multi-paragraph each long form answers to even get to a hiring screen. For one recent application, this was one of the questions, of eight: "Describe a time when you had to make a tradeoff in roadmap items. Describe each option and their merits, and the decision-making criteria you used. Describe what stakeholders you spoke with and how their input influenced you. Describe how you communicated this with the team, and customers. Be specific about all points and clear on the exact role you played in this process."

People can say "well, it's a good screen because if you won't put effort into that, will you put effort into your work", but if your argument is that you need to do such things because you get 500-1,000+ applicants per position, you're going to have a hard job convincing me that a human reads every one of those, and not just the subset that are not automatically routed to the trash by your ATS and/or AI.

So my end retort to that is "well, it's a good marker of the level of respect I can be expect to be treated with as an employee".

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to compete there when most of the margin is going to NVIDIA, pretty much impossible if you don't have the scale of Dell/Supermicro/etc

The Oxide approach, I think, would be to pick an open interconnect standard and work with one or more NVIDIA competitors to make hardware for it. E.g. AMD and a few of the specialized AI hardware companies. Essentially provide an open TPU standard.

Interesting. What would the incentives be for NVIDIA, for example, to opt into this? They are building their own racks now, like the NVL72 etc.

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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Clearly, you find Oxide's approach very upsetting; in the words of Laurie Bream, "look inward."

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#129

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…

I wish I could edit my post. Somehow everyone wrote to me about baldes. These are not the same, though. Blade servers were mounded into units of 4u, 8u, etc, they occupied a portion of the overall cabinet and still had to do "plumbing" for power and networking behind the chassis to the rest of the cabinet or to the rest of the datacenter. A full-cabinet blade rig would have multiple 8u blade units and some off the sh…

Forgot how I learned this but IIUC, blades failed because they expended per-rack weight and power budgets for datacenters with single enclosures. It turned out that you could compress 48U worth of computers into 8U or so, as long as you do not fill back the empty space with anything, because the cooling/cabling crawlspace collapses and circuit breakers will go off if you had done so. It wasn't because they still needed cabling.

This sounds like less of a problem for DCs with bare concrete flooring, but blades did fell out of fashion, so I guess the fractions of DCs with multiple levels or free-access floors were higher than anticipated.

(Also, maybe I'm just being an amateur, but I'd be scared of tolerance stacking with a "grape bunch" design like this. Individually enclosed chassis with cables and cage nuts are a lot more robust against dimensional issues)

Re: Oxide computer 3D rack guided tour

#130

I'm a bit surprised that this kind of incredibly engineered hyperconverged rack system isn't doing some form of liquid cooling.

I don’t think there’s a GPU component so it’s probably a much lower power profile. Also, per this cloudflare write up the Turin gen of the AMD Epycs is very efficient: https://blog.cloudflare.com/gen13-launch/
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