I 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.
EvanAnderson 15 hours ago [-]
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.
sgarland 12 hours ago [-]
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.
crabmusket 7 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure I'm not talented enough for Oxide, but just asking myself the application questions has been a fun exercise. I'm not in love with their problem space, but I am really into the way they work and do business.
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.
Fordec 14 hours ago [-]
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.
hagbard_c 14 hours ago [-]
And the other company you want to work for is ___________ because they ____________. Inquiring minds want to know.
Fordec 10 hours ago [-]
Tailscale, decent developer focus
krkckktkwnwk 13 hours ago [-]
Please don’t leave such a question unanswered.
matheusmoreira 6 hours ago [-]
Many years ago, I quit the technology industry because I thought a company like Oxide could never exist. I want to work for them but I'm not sure I'm qualified. Maybe one day I'll apply.
thraway3837 15 hours ago [-]
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.
bcantrill 14 hours ago [-]
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.
teaearlgraycold 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know Brian or anyone at Oxide, but for the record nearly every place I have ever passed an interview (and later enjoyed employment at) has had people complain about the process online. Partly I think that's down to nearly everyone having an imperfect interview process. It's hard to do right and you won't fail as a company because you passed on a good candidate. You optimize for rejecting the people that will cause disaster, because those are the people that could cause you to fail. Some of the saltiness I see online must be sour grapes.
Brian, you need to step off your high horse. Few people can go around saying that they are the best, and you’re not one of them.
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.
thraway3837 5 hours ago [-]
Holy crap. This just keeps getting worse. Link to podcast? See if you can find a mirror if possible, these guys may actually try to scrub this off the internet once their company realizes they have a lose cannon in their senior team.
polack 4 hours ago [-]
It was not THAT bad, but it really feed my impression that there is an institutional god complex at Oxide.
q3k 11 hours ago [-]
The particular 'mess' I've encountered was I applied (wrote 11 pages of interview material) on 2024/09/29 and then received a canned 'yeah whoops sorry for taking this long, not interested' on 2025/03/24. That's almost 6 months of delay from submission to first contact.
Terrible process. You need to give feedback early if you're not interested in someone, not leave them hanging for nearly half a year.
FireBeyond 12 hours ago [-]
> Several folks complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted.
> 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."
> 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.
FireBeyond 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pizzafeelsright 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I thought about applying.
Investing 6 hours into applying for a position should warrant a response beyond 'we are going to pass'
nwienert 3 hours ago [-]
It's so disrespectful to not give feedback to people you reject, companies that do it should be shunned.
Have some respect, be human.
FireBeyond 9 hours ago [-]
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".
mrcwinn 14 hours ago [-]
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?
bcantrill 14 hours ago [-]
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 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])
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.
esseph 4 hours ago [-]
It is very interesting to me to read these responses from some of you because I honestly don't see him saying anything at all unreasonable or out of line in any way.
But then again, I'm not a PR person, HR, or sales.
mrcwinn 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bcantrill 9 hours ago [-]
Clearly, you find Oxide's approach very upsetting; in the words of Laurie Bream, "look inward."
sieabahlpark 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
14 hours ago [-]
thraway3837 6 hours ago [-]
wow. If I am correct, this is the cofounder and CTO of Oxide. This is a very defensive and agressive response. This explains everything I need to know about your workplace and leadership structure. Hardest pass. No thank you.
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."
Kevcmk 3 hours ago [-]
I am not seeing the issue here
ithkuil 26 minutes ago [-]
Damned if you reply with empty corpspeak, damned if you don't
5 hours ago [-]
tptacek 12 hours ago [-]
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 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.
dijit 15 hours ago [-]
Devils advocate (really not affiliated with oxide, but I have worked for a “desirable” employer before).
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).
jaggederest 15 hours ago [-]
There's a simple answer, if someone is doing a substantial amount of work for your interview process, pay them an amount of money that is more than zero but less than "do job interviews for a living". Or provide that amount times two to a charity of their choice.
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.
dijit 15 hours ago [-]
“put substantial effort into it” is such a personal thing.
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.
jaggederest 15 hours ago [-]
Thousands of applicants reaching the substantial work stage is a failure of the systems thinking you're talking about. Hundreds of resumes nearly always gets narrowed down to perhaps a dozen or two at most at the screening stage.
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.
dijit 15 hours ago [-]
Hundreds of good applicants can’t be whittled down to a dozen without being very picky about things in the resume which may just be a poor representation.
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.
sgarland 11 hours ago [-]
As long as you aren’t biasing for any protected classes, why does it matter? If you as an employer have found that graduates from Foo University is a generally positive signal, then why wouldn’t you bias for that, if it’s saving you significant time, and introducing minimal false positives?
NewsaHackO 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, people don’t realize that’s why a lot of desirable jobs/grad schools become filled with people from top universities and previous employment. Pedigree is probably the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to shaving off a good chuck of applicants to a level that at least you know would be adequate.
esseph 4 hours ago [-]
Reading this makes me want to throw up.
Do not mix up opportunity and capability.
jaggederest 14 hours ago [-]
Once again, you're misunderstanding the goal of the system if you think that it's necessary to deliberately whittle down hundreds of good applicants through careful process to get a great hire.
Hint: you don't even need to evaluate most candidates at all. Random sampling is sufficient and provably bias free.
dijit 14 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
jaggederest 14 hours ago [-]
> what happens if you start needing to dig through that pool of now rejected candidates?
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.
ThePowerOfFuet 13 hours ago [-]
>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
So about six minutes for the problem itself, then?
menaerus 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, speaking of bias ...
IshKebab 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah I just got a new job and they sent me swag for getting to a certain (quite early) stage in the interview process. Awesome idea.
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.
jaggederest 14 hours ago [-]
Hiring is expensive linearly to the salary of the people you're trying to hire, so if any of the companies you've worked for were trying to hire well, it'd be a rounding error. Back of the envelope is 90 days of salary, minimum, is the cost to hire, so there's no reason to be miserly about it - if you can't afford it, you can't afford to hire at all.
fred_is_fred 15 hours ago [-]
From a legal and financial perspective it seems like it would be difficult to pay people to do interview homework. There's tax implications and other issues like state labor laws.
icedchai 15 hours ago [-]
People do contract / temporary / 1099 work all the time. It's very simple.
throwaway219450 15 hours ago [-]
If you truly believe you’re “scaling” you do it the Google way and have a strict loop with a good rubric for the interview so applicants are comparable. The whole point of that system is thousands of people and hundreds of interviewers, and a very standard process. I’ve always found it pretty fair even with some randomness in scoring.
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?
dijit 15 hours ago [-]
I’ve been through the Google process and I wouldn’t consider it to be the opposite of inhumane.
throwaway219450 14 hours ago [-]
Well “humane” and fair aren’t necessarily the same, and some people hate loops.
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.
DANmode 15 hours ago [-]
Use less negatives.
dijit 15 hours ago [-]
it was intentionally this way
DANmode 14 hours ago [-]
I probably should have spotted that, lol
marshray 15 hours ago [-]
I'm seeing the phrases "tremendous amount of homework", "substantial amount", and "few hours".
Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?
jamesmunns 13 hours ago [-]
My materials probably took 4-6 hours to write the first draft (I did most of it over two evenings, maybe one more just skimming the questions to figure out what things to talk about for each question), probably 2-3 hours or so to edit, then probably another hours over an evening just skimming it too many times before I hit submit. My materials were 16 pages or so, some of that was the original document (which has been linked in this comment section).
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.
sunshowers 13 hours ago [-]
My successful application took around 12 hours of writing and editing across 3 days, though I was lucky that most of my portfolio was already open source or otherwise public. Some people spend more, some spend less.
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.
sgarland 12 hours ago [-]
I don’t remember for my first application; probably a few hours. My second application was 27 pages, of which you can attribute a few to the pre-existing template. I spent probably 10-15 hours on it, spread across several evenings.
With every interview process you say "yes" only once and "no" many times. Where there are a lot of candidates, then many more times, while spending less time on each candidate. There is no way to design a process that will not leave the majority of candidates disappointed - as soon as they are up front with the amount of work you'll need to do, it sounds ethical to me
e40 10 hours ago [-]
Thought of the same, has a big Sun Microsystems vibe.
convolvatron 16 hours ago [-]
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
tonoto 13 hours ago [-]
Oxide is one of very few companies where I felt that it is a company I really want to work for one day. I spent a decent amount of hours answering the questions and sent in the application, but never got any feedback and this was like 2-3 years ago.
Spending time at regulated environments, I were in a similar situation that I could not really give out relevant information from the past. However, I have no regrets at all spending the time, as it was very useful for me personally to reflect over each question.
TZubiri 16 hours ago [-]
I'd be interested in the context if you'd be willing to share.
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.
convolvatron 16 hours ago [-]
no, they want a questionnaire, a coding sample, and an example of technical writing. there's a reasonable interpretation of that that doesn't involve writing a distributed unix.
TZubiri 16 hours ago [-]
Sounds approachable, and something that would be evaluated based on merit.
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.
jjav 3 hours ago [-]
Oxide is the only company I can think of that carries the torch of what silicon valley used to be in the 90s. Actual, awesome, cool technology! I wish massive success to Oxide.
Melatonic 15 hours ago [-]
Seriously - looks so cool
sreghrhhd 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
13 hours ago [-]
andrewl-hn 16 hours ago [-]
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 still beating inside!
bri3d 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Not so sure about this one. HCI (Hyperconverged) rack units (where storage and compute live in the same racked systems) and "blade servers" have been a thing for a really long time now; compute sleds aren't what's novel here.
Rack-level DC conversion is also not particularly novel, although underutilized IMO. It was pretty popular in HPC style density applications for awhile (see HP/SGI Altix 4000 for a good old example).
What's unique about Oxide is that they went all the way down to the firmware and then back up, rather than doing commodity hardware integration or reselling - for example, you can get something like a Supermicro EVO:Rail, but it will be running VMWare, not a fully integrated platform.
andrewl-hn 13 hours ago [-]
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 shelf units for networking, storage, etc. Yes, you could mix and match different components based on your needs, but that also meant that there were extra wires, cables, mounting rails, and more importantly - all these different components ran a mix of software that had to integrate using common denominator protocols and speeds.
Steve rightly mentioned the integration below, and I didn't put it in my message because I kinda assumed that we include software in this discussion too.
HP in 2005 had an army of programmers writing all sorts of firmware and software and another army of hardware engineers, too. They could have made an Oxide computer back then, and it would sell really well. But they didn't, and none of their competitors did despite this being an obvious product (in hindsight), an THIS is what I find interesting.
EvanAnderson 13 hours ago [-]
Cabling, plumbing, etc, aside, all the "blade servers" I've ever worked with were still glorified IBM PC's. They still have BMC's strapped to legacy interfaces pretending to be decades-old hardware allowing for "headless" operation of a platform originally intended to be a single-user computer on a desk with a monitor and keyboard, etc.
That's what's so cool about Oxide's boxes to me-- the legacy garbage is gone and the strange undefined behavior part and parcel with overlapping edge cases will be minimized (and managed, as opposed to used as an excuse by a vendor).
Dealing with incompatibilities and strange firmware interactions have made me come to see PC-based servers as a weird opposite of the "Swiss cheese" model. The various layers of interacting hardware, firmware, drivers, and OS act as a kind of "filter" for correct operation. When you swap or add one of these component you get one or more exciting new layers in the stack that, hopefully, have "holes" aligning with the existing.
wmf 13 hours ago [-]
FWIW the original IBM BladeCenter platform was developed before BMCs so it had a much smaller service processor per blade connected over an out of band RS-485 management bus to a chassis management module. It was closer to Oxide than what's being sold today. And then "Windows needs VGA" kicked in.
EvanAnderson 12 hours ago [-]
IBM gear, aside from Thinkpads and the EduQuest PCs, have never been a thing I've gotten to interact with. Their documentation was always very good (which I think implies a certain level of overall competence) Given their massive legacy in datacenters I can imagine their PC-based server gear probably benefited.
numpad0 8 hours ago [-]
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)
wmf 12 hours ago [-]
Speaking of the army, it's not clear that the extremely narrow feature set of Oxide justifies the engineering effort required.
The storage market used to be dominated by Oxide-style vertical integration and bespoke engineering and almost every vendor has transitioned to modularity over the last 20 years. Pure Storage seems to be doing OK with custom hardware though, so maybe the rest of the industry just has a lack of courage.
esseph 4 hours ago [-]
> it's not clear that the extremely narrow feature set of Oxide justifies the engineering effort required.
Some if it may even get sent to labs first for disassembly and inspection. Other times it may never ever be plugged in to an internet connection.
For these customers, the feature set, supply chain ownership, integration and support is everything.
steveklabnik 15 hours ago [-]
The big difference that everyone is missing in this subthread is that Oxide is about the hardware and the software.
There are systems which have similar overall hardware designs, but they are usually integrating a large amount of hardware and software from multiple vendors. Oxide is much closer to "everything is produced by Oxide."
> Somehow hardware giants like Dell, HP, SuperMicro, etc didn't make a product like this,
Dell and HP both have "blades" that plugged into a blade-chassis. The chassis had all the lights out mgmt as well as power/networking integrated so the blade was basically a metal box with compute/memory/storage and it just slid in to the dock.
I am sure that supermico had something like this as well
Melatonic 15 hours ago [-]
Cisco does too and theres another hardware virtualization layer below the normal ones ( so for example you can have many virtual nics per actual nic, etc)
casumel 14 hours ago [-]
Cisco UCS! A great hardware platform, albeit quite expensive.
XorNot 13 hours ago [-]
Blades basically died out is the thing - AFAIK no one really wanted them and honestly the same is a risk for what Oxide is doing too.
Blades have the basic issue of "how often do you want an unpopulated chassis?" - answer, never.
So really they're solving for replacing a failed piece of hardware.
But how often do you need to do that, what's it worth to you? If it makes sense then the statistical window where it does is tiny.
And if you own more then 1, like an entire rack, then do you even care? Because above some scale you're just going to wheel the rack out rather then go and pull individual units.
Basically the scaling is against you: for a highly manageable bladey rack unit, you've got to be small enough that one server matters, large enough you need the swap out to be low labor, but not so large you could just wait for the rack to go down. And this has to be worth enough to justify the price premium and vendor lock in (because at rack scale you just buy a rack of the cheapest whatever from any vendor and make them compete on price - at one job bringing our computer management in house triggered an immediate 10% price drop because we threatened HP with using another supplier at all).
jabl 2 hours ago [-]
I work in HPC and at some point we had a dozen or so racks with blade systems in our cluster. IIRC it was HP c7000 blade enclosures, 16 nodes in a 10U chassis. We had 4 such chassis in each rack. So reasonably dense, and there was a bit less cabling compared to individual servers.
OTOH, much of the cost saving of less cabling was eaten up by the vendor charging higher prices for equipment like HCA's or switches compatible with the blade enclosure. And unless you went for a fully non-blocking IB fabric there were a bunch of unused IB switch ports.
Also, while the blade enclosure had this fancy web GUI for management, at scale we had built our OOB management automation around IPMI anyway, so this wasn't a feature worth much for us. If anything it was a bit of a chore, as in the cases when we needed to do something which IPMI wasn't capable of, there was an extra step of figuring out the node->chassis mapping to know which chassis to connect to, and then figuring out which blade in the chassis corresponded to the node in question.
For the next generation we got these "twin" systems manufactures had started coming out with, with 4 nodes in a 2U chassis. A bit more cabling than the blade systems, but in the end it was somewhat cheaper.
linsomniac 13 hours ago [-]
You're right, even though I did have a good use-case for them. Back in 2000-~2020 I built a "boutique linux hosting" provider, and the Supermicro "Twin^2" servers really fit our use case. We were mostly serving small dedicated servers and were very price sensitive.
Loved the idea of blade servers, but they were targeted to people who needed very high compute in small footprints, and we both didn't have high compute requirements and were power/footprint constrained (we could get more power but cost/watt would go up because of cooling density).
The Twin^2 was nice because it amortized the cost of redundant power supplies over 4 machines, but didn't have the cost overhead of big backplanes or fancy layouts to get a lot of CPU+RAM in a small physical space.
Once populated a 4 node chassis was around $750/node including CPU and RAM and 2x SATA drives, it was within $100 of the price of a similar 1U server. We had around 10 cabinets in a data center when I left the company. It was, IMHO, a pretty good deal to get a dedicated box with 24x7 monitoring and sysadmin services including updates and backups at $150/mo.
linsomniac 13 hours ago [-]
Aside: we were also one of the first VM providers, I see on the Wayback Machine we were offering it in Feb 2005, predating Digital Ocean by at least 6 years. I've regretted not marketing and selling that service much more widely. It was a side project and we had a lot of irons in the fire at the time, so we didn't focus on it very much.
It was implemented with User Mode Linux, a Linux kernel ported to run under Linux instead of ported to a bare machine. A crazy idea, but it worked REALLY well. I remember finishing up the sign-up and billing software on the plane on the way to US PyCon where we announced the service, though I don't remember the year.
baby_souffle 12 hours ago [-]
> Basically the scaling is against you: for a highly manageable bladey rack unit, you've got to be small enough that one server matters, large enough you need the swap out to be low labor, but not so large you could just wait for the rack to go down. And this has to be worth enough to justify the price premium and vendor lock in (because at rack scale you just buy a rack of the cheapest whatever from any vendor and make them compete on price - at one job bringing our computer management in house triggered an immediate 10% price drop because we threatened HP with using another supplier at all).
Yep! That perfectly describes the few remaining people I know of that operate the things... and they're (slowly) seeing the light.
Oxide does get a bit of a pass on the vendor lock-in, though. I think you're buying from them _because_ they are the only vendor that has the security model and level of integration.
esseph 4 hours ago [-]
> Blades basically died out is the thing - AFAIK no one really wanted them and honestly the same is a risk for what Oxide is doing too.
To me, from someone that has worked for orgs that either would have been or are customers of Oxide - You need to be thinking more about the complete package. You are thinking about a tiny piece.
foobiekr 14 hours ago [-]
Blade servers have been doing this for 25+ years.
wmf 16 hours ago [-]
The vendors did make blades in the 2000s.
creaturemachine 15 hours ago [-]
I thought surely this isn't just blade servers, that those compute shelves were full of GPUs or something novel, but no just blades reincarnated. I used to support HP's baby version of this, the c3000.
jeffbee 15 hours ago [-]
Also, a big cabinet into which you plug varying amounts of hardware capacity, then use the control plane to partition into various virtual resources, describes at least at the conceptual level IBM going back decades.
fred_is_fred 15 hours ago [-]
> 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?
They all did. HP had Super Dome and blades and Synergy. Dell had similar.
manwithopinions 15 hours ago [-]
I learned about blade servers back in ~2010 because Blizzard used to run World of Warcraft realms on them and auctioned them off for charity.
Oxide hitting stride just in time for the memory crisis. I hope they can sustain because they have the coolest stuff, and the podcast is great.
I guess the world of atoms is still hard enough that you can publish an interactive spec of your product and not have to worry about it being immediately copied.
Thanks for sharing that. Very cool - was this sales product that you decided to release or has it always been public?
benjaminleonard 14 hours ago [-]
Sales/marketing. Though there's some ideas floating around on using it to document something like a CRU replacement.
We need to get it cross-linked from the main site still.
piker 14 hours ago [-]
Makes sense. I was looking for a link from the main site and noticed there wasn't one. A great leave-behind for sales. Nice job.
dorongrinstein 16 hours ago [-]
I met Bryan Cantrill the CEO of Oxide many years ago. He's awesome. I am rooting for Oxide to become as big as Dell.
bcantrill 13 hours ago [-]
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]
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 were accepted because our definition of "national security" concerns was aligned around lawful behavior and human rights.
But for procurement of new hardware from a startup like Oxide in 2026, European customers are forced to accept that US elites have unilaterally changed their definition of "national security" to also include things like invasion of Greenland/Canada, destabilizing tariffs, the idiotically executed Iran war and the Epstein files coverup. That's some seriously bad PR, not even mentioning the religious fundamentalism and Epstein's ties to Thiel and other US old money investors.
You guys know how the sausage is made from your time at DELL.
How is it possible for a US startup with honest leadership to shine through all this bullshit?
girfan 15 hours ago [-]
Cool tour.
I haven't kept up with their developments; what kind of workloads have they been pushing for? Since they don't seem to have any specialized accelerators in the Compute Sled, I am assuming they are not targeting AI workloads for now?
connicpu 14 hours ago [-]
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
adastra22 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ironhaven 6 hours ago [-]
They already picked out a interconnect standard it is called 100 Gigabit Ethernet. They can interoperate with multiple different vendors using the sfp28 ports on the switch. I bet they are even working on new programmable hardware for a next gen 200 Gigabit Ethernet fabric with oxide controlling the entire stack from hardware to software
adastra22 3 hours ago [-]
Ethernet would add way too much latency to this application.
girfan 9 hours ago [-]
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.
adastra22 8 hours ago [-]
None, they won’t. But it would out Oxide into the strong negotiating position, and not at the mercy of NVIDIA.
NVIDIA has one primary weakness here: GPUs are NOT optimal hardware for training or inference. No competitor has the market reach to challenge them though. An open standard supported by high growth, breakout startup would change that though.
bradfa 15 hours ago [-]
How easy is it to swap the fan bar out for a failed fan? It looks like a single unit holding all the fans. Can the sled be pulled but retained in the rack and then fan bars removed and reinstalled without fully removing the sled and without tools?
sudomateo 15 hours ago [-]
The sleds blind mate to power and network on the backplane so removing the sled will disconnect it. Once the sled is disconnected you pull the fan assembly out and replace it.
arjie 16 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, they're on the Epyc 9005 series now. Very cool. Dude, what a monster of a machine that rack is haha. Bloody hell.
bradfa 15 hours ago [-]
Curious how robust the (what looks like PCIe edge connector slots) connection to the drives is in practice. Obviously converting from the horizontal mainboard to a vertical drive requires such a connection, making it a plug-in card at least allows for replacing the card if it breaks/wears/etc, and mounting the front of the adapter card to a bulkhead should prevent much shifting of the card in the slot. Neat design and reuse of a cheap high speed connector.
GL26 14 hours ago [-]
Very instructive on how a computer rack works. I cought only later on that it was Oxide specific, but the design decisions seem so obvious to me that they look like industry standards. What about firmware architecture ? How do you design for reliability ? And how often does an infra like that stop working bc of a hardware problem ? And firmware ?
11 hours ago [-]
Kostic 15 hours ago [-]
A very beautiful website and a machine. Oxide folks should be proud, you can see the love that went into it.
PoignardAzur 16 hours ago [-]
The screen goes black for me after ~5s. I'm using Firefox on Linux, probably something to do with that.
completely locked my machine up with Firefox on Linux. Gave up after that.
dralley 16 hours ago [-]
It's a shame they missed out on the AI server boom.
sunshowers 13 hours ago [-]
I'm sure you're aware there's a huge amount of computation that isn't matrix multiplication :)
panick21_ 14 hours ago [-]
They didn't. They actually said they have huge demand because of AI companies. Turns out, when the AI is surfing the web or using doing other task, that's a CPU. So they also have demand for CPU.
kevinrineer 15 hours ago [-]
I'm a bit surprised that this kind of incredibly engineered hyperconverged rack system isn't doing some form of liquid cooling.
schainks 15 hours ago [-]
Not worth the capex to do that. Air cooling with evaporators up front is pretty standard and works great, not to mention fewer moving parts.
wmf 15 hours ago [-]
99% of data centers do not have liquid available to the rack. Liquid within the rack doesn't really help.
jtbaker 8 hours ago [-]
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/
eep_social 12 hours ago [-]
Interop standards for this like Open19 are not widely deployed and without interoperability it’s a dead
end since you need the hosting provider to give you the drop to your rack or cage. Hyperscalers I don’t know, but I’d guess they don’t deploy rack density that calls for liquid cooling yet.
drudolph914 15 hours ago [-]
big fan of oxide, and love the demo overall, but at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that these kinds of 3D demos are a bit gimmicky/cheap nowadays. pages like this used to be a signal for a high-end product and or a benchmark for good engineering. now though, we all know that this kind of work can be vibe-coded with threejs fairly quickly if you have the assets. idk ... it feels like it's trying to capture my attention through flashing lights instead of letting the work stand on its own
I don't want to subtract from the demo too much, b/c I do love oxide, but I do see this as a trend that more people will use to garner attention until it's too overdone - at which point, 3D will revert to being used for more practical use-cases
EDIT: typos
benjaminleonard 14 hours ago [-]
IIRC the CAD exports were in the many millions of polygons, so there's substantial work in preparing the assets for the explorer. Kenan (the 3d artist I worked with) did fantastic work cleaning and optimising them. I'm somewhat jealous of hardware startups with products without quite so many parts!
It's part of the reason I'd waited so long before making this, I knew it was going to be a lot of work. There's parts that Claude was especially useful for, like perf testing, debugging and animation. But the first half of the project was done almost entirely by hand.
drudolph914 13 hours ago [-]
I appreciate ya commenting, and let me tell ya directly that the work is great! I'm an old-head and curmudgeon - my thoughts here are about the world at large. your work here is great, please keep it up!
mnsc 14 hours ago [-]
My feeling? I ask myself the same question as I do for for everything nowadays. Yeah this might be ai slop, but is it good ai slop? If it's good, like this, I feel good. If it's bad, I feel bad.
Human effort as a proxy for quality... that ship has sailed. And that makes me feel frustrated.
drudolph914 14 hours ago [-]
yeah, I agree with you. I guess the part that feels disingenuous is that these kinds of projects are some-what cashing in on attention from people who still who see threejs slop as "high-effort UIs." this speaks more about me than other ppl, I'm just personally already at the point where all of this feels closer to slop rather than quality. I guess as this trend plays out, we'll all eventually feel somewhat similar on the yet-another-3d-UI-slop trend
sandworm101 3 hours ago [-]
That is the best in-browser 3d model/website I've seen. It loaded and functioned on my phone perfectly... A first for such things in my experience.
IIRC I heard that a single rack is upwards of $600k–$1m, but that was before the AI boom/crisis.
TZubiri 16 hours ago [-]
I don't recall if the price was confidential, but I will say that it's higher than that, and that it has been influenced by the RAM cost increase.
If I recall when comparing to competition, it was premium priced, for sure, but it's more that it's so dense that you had to compare 1 Oxide rack to like 4 commodity racks. Spec for spec I recall that the premium for the verticality wasn't that high.
jeffbee 16 hours ago [-]
With only 288 128GiB DDR5 ECC DIMMs? I'm sure that doesn't cost much.
DiabloD3 16 hours ago [-]
Thats neat.
RobLach 17 hours ago [-]
Neat
Rendered at 10:33:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Terrible process. You need to give feedback early if you're not interested in someone, not leave them hanging for nearly half a year.
> 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."
Source: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003
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.
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])
[0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Beautiful machine, and fun to see Illumos heart still beating inside!
Not so sure about this one. HCI (Hyperconverged) rack units (where storage and compute live in the same racked systems) and "blade servers" have been a thing for a really long time now; compute sleds aren't what's novel here.
Rack-level DC conversion is also not particularly novel, although underutilized IMO. It was pretty popular in HPC style density applications for awhile (see HP/SGI Altix 4000 for a good old example).
What's unique about Oxide is that they went all the way down to the firmware and then back up, rather than doing commodity hardware integration or reselling - for example, you can get something like a Supermicro EVO:Rail, but it will be running VMWare, not a fully integrated platform.
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 shelf units for networking, storage, etc. Yes, you could mix and match different components based on your needs, but that also meant that there were extra wires, cables, mounting rails, and more importantly - all these different components ran a mix of software that had to integrate using common denominator protocols and speeds.
Steve rightly mentioned the integration below, and I didn't put it in my message because I kinda assumed that we include software in this discussion too.
HP in 2005 had an army of programmers writing all sorts of firmware and software and another army of hardware engineers, too. They could have made an Oxide computer back then, and it would sell really well. But they didn't, and none of their competitors did despite this being an obvious product (in hindsight), an THIS is what I find interesting.
That's what's so cool about Oxide's boxes to me-- the legacy garbage is gone and the strange undefined behavior part and parcel with overlapping edge cases will be minimized (and managed, as opposed to used as an excuse by a vendor). Dealing with incompatibilities and strange firmware interactions have made me come to see PC-based servers as a weird opposite of the "Swiss cheese" model. The various layers of interacting hardware, firmware, drivers, and OS act as a kind of "filter" for correct operation. When you swap or add one of these component you get one or more exciting new layers in the stack that, hopefully, have "holes" aligning with the existing.
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)
The storage market used to be dominated by Oxide-style vertical integration and bespoke engineering and almost every vendor has transitioned to modularity over the last 20 years. Pure Storage seems to be doing OK with custom hardware though, so maybe the rest of the industry just has a lack of courage.
Their customers think so.
(Think governments, security-serious applications, critical workloads, science, energy, financial, etc.)
Some if it may even get sent to labs first for disassembly and inspection. Other times it may never ever be plugged in to an internet connection.
For these customers, the feature set, supply chain ownership, integration and support is everything.
There are systems which have similar overall hardware designs, but they are usually integrating a large amount of hardware and software from multiple vendors. Oxide is much closer to "everything is produced by Oxide."
I wrote this back in 2022, and it's still fundamentally relevant today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324
Dell and HP both have "blades" that plugged into a blade-chassis. The chassis had all the lights out mgmt as well as power/networking integrated so the blade was basically a metal box with compute/memory/storage and it just slid in to the dock.
I am sure that supermico had something like this as well
Blades have the basic issue of "how often do you want an unpopulated chassis?" - answer, never.
So really they're solving for replacing a failed piece of hardware.
But how often do you need to do that, what's it worth to you? If it makes sense then the statistical window where it does is tiny.
And if you own more then 1, like an entire rack, then do you even care? Because above some scale you're just going to wheel the rack out rather then go and pull individual units.
Basically the scaling is against you: for a highly manageable bladey rack unit, you've got to be small enough that one server matters, large enough you need the swap out to be low labor, but not so large you could just wait for the rack to go down. And this has to be worth enough to justify the price premium and vendor lock in (because at rack scale you just buy a rack of the cheapest whatever from any vendor and make them compete on price - at one job bringing our computer management in house triggered an immediate 10% price drop because we threatened HP with using another supplier at all).
OTOH, much of the cost saving of less cabling was eaten up by the vendor charging higher prices for equipment like HCA's or switches compatible with the blade enclosure. And unless you went for a fully non-blocking IB fabric there were a bunch of unused IB switch ports.
Also, while the blade enclosure had this fancy web GUI for management, at scale we had built our OOB management automation around IPMI anyway, so this wasn't a feature worth much for us. If anything it was a bit of a chore, as in the cases when we needed to do something which IPMI wasn't capable of, there was an extra step of figuring out the node->chassis mapping to know which chassis to connect to, and then figuring out which blade in the chassis corresponded to the node in question.
For the next generation we got these "twin" systems manufactures had started coming out with, with 4 nodes in a 2U chassis. A bit more cabling than the blade systems, but in the end it was somewhat cheaper.
Loved the idea of blade servers, but they were targeted to people who needed very high compute in small footprints, and we both didn't have high compute requirements and were power/footprint constrained (we could get more power but cost/watt would go up because of cooling density).
The Twin^2 was nice because it amortized the cost of redundant power supplies over 4 machines, but didn't have the cost overhead of big backplanes or fancy layouts to get a lot of CPU+RAM in a small physical space.
Once populated a 4 node chassis was around $750/node including CPU and RAM and 2x SATA drives, it was within $100 of the price of a similar 1U server. We had around 10 cabinets in a data center when I left the company. It was, IMHO, a pretty good deal to get a dedicated box with 24x7 monitoring and sysadmin services including updates and backups at $150/mo.
It was implemented with User Mode Linux, a Linux kernel ported to run under Linux instead of ported to a bare machine. A crazy idea, but it worked REALLY well. I remember finishing up the sign-up and billing software on the plane on the way to US PyCon where we announced the service, though I don't remember the year.
Yep! That perfectly describes the few remaining people I know of that operate the things... and they're (slowly) seeing the light.
Oxide does get a bit of a pass on the vendor lock-in, though. I think you're buying from them _because_ they are the only vendor that has the security model and level of integration.
To me, from someone that has worked for orgs that either would have been or are customers of Oxide - You need to be thinking more about the complete package. You are thinking about a tiny piece.
They all did. HP had Super Dome and blades and Synergy. Dell had similar.
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Server_blade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_server
I guess the world of atoms is still hard enough that you can publish an interactive spec of your product and not have to worry about it being immediately copied.
https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rack-explorer
We need to get it cross-linked from the main site still.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVkIKm9pkPY
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_XqNYt0cY0
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 were accepted because our definition of "national security" concerns was aligned around lawful behavior and human rights.
But for procurement of new hardware from a startup like Oxide in 2026, European customers are forced to accept that US elites have unilaterally changed their definition of "national security" to also include things like invasion of Greenland/Canada, destabilizing tariffs, the idiotically executed Iran war and the Epstein files coverup. That's some seriously bad PR, not even mentioning the religious fundamentalism and Epstein's ties to Thiel and other US old money investors.
You guys know how the sausage is made from your time at DELL.
How is it possible for a US startup with honest leadership to shine through all this bullshit?
NVIDIA has one primary weakness here: GPUs are NOT optimal hardware for training or inference. No competitor has the market reach to challenge them though. An open standard supported by high growth, breakout startup would change that though.
I don't want to subtract from the demo too much, b/c I do love oxide, but I do see this as a trend that more people will use to garner attention until it's too overdone - at which point, 3D will revert to being used for more practical use-cases
EDIT: typos
It's part of the reason I'd waited so long before making this, I knew it was going to be a lot of work. There's parts that Claude was especially useful for, like perf testing, debugging and animation. But the first half of the project was done almost entirely by hand.
Human effort as a proxy for quality... that ship has sailed. And that makes me feel frustrated.
Isn't it decommissioned?
If I recall when comparing to competition, it was premium priced, for sure, but it's more that it's so dense that you had to compare 1 Oxide rack to like 4 commodity racks. Spec for spec I recall that the premium for the verticality wasn't that high.