Oxide Hiring Process

The amount of written material (work samples, writing samples, free-form essay responses) they request is staggering. There is no guarantee they will read your responses with the same care you put into writing them - almost certainly they won't, since they have actual work to do and an honest reading of over a dozen responses, on technical subjects, is easily a huge chunk of a day. At least with a real-time interview, if you're wasting my time, I'm wasting an equal amount of yours. There is an incentive for the interviewer to get the signal they need to make a decision and respect the candidate's time, since it's their time too. This hiring approach won't scale, for them, or the people they need to hire, if they expand, so at some point they will be forced to change it. Until then, I think the better approach if you're interested in a place like this is to be so awesome they have to call you first.

&gt; &quot;What work have you found most challenging in your career and why?<p>What work have you done that you are particularly proud of and why?<p>When have you been happiest in your professional career and why?<p>When have you been unhappiest in your professional career and why?<p>For one of Oxide’s values, describe an example of how it was reflected in a particular body of your work.<p>For one of Oxide’s values, describe an example of how it was violated in your organization or work.&quot;<p>I feel like these are a test of creative writing skills, storytelling, believable exageration, and imagination more than their stated purpose.<p>&gt; &quot;In other cases, it’s even more nuanced: there have been many later-in-life converts to the beauty and joy of computers, and such candidates should emphatically not be excluded merely because they discovered their calling later than others. For those that concentrated in entirely non-technical disciplines, further probing will likely be required, with greater emphasis on their technical artifacts.&quot;<p>I love this section!

So much effort is put in to coming up with these systems and convincing ourselves that we&#x27;ve got the perfect hiring process, when in the end it&#x27;s very likely that it doesn&#x27;t work and is just a kind of ritual that has to exist so that you can defend your decisions by pointing to all the hoops you made people jump through.

They say to expect 9 hours of interviews, on top of all this homework. All-in, this looks like it would take at minimum one full day of work just writing on top of at least one extra-full day of interviewing and that&#x27;s not including time to research, think, and copyedit the written homework or generate work samples if they don&#x27;t already exist. Later on it insinuates the candidate would be expected to read internal issues and documentation requiring yet more of the candidates time - all for free without even the promise of an offer yet. This is essentially the same as Canonical&#x27;s well-known and ridiculed process, except this is from a hot startup so it might get a pass.<p>I have nothing but the strongest distaste for LeetCode interviews but this is another flavor of absurd that still takes a huge time commitment from the interviewee which inherently discriminates against those already employed, those later in life, and those interviewing at more than one company.<p>More evidence for my big binder of evidence that interviewing culture in our industry is entirely some grotesque form of hazing ritual that builds upon itself, with each company and team deciding that the specific form of pain that they had to go through is the ideal form to subject candidates to in order to justify the pain inflicted on them.

<i>To assess analytical ability, candidates should be asked to provide an analysis sample: a written analysis from the candidate. As with the work and writing sample, the specifics of the prompt will vary by domain: for engineers, this should be the analysis that the candidate performed of a system behaving pathologically; for sales, this might be the research the candidate performed of a prospect and their fit with the product before reaching out to them; for operations, this might be the examination of an existing process with an eye towards improvement; for product management, this might be the exploration of a new system or of a new aspect of the system. Regardless of domain, the sample should contain enough concrete detail to assess analytical ability, with the candidate asked to recall details to the best of their ability.</i><p>Given the level of detail requested here, in writing, this feels like it’s requiring proprietary information from a previous job.<p>I don’t think many people do “analysis [...] of a system behaving pathologically,” or “perform[] [analysis] of a [sales] prospect and their fit with the product before reaching out to them” on their own.

I applied almost two years ago. I am excited about what Oxide is doing and it felt like a fun opportunity. While I respect what they do around comp, for where I was in my life and goals I had set, it was going to be rough. I applied anyway at the encouragement of a friend who worked there. I think the packet process is awful. So much unnecessary work and frankly by the end I just sort of phoned it in because I lost interest. It took about two months to hear back (I applied in December 2021 and heard back February 2022) and get rejected and got nothing more than a generic form rejection letter after all the time spent on preparing the packet.<p>———<p>We are so humbled by your application to join Oxide Computer Company. At this stage of the company we are hyper-focused on certain areas of the stack and when we need specific domain space experience such as yours, please engage with us. Our roles will be updated as we need them.<p>We are grateful you took the time to apply and put so much thought into the candidate materials, we loved reading them. We would absolutely love to work with you in the future and cannot wait for that stage of the company!<p>All the best, The Oxide Team

So what is the Oxide hiring process?<p>&gt; Interviews shouldn’t necessarily take one form; interviewers should feel free to take a variety of styles and approaches<p>I guess we still don&#x27;t know.<p>&gt; Author: Bryan Cantrill<p>&gt; the act of writing — like so much else that we do — requires not only the ability to create wholly new material, but also the ability to reflect, correct, revise, and polish.<p>Oh Bryan, you could have spent your time doing some actual work instead of being pretentious to the tune of 4700 words and still not saying anything useful to anyone.

I&#x27;m struggling to read past the first couple paragraphs because the whole thing reeks of pretentiousness. How does that even happen?

9+ hours of interview process for a salary of $201,227 USD. Isn&#x27;t this bit too much?¹<p>This reminds me of the impractical and absurd hiring process of Canonical.²<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;careers" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oxide.computer&#x2F;careers</a><p>2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37059857">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37059857</a>

&gt; we have generally found nine hours of interviews to be sufficient without being overly burdensome.

It sounds like, in order to work at Oxide, I must be able to write, pitch, and engineer. I wonder if people who joined Apple, IBM, Dell, HP, Alienware etc.. were all renaissance artists.

Sensitivity and specificity [0] seem relevant here.<p>Every interview stage which is designed to reject bad candidates (true negatives) will also accidentally reject some good candidates (false negatives). The more eagerly you filter out bad candidates, the more you&#x27;ll also filter out good candidates; sensitivity decreases as specificity increases.<p>This means that building more pass&#x2F;fail tests into your interview pipeline may produce worse results - even if you have an enormous number of applicants, all with infinite time and patience! At each interview stage, there&#x27;s a risk of accidentally rejecting the best remaining applicant, the one who would have outperformed all others if they were hired. For example, the article mentions &quot;values mismatch&quot; as a particularly good reason to hard-reject a candidate, but several of the company&#x27;s values seem like they ought to be optional. Surely some truly excellent software developers lack courage, humour, and thriftiness? Could those qualities just as well be taught on-the-job? Could a non-courageous hire have useful things to teach you about caution?<p>Good hiring processes should draw a clear distinction between &quot;must-have&quot; qualities and &quot;nice-to-have&quot; qualities. Beyond a certain point, the problem stops being &quot;filter out bad candidates&quot;, and starts being &quot;out of several great candidates, make sure we choose the best one&quot;; to solve those two problems, different tools are required.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sensitivity_and_specificity" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sensitivity_and_specificity</a>

American companies often seem to be out of touch with reality. Who would want to waste so much of their time on a process that ultimately benefits the company&#x27;s CEO? This seems to be a good example of such a company.<p>The hiring process in most German companies is much more humane and efficient

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I never understand why these kinds of practices gets so much hate.<p>If you have the qualifications for this type of job (high skill high pay) then life is pretty much choose your adventure mode.<p>There are people in this world who would willingly play a modded version of a game which has a level harder than hardcore. On the other end of the extremes, you have people actively looking for &quot;Rest and vest&quot; gigs.<p>The people working at SpaceX or Apple under Jobs are one of the most highly sought after talent in the world.<p>They are no forced out of circumstances or coerced into any of this.

So true the part about writing, I had a hard time articulating my thoughts about writing skill before reading this:<p>&gt; As a company, we believe that good writing is found in the best practitioners, regardless of role: the act of writing — like so much else that we do — requires not only the ability to create wholly new material, but also the ability to reflect, correct, revise, and polish.

I don&#x27;t want to work with their team; I&#x27;m bad with people (I&#x27;m assume they&#x27;re all people).<p>I <i>would</i> like them to loan me one of their stacks for a while and maybe pay me to come up with some neat stuff for it to do.<p>And bullfrogs want wings, so they don&#x27;t bump they little butts when they hop.

You know how I know somebody is out of touch with reality? When they have &quot;technical beliefs&quot;.

§3.1 Timely rejection is key. Ghosting a candidate as a sign of no-move-forward is beyond crass.

Guess I&#x27;ll know I&#x27;ve made it as an engineer when I could plausibly fill out this application...

Well, they have a very strong team, so I can only assume that:<p>- their process works<p>- they skip it for the right candidate

… why does everything that comes out of this company smell scammy &#x2F; cultish?

1. Something about this thread is really bad taste: A user &quot;steveklabnik&quot; responds to many of the questions with point blank &quot;if it sucks, you&#x27;re welcome to not apply here&quot; and other prescriptive&#x2F;absolute type explanations to the concern rather than actually addressing it. Examples: &quot;Multiple people review every single submission.&quot; &quot; Any application process is a two-way street. It is absolutely fine for you to decide to opt to not apply. Maybe someday we&#x27;ll have a different process, or maybe it was just never meant to be :)&quot;<p>I would advise Oxide that if SteveKlabnik is not in the PR field with experience in handling HR style topics such as this thread, then to have Steve refrain from doing so, because this isn&#x27;t helping the community perception of Oxide. You&#x27;re getting destroyed in the comments.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steveklabnik.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;today-is-my-first-day-at-oxide-computer-company" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steveklabnik.com&#x2F;writing&#x2F;today-is-my-first-day-at-ox...</a> (&quot;Steve Klabnik is the Community Team Leader for the Rust team at Mozilla&quot;)<p>2. Publishing the exact hiring process is a refreshing and welcome step in the industry where interviews are a black box. I also welcome the work that&#x27;s been done to reduce as much bias as possible. However, this all begs the question: Do we <i>really</i> need this much evaluation in trying to hire an employee? I believe the pandemic and WFH has shown that people want to prioritize their personal and family lives more than &quot;giving it all&quot; to the workplace. The sense I get from reading the Oxide hiring process is one where you truly have to believe and be in love with the Oxide culture. Why? Why can&#x27;t we just treat work as a means to an end, and that you can still good quality work with that style of thinking? It does not have to be an either&#x2F;or, but the hiring process document makes it seem like it&#x27;s &quot;you either fit into our style and values, or you don&#x27;t&quot;. Why the gatekeeping?<p>2a. The amount of hoops software engineering folks have to go through to land a job is just mostly made up stuff, based on no studies or research on workforce hiring, and at a startup, HR is just really payroll, with no formal processes on handling grievances, human process, etc.<p>2b. Having said 2 and 2a. Why do we, as an industry seem to mired in spending so much effort on weeding people out? What are we scared of? All of us have worked with people we don&#x27;t like, or that we feel were not good enough (caliber, skillset, professionalism, etc.), but this and other process isn&#x27;t helping. What if we changed our mindset to actually trusting and believing in people to do the best they can rather than send them so much homework, have them sit through panel interviews and then conclude with &quot;hire, do not hire&quot; and then provide the candidate absolutely no feedback on what went wrong. Why can&#x27;t we seem to disrupt this. It&#x27;s tiring, and it shows in this thread that people are quite honestly sick of it.<p>3. Personally, when I attend future interviews, I want to have a hard boundary for the type of questions that get asked. If I get thrown a &quot;reverse this integer&quot; style question or &quot;lets do TDD on the white board&quot;, I think as a collective we need to walk out or stop the interviewer and put them on the spot and go &quot;You really want to waste an hour of my time asking basic questions like this? Don&#x27;t you want to know how to solve real problems that you&#x27;re currently facing or are you not facing any challenging problems so you want play with puzzles and waste my time?&quot; I would bet if the masses resisted and took this course, interviews would change drastically and quickly.<p>EDIT: @Oxide, bcantrill isn&#x27;t helping in the comment section either. This isn&#x27;t going well for you and I strongly advise you to hire HR or PR to handle commentary and writing about these things rather than engineers&#x2F;founders.