I don't need to work there (nor do I feel like I'm smart or talented enough to)-- I just wish I could work with the Oxide gear in Customer engagement, too. I don't work with businesses big enough to need it, sadly. It looks so sweet.
This is what I think of when I think of utility-scale compute-- not racks of Supermicro / Dell / HP boxes with tiny ISA buses hiding on traces on their motherboards for "baseboard management controllers" to plug into to pretend to be PC AT keyboards.
I will apply again at some point when an interesting job comes up, and I have a stronger skillset.
Network with people at the company and third time may be a charm. Maybe.
That doesn't mean this isn't bad advice overall, but it doesn't give you any structural leg-up with Oxide specifically.
Greatest hope: their approach catches on outside just Oxide, and I get to work somewhere with a similar ethos and practises one day.
Greatest fear: the way they work only makes sense for the most elite and well-capitalised of companies.
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 complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted. One of employees repeatedly rebutted that claim in the comments, and they did this for quite a few commenters. Was a not a good look. I doubt much has improved since then as seeing the comments below confirms the same mess.
Don't spend time being amazed by folks who won't treat you right. It just ain't worth it.
To state clearly what I feel we have said many times: Yes, it's hard to get a job at Oxide. Yes, we get a lot applicants. Yes, we ask a lot of applicants upfront. But the payoff (and the reason it's worth the risk and the work for the right person!) is an extraordinary and uplifting team -- one that I daresay each of us counts as being of unparalleled breadth and depth in our careers.
Terrible process. You need to give feedback early if you're not interested in someone, not leave them hanging for nearly half a year.
Having looked at the process (RFD 3 and original post on dtrace.org), and contextualizing it with the oversubscribed-problem (which was mentioned somewhere else in this thread), I cannot help but think that there is a kind of solution that can help both the applicants and oxide and (yes) the industry as a whole.
The kinds of materials that the RFD asks for, seems like it would make for very interesting reading, regardless of whether it is read by a hiring-manager or a computer nerd. So why not, instead of (or in addition to) writing 11 pages, and sending them to the inbox of someone who (even without the additional responsibility of sorting thousands of applications in order hire-ability) is already extremely busy (this is, after all, a very demanding job), you publish them on your webpage?
In addition to taking some of the pressure off the oxide hiring-pipeline, you also get more exposure to people, who may work at organizations that would benefit from such a pipeline, but cannot afford to burn the political capital to replace the old pipeline. In a way, people who would appreciate your materials would, over some amount of time (and time should not be an issue, because it seems like it takes (at least sometimes) a long time for oxide to respond anyway), find them and possibly reach out.
I am basically a nobody, but if people started publishing things in the format of an oxide application, I would _totally_ read them. I am not saying I would necessarily _like_ them, but I would certainly read them[1]. Also, if disclosure is an issue, people can be published pseudonymously.
[1]: If for no other reason, than to see the multitude funny ways in which other people are wrong ;)
When I was there, there were often very tough decisions, where we had one opening, but five or even ten excellent final candidates. The math means that you are inherently turning down some excellent people.
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.
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.
Although I suppose you're saying that promising candidates are kept on file for later?
Being civil and considerate to people who are in your process spending many hours is not hard. Give them updates. Not a fit? Tell them. Plans have changed and the role is gone/changes so they won’t even fully consider you? Yell them. Buried under other work and don’t have the time to evaluate them? Tell them.
> Give them updates.
But you have to consider that different processes mean different ability to even give updates. Yes, saying "give me updates" is a good thing, but a side effect of the process that Oxide uses means that there is high latency for taking an initial look at an application. In that time, there's simply nothing to update you on. More traditional hiring practices have more stages, with faster feedback for candidates, and that's one pro of the way that they do things.
> Not a fit? Tell them.
People are told "no", but again, due to the above, it can take a while before this evaluation even happens.
> Plans have changed and the role is gone/changes so they won’t even fully consider you?
This does not happen at Oxide, roles are very carefully considered, and as a smaller startup, tend to be more general. There isn't the sort of re-org shuffling that happens at large organizations.
> Buried under other work and don’t have the time to evaluate them?
This is why Oxide makes it clear that this takes a long time, up front. It is a tremendous amount of work for Oxide to run their process.
It was also embarrassing to listen to the podcast episode where you humiliated that Eastern European guy you had invited. All very off putting and it really tarnish the brand.
> 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-process. And that others said the same.
But even beyond that, your response doesn't align with your own careers page's "Hiring Process":
> If candidates aren’t advanced into interviews by the process outlined in [rfd147], an explicit rejection should be sent. The level of oversubscription for Oxide roles means that this rejection will likely be non-specific — which is naturally frustrating for applicants that have put a lot of energy into their materials. 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.
Which would be in alignment:
> Decency
> We treat others with dignity, be they colleague, customer, community or competitor.
Here you just come off quite defensive, and argue that you at are Oxide are "very clear about" things that you say quite the opposite about on the very directions you tell candidates to read.
If what you say is true - and I can absolutely believe it is - fine, update the docs and the site. But don't come here and gaslight people into "I don't understand the problem. We're very clear, we've been very clear, people should not be complaining about this."
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.
Investing 6 hours into applying for a position should warrant a response beyond 'we are going to pass'
Have some respect, be human.
Humans doing human things
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".
And since transparency is a core value and principle, will you commit to sharing your cap table publicly?
In terms of the cap table: that's a bit of an odd request? On the one hand, there are no real secrets hanging out on our cap table -- but on the other, based on your tone, it doesn't feel like the request is terrible earnest? (And, I hasten to add, transparency is a value -- not a principle.[0])
It's just very funny to lead with that is all.
[0] https://www.information-age.com/mcnealy-and-ellison-usher-in...
A good rule of thumb is to always ask to see the cap table as an early employee. Question them when they don’t. Probably not so much with 0xide at series C, but definitely demand it at preseed and series A.
Hope all is good with you bro
You’re not getting across a reasonable point here. Maybe take a step back and think about what you really want to say.
Clearly something is landing wrong, but exactly what is not being well communicated.
But then again, I'm not a PR person, HR, or sales.
but
>"you are a social cancer"
when someone is earnestly explaining the tradeoffs they're making is not constructive dialogue.
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? 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 get a job at Oxide. Yes, we get a lot applicants. Yes, we ask a lot of applicants upfront. But the payoff (and the reason it's worth the risk and the work for the right person!) is an extraordinary and uplifting team -- one that I daresay each of us counts as being of unparalleled breadth and depth in our careers."
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.
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.
How would you handle a few thousand applicants for a single role?
I think no matter what you do it will feel inhumane, we can argue that a few hours of work for a take home test is inhumane too, being ghosted after doing one definitely wouldn’t pass my personal bar of acceptability, but if its the first stage and the task would take a properly qualified applicant less than 30 minutes then I can’t fault.
How would you do things? remember that it has to scale and you cant leave any gaps based on human fallibility (HR/Hiring Managers are humans and will forget if there are too many things going on at once).
Once you're in the door, service should be good/great.
All companies have to do is just be more transparent. Ie, we have a backlog of 1000 applicants. Or just give a time expectation for the resume to be reviewed.
Ghosting people who've "gotten in the door" and spent a considerable of time interviewing is extremely disrespectful.
> Or just give a time expectation for the resume to be reviewed.
The standard time given is four to six weeks. I haven't worked there in a long time, so I can't speak to how true that currently is, but sometimes it does take longer than that. Just like the materials are a lot of work to produce, they are also a lot of work to read, and they're read by multiple people.
I've done this for hiring before, for people who reached the "put substantial effort in" stage (in my case basically 2nd or 3rd round work sample stuff), and it was a great way to make sure we got good signal and they felt respected.
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 the ask, even if you’re paying me a flat rate, I might lose to someone equally qualified who puts in 1.01n into the task, so I should put 1.02n (etc; ad infinitum).
Which is part of the issue with all take home assignments. I have given out take home assignments (given to HR to be administered) which 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). I don’t doubt for even a moment that someone has spent several hours on this problem- because they’re not qualified.
Passing the HR barrier in that case will not help them unfortunately, because they’ll get to talk to me, and I will disqualify them in all likelihood, and candidates are told that it should take not more than a half hour, but en masse: people don’t listen.
The trouble is, theres thousands of applicants, a handful of HR, and one me.
Not to be on some kind of pedestal (I’m not), but the problem doesn’t scale, you need only apply the tiniest amount of systems thinking to see it.
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.
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.
Do not mix up opportunity and capability.
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.
No, in fact I see no indicators at all that it is the case.
> 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?
It may or may not be. It depends on the quality of the signal itself, its reliability, repeatability, and if that signal blinds you from other indicators or maybe even leads you astray.
Having a signal doesn't mean it's particularly useful. Example: like triggering an alert on a VMs cpu utilization. It's certainly a signal but rarely is it good for anything or actionable.
Hint: you don't even need to evaluate most candidates at all. Random sampling is sufficient and provably bias free.
> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash
> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.
What do you send them as a response "sorry, we're going ahead with other applicants" - "you have not been selected this time" -- what happens if you start needing to dig through that pool of now rejected candidates?
Peak humanity.
I acknowledge that I am reaching back out, and they may not be available.
Like a human does.
> Reminds me of something I heard once.
>> Whenever I get a stack of resumes, I throw half of them in the trash
>> I sure don't want unlucky people on my team.
I was actually about to make the same joke.
So about six minutes for the problem itself, then?
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.
You shouldn’t be giving take homes unless they’re either short, or the applicant passed a screen and you’re investing time. Otherwise how are you “scaling” the review? Claude? Hidden test suite (not bad)? Some sort of leaderboard (bad, rewards people with time), something else?
I like programming problems, spending a day at Google was fun, they put me up in a fancy hotel, and the interviewers were nice. Like it was clear a lot of time and money had gone into the process (6-8 hours of dev time is not cheap), not a zoom and ghost like most companies.
Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?
It's a fair bit of writing to ask for, but for a mostly remote and prose-driven company, you do a lot of long-form writing in the day to day work. The public RFDs and github issues/comments/commits give a good flavor for this.
As others have said, lots of my work is open source, and I have public writings and talks, so finding those were much easier for me than it might be for someone with only closed source works.
I don't remember how much time I put into mine when I applied.
It is worth keeping in mind that we write a _lot_. If you don't enjoy the process of writing, you might not like working here.
Got boilerplate-rejected with zero human interaction 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 oversubscribed. We'll try to give you a sense of how long it will take when you apply. This is generally the longest part of the process.
It is never something that is quick.
> with zero human interaction
This, on the other hand, is completely expected. As that page says
> If, based on your materials, we believe that there is a likely fit, we will work with you to schedule one-on-one conversations with people from across the company.
Everything is very front-loaded in the Oxide process. Hundreds (I left a long time ago at this point, could be thousands at this point, I dunno) of people submit materials, but the only conversations that happen are with the handful of people who are in final consideration. 99% of people don't ever do an in-person interview.
This has various pros and cons for candidates: for example, if you're very personable in person, but struggle with writing, the process is going to be hard on you. The counterpoint is that Oxide is specifically interested in people who can write well, because the written word is a huge part of the job. As an applicant, this structure is a pro because you will never get the "I did 10 interviews and then received a rejection" that can happen at companies that do multiple rounds of reviews: the vast majority of people don't make it past the first step, and there's a second and sometimes a third step, but that's it. The latency may be high, but the throughput is good.
> 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.
but I still applaud the intent. I self-selected out by giving into scope creep
It sounds from the outside like Oxide has an interview process that requires some low level engineering work to be delivered? Maybe I got that wrong.
As usual, I'm assuming the assignment is evaluated based on a reasonable time-commitment. From what the recruiting experts tell me, it's a good strategy to spend as much time as possible, the deliverable is better, and the optics aren't bad either, it signals investment into the application instead of signalling spray and pray application broadcasting.