alt Hacker NewsI want Oxide to do so well. The product is a breath of fresh air in the era of cloud providers. As an engineer, I'd kill to get to work with their hardware.
Not to mention that working at Oxide sounds like a modern Sun Microsystems with the ideology that team has. Highly recommend their podcast "Oxide and Friends", and their original "On The Metal" show.
I've attempted to apply to their company multiple times over the years, only to be stun locked by the application process. Not because it's a bad process, but because I feel I'm not up to par as an engineer. Maybe one day I'll go through with it.
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Oxide is literally the only company where I have found zero reasons why I would be unhappy to work there. I have listened to many, many podcasts, read RFDs… it always seems like a place I would thrive. To that end, I have applied twice in the last few years; unfortunately declined both times, but to be fair, the first time I didn’t know any Rust, and the second time, I was learning it.
I will apply again at some point when an interesting job comes up, and I have a stronger skillset.
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.
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 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.
Thought of the same, has a big Sun Microsystems vibe.
I've gone through the same process, not so much that I don't think I would be worth considering, but serious code and documentation examples aren't something I can really give out given that they're proprietary. this last winter I started a whole guest-kernel based syscall intermediation and distribution framework in rust just for the application. with all kinds of design documents. I was about 30% finished by the time I landed a job somewhere else :)
but I still applaud the intent. I self-selected out by giving into scope creep
Seriously - looks so cool
Oxide certainly sounds cool. It reminds me of when I dealt with DEC gear back in the late 90s. That stuff felt more like "real computers" than any of the IBM PC-derived drek I'd worked with. Things were actually made to work together. Configurations were tested. Firmware was made for the integrated system and the system behaved like it was meant to work together instead of being the manifest behavior of all the edge cases of all the off-the-shelf disparate components plugged-together to make the resultant machine.
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.