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Oxide raises $200M Series C

oxide.computer

131–140 of 355 posts

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#131
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a long term vision. Total chaos.

Yeah there's a famous essay "The tyranny of structurelessness" or something like that. The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy. If there isn't a formal one that just means there's an informal one which is usually much worse.

> The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy.

See perhaps Le Guin's novel:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#132

I'm confused what their product is... "The cloud you own"? Isn't that just... a server? Sure, it looks like a very nice server, but is there anything special about it apart from that?

If you have ever struggled with a server whose bios won't netboot because there's a misconfiguration on the switch, or the Ethernet cable is not coded right for the speed of the server's card (because your vendor silently "upgraded" you to 25 Gbit because they were out of 10 Gbit cards), and then when it does boot, it is thermally throttled because it's tiny fans happen to be blowing in the one spot where your electrician tied a bundle of electric cables 10 cm thick, and then once you get the thermal throttling problem solved, you find out your version of IPMItool is incompatible with some stupid extension your server vendor defaulted to "on", then you might understand why Oxide is a good deal.

If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#134
post #7

Oxide is the only company where I check the careers page hoping that they have a position which I can apply to. Happy to see their success. Especially so if you've been following their journey through their podcasts (easily the best tech podcast out there if you care about your craft; no filler, all killer).

I actually did apply, The mere application takes hours upon hours, and for what a generic rejection email. This isn't the worst though, I recently went through an interview with another startup company, and after six interviews and a take-home project I found myself getting the same generic rejection. The CEO went out of his way to tell me he didn't like my resume since I've had to hop around a little bit to stay emp…

If you went through multiple rounds it likely means they were seriously considering you but ultimately they didn’t get to a yes. If it’s any comfort that means you did pretty well.

The short stints on a resume is likely not the only reason you didn’t get to 100%, but unfortunately you should know that it’s seen as a pretty bad signal. The general expectation is 2 years minimum at a gig. If you have multiple short non-contract jobs it raises the concern that a candidate doesn’t commit to their jobs, or that they don’t do well at their jobs and are getting let go.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#135
post #79

I just came to know about Oxide the other day, and god damn if it is not a dream workplace! High salary, flat structure, a large open-source presence, and maybe much more! Their blogs are really good too. I am an undergraduate right now and looking at the people working there, it doesn't seem likely they would hire a fresh grad, I think I have found the yardstick I am going to measure myself by going forward, "Am I s…

After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a long term vision. Total chaos.

>Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#136
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Concerns that should have been handled in the initial call, somehow get pushed back till after I've wasted monumental amount of time. Honestly these "reasons" they give are usually BS excuses when it basically amounts to they don't like your personality or looks.

Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package was at any point during the process. It's a contractor life for me, I work for money, not "purpose" or anything else. Hell my Facebook (technically a fully owned subsidiary to be fair) interview loop was easier. I didn't get the job that time either, but at least it was straight up.

> Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package was at any point during the process.

In previous HN threads they said something to the effect that they expect their applicants to have read what’s online about their equal base salary. Equity is not equally applied though.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#137
Wow, amazing. That some serious money. Everybody gets a raise hopefully. Congrats everybody.

What to do with so much money?

An AI product is of course the 'no-brainer', I would love to see them partner with Tenstorrent for the CPU/AI part. I think Bryan described this as Door 3 'doing something crazy'.

A product around AMD APU was talked about, but in a recent talk Brain said AMD doesn't seem to care about that product.

OpenTitan is now getting ready for production uses, maybe makes sense to switch to that in the future. Moving Hubris onto that shouldn't be to big of a lift.

A conventional server without DC bus bar maybe? Not talking about homelab server but something in a class where you can't have a whole rack and the bus bar. The main seller would be the fireware and software ontop to get people into the control plane ecosystem. And you could make Linux boot on it too for more market reach potentially. I'm not sure how much such a platform could share with current system.

An SSD or NIC with open fireware would be great, but not sure if you can develop that only for your own product or if you would want to sell it separatly to make sense. But that would be big departure from the current All-in-One product.

Amazing what you can do when all you try to do is make podcast. Maybe now they have money to bring back 'On the Metal'. I enjoyed the more structured interview style podcast about history of computing quite a bit. That said the more discussion oriented 'Oxide and Friends' is also nice.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package was at any point during the process. It's a contractor life for me, I work for money, not "purpose" or anything else. Hell my Facebook (technically a fully owned subsidiary to be fair) interview loop was easier. I didn't get the job that time either, but at least it was straight up.

> Did I mention no one told me what the compensation package was at any point during the process. In previous HN threads they said something to the effect that they expect their applicants to have read what’s online about their equal base salary. Equity is not equally applied though.

I'm not talking about Oxide here, this was a different company.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#139
post #93

Has anyone purchased/enquired about an Oxide rack or currently running one ? any info on pricing ?

Prices are not public, but comments over the years have hinted it’s in the $500K to $1mm range.

Their hardware is multiple generations behind at this point, however. I wonder if they’re starting to reduce the price because it’s hard to justify paying so much for old hardware. They could just be targeting customers who don’t care as much about performance or efficiency as they do the software stack.

Re: Oxide raises $200M Series C

#140
post #79

I just came to know about Oxide the other day, and god damn if it is not a dream workplace! High salary, flat structure, a large open-source presence, and maybe much more! Their blogs are really good too. I am an undergraduate right now and looking at the people working there, it doesn't seem likely they would hire a fresh grad, I think I have found the yardstick I am going to measure myself by going forward, "Am I s…

After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a long term vision. Total chaos.

I think flat structures aren't always bad - if the organization is geared towards maintenance and care work, it's essential to be as flat as possible. Another good example would be research labs, where experimentation cannot happen in hierarchical envrionments.

For an organization that has definite goals and have to ship a product by a deadline, a flat structure can surely be detrimental to any progress. In an environment of competition (from outsiders) and scarcity, a flat structure will only create either chaos or an implicit form of hierarchy that is even more cruel than what should have been.

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