5 ms·

If folks are interested (and in the spirit of keeping things positive), I'm happy to answer any questions here about our comp philosophy or about Oxide more gen

If folks are interested (and in the spirit of keeping things positive), I'm happy to answer any questions here about our comp philosophy or about Oxide more generally.

__jem 6y ago
For those of us who are only Rust hobbyists and don't have the hardware experience to work at Oxide, are there other companies you know that are pushing similar values? I'd take a major pay cut to have this kind of transparency and focus on culture.
- bcantrill 6y ago
  That's a great question. I hear too often that our values (and, more disturbingly, our principles!) are differentiators -- but they honestly shouldn't be: I would encourage any company (but especially startups) to be very frank about their values. Of course, this requires those values to be a fair representation of the organization (namely, describing values that are actually held, not virtues aspired to), and then further requires ongoing and honest conversations about reflecting those values in daily life -- but these are solvable problems. To answer your question: I don't have a long list, though companies like Stripe certainly come to mind. I'm sure there are others out there. Perhaps others can point to companies that are models in this regard?
petr_tik 6y ago
Unrelated to comp. I have seen several of your talks and I cannot wait to hear you speak at a rust conference of some kind. On that note, how involved will Oxide be in the rust foundation?
- bcantrill 6y ago
  Yes! We love everything that's happening with the Rust Foundation and want to find a way to be involved that's helpful to them -- and in fact you're reminding me that I have an e-mail to follow up on! ;)
dvnguyen 6y ago
Thank you for sharing. I’m curious if you include equity as a part of the compensation package?
- bcantrill 6y ago
  Yes, it's essential to us that everyone has a stake in Oxide's success. (The blog entry hits on this; apologies if that was unclear.)
fhrow4484 6y ago
I understand your desire for employees meeting more-than-basic needs, while the company equity is currently monopoly money. Is "commitment to excellence" not a value? If one were to join Oxide but was mediocre, they would surely get fired. But on flip side, if they use their unique combination of skills & discipline, potentially at the expense of some personal sacrifice to bring a ton of value to the company, while still being full of honesty, integrity and decency, then no upside? Or is variable equity refresh the answer to this scenario? Otherwise "Measuring people impact is hard, so nobody gets paid more" seems a bit crab mentality.
- bcantrill 6y ago
  Well, as a clarification: one doesn't join Oxide, but rather gets hired by Oxide -- and we have a deliberate hiring process that is designed to assess candidates with respect to their fit for our mission and values. This leads to a deeply intrinsically motivated team, which addresses some of your concerns. As for potential upside: yes, everyone has an equity component; if we succeed together, there is more than enough upside for everyone. Edit: grammar.
  - fhrow4484 6y ago
    Thanks, > This leads to a deeply intrinsically motivated team If you managed to achieve that, then hats off! > if we succeed together Hope you all do! :)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
0xB31B1B 6y ago
What type of research did you do before you made this compensation choice? I understand lawfirms have a similar comp model for associates (7 years of lockstep pay increases before partner). Did you find any other industries that gravitate to this structure? If so, what did they have in common? What benefits do they see from this choice and what are the drawbacks?
- bcantrill 6y ago
  Honestly, none -- it really just came out of our own experience (e.g., I have always been a believer in not paying people differently by geography), and it evolved exactly the way I described in the blog entry. And indeed, we had no intention of writing about this at all, but when asking for how we could improve our hiring process, one of the consistent pieces of feedback was that we didn't specify the pay -- and that we were unclear about our policies with respect to remote work. This was kind of a "well, should we tell 'em?" moment inside of Oxide -- and there was a broadly shared belief within the company that this was something we needed to be talking about. And here we are! ;)
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    You made Oxide a first choice company on every engineer's list, worldwide, by adopting that policy. Post Covid is going to be a huge gold rush for remote talent, as some big players start playing games with CoL and lose some of their core contributors over it.
    - bcantrill 6y ago
      I certainly agree with you! My reason for not adopting geo-based pay actually dates back to the beginning of my career: one of the senior engineers I worked with in Menlo Park needed to move from California back to Massachusetts to save his marriage. Our employer applied a geography multiplier to pay; as per company policy, when he moved, his salary was adjusted based on the new geography -- which meant his pay was docked by 5%. Of course, he was doing the exact same work -- and it very much felt to him that the company had simply taken advantage of an already difficult personal situation. And indeed, the five percent was not at all meaningful from the company's perspective, and was not even terribly economically meaningful from his perspective -- but it was emotionally gutting. I made a mental note: never, ever do this.
zffr 6y ago
Assuming 2 employees join at the same time, would they get equal equity too?
- bcantrill 6y ago
  Yes.
fallous 6y ago
This may be fine for an initial hiring practice, but as you note it will become problematic in the future. Interestingly, you dodge the real source of the problem (and its possible resolution) by hand-waving the "career ladder." Once you have an employee and a history of experiencing their work within the company you have the basis for deciding where pay diverges and what career ladder they wish to follow. The fundamental question you should always ask yourself regarding compensation for an existing employee is "what would it cost me to replace the value they deliver to the company?" That isn't based on title or prior work experience, it should be based on a real understanding of their work, initiative, and the other aspects of their involvement with the company that delivers value (along with a balance of possible deficiencies that reduce that value). Does that tend to produce valuations for existing personnel that may be higher than possible new hires? Sure, but then bringing on a new hire has its own costs regarding training, accumulation of institutional knowledge, etc but those are real costs that must enter the compensation equation. If an employee wishes to gain more compensation, their career ladder is to find ways to deliver more value. That isn't dependent on titles or checklists of certifications, it's based on what directly contributes to the success of the company.
- bcantrill 6y ago
  Seems like more of a comment than a question?
  - phnofive 6y ago
    Piggybacking on that comment - which I interpret to mean that fixed, common salaries are at odds with the unique value each employee brings - is your philosophy that salary should not be a reflection of individual contributions, but (indexed to SF CoL) sufficient to make personal OpEx a non-issue? And that, by extension, employees who differentiate themselves (e.g., founders, not sure who else might see equity) are better rewarded with shares/RSUs? Can’t say I disagree, if so!
lettergram 6y ago
I’ll be interested to see how this works out. My 2-cents, I think you should always pay well, but differentiation needs to occur somehow. Perhaps it’s more vacation (because good workers get their work done faster), a bonus at the end of the year, something. I say this because it’s difficult to keep good workers. I work very hard, I work with people who work half as hard, and produce a fourth as much. While some are okay making the same wages, I personally only work places where I make significantly more. It’s important to me to teach this to my children (harder work = more benefits). It’s important to provide more to my family. It’s important others understand they can also earn more by working harder. I understand you may have a different philosophy and I am curious how it works out... but I suspect this will lead to (as through all history) resentment, anger, and eventually significant harm.
- bcantrill 6y ago
  I would say that we're very big on intrinsic motivation and teamwork -- and that these two things (coupled with our transparent compensation) serve to give people reward from their work that is something beyond what differentiation provides.
  - myroon5 6y ago
    It'll be interesting if the equity ends up valuable enough to diminish the relative importance of the cash compensation. Some may actually benefit from lower employee compensation depending on equity ownership. The post touches on equity, but I'd be interested to know more, especially due to potential conflicts of interest of larger equity owners benefitting from lower employee compensation
  - Terretta 6y ago
    It’s fascinating to see how many comments here insist rewards must be extrinsic for some kind of score keeping or personal advancement, when bulk of research suggests intrinsic rewards are far more effective provided nobody is exploiting the system. This suggests (a) rewards for better outcomes can lie in the space of the team asking that out-performer to take on more accountability, so the individual can be on a personal growth, leadership, responsibility path, while the rising tide of performance lifts all boats. And at the same time, that seems to need to be accompanied by (b) fairness, a recognition the team is not a charity and nobody can be slacking and remain part of the effort, such that intrinsic rewards are not undermined. There’s an opt-in aspect to make this work — not everyone wants to be on the starship Enterprise exploring new worlds without getting paper tokens to count their score “against” peers by. Even if the crew agrees Picard should be captain and have the quarters closest to the bridge, for some folks that’s not enough, they need to “beat” other humans instead of enjoying making the Enterprise better. FWIW, I categorically disagree on sales commissions. Sales commission culture seems generally toxic to founder values. I’ve never seen a commission structure that doesn’t get gamed in ways beneficial to sales people at either customers’ or the firm’s expense and to its cultural or mission detriment, once the commission plan begins to scale. --- All that said, if there are graduated pay scales, instead of a communal collective at utopian parity, it seems these should be less graduated by org chart level, and more by “toil vs. automation”. How to turn individual or collective labor into individual or collective annuity? We (tech industry labor) haven’t really grappled with this yet, though you see it upstream of us, in valuations multiples differing between service where an hour of work is needed for a dollar of income versus “-as-a-service” where some code can be run as a utility. This is what’s behind “do things that don’t scale”: figuring out how to scale these things, how to take the 1:1 toil part out of the equation, replace it with a multiplier or better zero it out. The craftspeople able to figure these scaling problems out, automate them, are able to generate disproportionate future value per hour, and arguably should be compensated accordingly (think NPV), else in today’s typical system that value accrues to the company management where, frankly, most “management” is probably glorified toil.
caslon 6y ago
What exactly is Oxide doing? Which parts of Sun is it trying to take after? I'm guessing hardware isn't the majority of its focus, since most people who've publicly acknowledged being hired are software people, but the Oxide landing page makes it seem like it is. Love the podcast, by the way! Off-topic, but on the note of retrocomputing and Sun appreciation: Would you consider putting that copy of Spring you have on the Internet Archive? It would be a wonderful act of preserving the history of computing: there isn't a single copy on the Internet.
- bcantrill 6y ago
  To take these in order: for what we're doing, I would recommend the talk I gave at Stanford about a year ago.[0] It's a bit dated (and of course we have much much more detail now), but it remains broadly on point. For the parts of Sun that we want to take after: the good bits, of course! ;) There were things that have influenced us with respect to mission, and then also with respect to hardware/software co-design (we are, contrary to the impression you might have, doing a lot of hardware[1]). Lest I sound too rosy about Sun, it had a lot of problems too[2] -- so we're trying not to recreate those! ;) Thank you for the kind words on the podcast -- very much looking forward to getting back in the garage and recording some new episodes! Finally, on Spring: yes, I need to find it (we just moved) and then find a CD-ROM drive (feels easier) and then I'll get it uploaded! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc [1] https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1342294298692206593 https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1342294298692206593 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033
  - caslon 6y ago
    Thanks for the link to the talk! Putting it on right now. The summary for it mentions open firmware in the generic sense; on the Sun note, will Oxide be reusing OpenFirmware/OpenBoot? It's one of Sun's most fantastic accomplishments, I think, and it would be a shame for it to die off. I love Sun! You can never get rosy enough, unless you're talking about many of its executives in the last twenty years of its life... I'm glad you guys are taking after Sun on the hardware part (and hopefully avoiding replicating its actions in driving SPARC to the ground with RISC-V)! It will be extremely welcome to have another contender in the hardware space! Can't wait to listen to new podcast episodes! And thank you so much on Spring! Any bit of computing history that can be preserved is a win for our field!
gmatejka 6y ago
Great piece and thanks for sharing. Does Oxide face a challenge of feeling the need to creatively compensate especially motivated team members, or do the company values and hiring process promote a general and widespread highly motivated and quality team, with maybe a more consistent level of contributions from each individual than a traditional org structure? Or a different alternative entirely? Love to hear your thoughts on this as you said you hire people 'if we saw them contributing to the company as much as anyone else', but what if some people just don't contribute as clearly/observably? Also are we going to get more On the Metal episodes?
- bcantrill 6y ago
  Taking these in order: Our hiring process more or less selects for intrinsic motivation at every stage -- that's very important to us. As for "judging" the output of folks: I would say Oxide is just a more extreme example of something that one sees in lots of places, where it is exceedingly difficult (and dangerous!) to make those kinds of comparisons. Not only because the work is highly varied (though certainly that) and not only because it is deeply technical (though that too!), but also because we rely so much on helping one another out. How does one evaluate that? And perhaps a blunter question: what would be the purpose of that evaluation? When I talk about "seeing someone contribute to the company as much as anyone else", I very much mean in the future tense -- namely, during the hiring process. I think it's not an unfair characterization to say that we would much rather take the energy typically wasted on comp, and spend that energy on careful hiring. As for more On the Metal, yes definitely: Steve, Jess, and I very much look forward to being vaccinated and back in the garage!
  - gmatejka 6y ago
    Thanks for your input, glad to see a company actually care about principles and not just use them as a break room poster. Please keep these blog posts coming. Really shows people Oxide stands for something and what your values look like in practice. Makes up and coming engineers happy when they feel like some tech companies will actually care about them as a human.

If folks are interested (and in the spirit of keeping things positive), I'm happy to answer any questions here about our comp philosophy or about Oxide more generally.

__jem 6y ago

For those of us who are only Rust hobbyists and don't have the hardware experience to work at Oxide, are there other companies you know that are pushing similar values? I'd take a major pay cut to have this kind of transparency and focus on culture.

bcantrill 6y ago
That's a great question. I hear too often that our values (and, more disturbingly, our principles!) are differentiators -- but they honestly shouldn't be: I would encourage any company (but especially startups) to be very frank about their values. Of course, this requires those values to be a fair representation of the organization (namely, describing values that are actually held, not virtues aspired to), and then further requires ongoing and honest conversations about reflecting those values in daily life -- but these are solvable problems. To answer your question: I don't have a long list, though companies like Stripe certainly come to mind. I'm sure there are others out there. Perhaps others can point to companies that are models in this regard?

petr_tik 6y ago

Unrelated to comp. I have seen several of your talks and I cannot wait to hear you speak at a rust conference of some kind. On that note, how involved will Oxide be in the rust foundation?

bcantrill 6y ago
Yes! We love everything that's happening with the Rust Foundation and want to find a way to be involved that's helpful to them -- and in fact you're reminding me that I have an e-mail to follow up on! ;)

dvnguyen 6y ago

Thank you for sharing. I’m curious if you include equity as a part of the compensation package?

bcantrill 6y ago
Yes, it's essential to us that everyone has a stake in Oxide's success. (The blog entry hits on this; apologies if that was unclear.)

fhrow4484 6y ago

I understand your desire for employees meeting more-than-basic needs, while the company equity is currently monopoly money. Is "commitment to excellence" not a value? If one were to join Oxide but was mediocre, they would surely get fired. But on flip side, if they use their unique combination of skills & discipline, potentially at the expense of some personal sacrifice to bring a ton of value to the company, while still being full of honesty, integrity and decency, then no upside? Or is variable equity refresh the answer to this scenario? Otherwise "Measuring people impact is hard, so nobody gets paid more" seems a bit crab mentality.

bcantrill 6y ago
Well, as a clarification: one doesn't join Oxide, but rather gets hired by Oxide -- and we have a deliberate hiring process that is designed to assess candidates with respect to their fit for our mission and values. This leads to a deeply intrinsically motivated team, which addresses some of your concerns. As for potential upside: yes, everyone has an equity component; if we succeed together, there is more than enough upside for everyone. Edit: grammar.
- fhrow4484 6y ago
  Thanks, > This leads to a deeply intrinsically motivated team If you managed to achieve that, then hats off! > if we succeed together Hope you all do! :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

0xB31B1B 6y ago

What type of research did you do before you made this compensation choice? I understand lawfirms have a similar comp model for associates (7 years of lockstep pay increases before partner). Did you find any other industries that gravitate to this structure? If so, what did they have in common? What benefits do they see from this choice and what are the drawbacks?

bcantrill 6y ago
Honestly, none -- it really just came out of our own experience (e.g., I have always been a believer in not paying people differently by geography), and it evolved exactly the way I described in the blog entry. And indeed, we had no intention of writing about this at all, but when asking for how we could improve our hiring process, one of the consistent pieces of feedback was that we didn't specify the pay -- and that we were unclear about our policies with respect to remote work. This was kind of a "well, should we tell 'em?" moment inside of Oxide -- and there was a broadly shared belief within the company that this was something we needed to be talking about. And here we are! ;)
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  You made Oxide a first choice company on every engineer's list, worldwide, by adopting that policy. Post Covid is going to be a huge gold rush for remote talent, as some big players start playing games with CoL and lose some of their core contributors over it.
  - bcantrill 6y ago
    I certainly agree with you! My reason for not adopting geo-based pay actually dates back to the beginning of my career: one of the senior engineers I worked with in Menlo Park needed to move from California back to Massachusetts to save his marriage. Our employer applied a geography multiplier to pay; as per company policy, when he moved, his salary was adjusted based on the new geography -- which meant his pay was docked by 5%. Of course, he was doing the exact same work -- and it very much felt to him that the company had simply taken advantage of an already difficult personal situation. And indeed, the five percent was not at all meaningful from the company's perspective, and was not even terribly economically meaningful from his perspective -- but it was emotionally gutting. I made a mental note: never, ever do this.

zffr 6y ago

Assuming 2 employees join at the same time, would they get equal equity too?

bcantrill 6y ago
Yes.

fallous 6y ago

This may be fine for an initial hiring practice, but as you note it will become problematic in the future. Interestingly, you dodge the real source of the problem (and its possible resolution) by hand-waving the "career ladder." Once you have an employee and a history of experiencing their work within the company you have the basis for deciding where pay diverges and what career ladder they wish to follow. The fundamental question you should always ask yourself regarding compensation for an existing employee is "what would it cost me to replace the value they deliver to the company?" That isn't based on title or prior work experience, it should be based on a real understanding of their work, initiative, and the other aspects of their involvement with the company that delivers value (along with a balance of possible deficiencies that reduce that value). Does that tend to produce valuations for existing personnel that may be higher than possible new hires? Sure, but then bringing on a new hire has its own costs regarding training, accumulation of institutional knowledge, etc but those are real costs that must enter the compensation equation. If an employee wishes to gain more compensation, their career ladder is to find ways to deliver more value. That isn't dependent on titles or checklists of certifications, it's based on what directly contributes to the success of the company.

bcantrill 6y ago
Seems like more of a comment than a question?
- phnofive 6y ago
  Piggybacking on that comment - which I interpret to mean that fixed, common salaries are at odds with the unique value each employee brings - is your philosophy that salary should not be a reflection of individual contributions, but (indexed to SF CoL) sufficient to make personal OpEx a non-issue? And that, by extension, employees who differentiate themselves (e.g., founders, not sure who else might see equity) are better rewarded with shares/RSUs? Can’t say I disagree, if so!

lettergram 6y ago

I’ll be interested to see how this works out. My 2-cents, I think you should always pay well, but differentiation needs to occur somehow. Perhaps it’s more vacation (because good workers get their work done faster), a bonus at the end of the year, something. I say this because it’s difficult to keep good workers. I work very hard, I work with people who work half as hard, and produce a fourth as much. While some are okay making the same wages, I personally only work places where I make significantly more. It’s important to me to teach this to my children (harder work = more benefits). It’s important to provide more to my family. It’s important others understand they can also earn more by working harder. I understand you may have a different philosophy and I am curious how it works out... but I suspect this will lead to (as through all history) resentment, anger, and eventually significant harm.

bcantrill 6y ago
I would say that we're very big on intrinsic motivation and teamwork -- and that these two things (coupled with our transparent compensation) serve to give people reward from their work that is something beyond what differentiation provides.
- myroon5 6y ago
  It'll be interesting if the equity ends up valuable enough to diminish the relative importance of the cash compensation. Some may actually benefit from lower employee compensation depending on equity ownership. The post touches on equity, but I'd be interested to know more, especially due to potential conflicts of interest of larger equity owners benefitting from lower employee compensation
- Terretta 6y ago
  It’s fascinating to see how many comments here insist rewards must be extrinsic for some kind of score keeping or personal advancement, when bulk of research suggests intrinsic rewards are far more effective provided nobody is exploiting the system. This suggests (a) rewards for better outcomes can lie in the space of the team asking that out-performer to take on more accountability, so the individual can be on a personal growth, leadership, responsibility path, while the rising tide of performance lifts all boats. And at the same time, that seems to need to be accompanied by (b) fairness, a recognition the team is not a charity and nobody can be slacking and remain part of the effort, such that intrinsic rewards are not undermined. There’s an opt-in aspect to make this work — not everyone wants to be on the starship Enterprise exploring new worlds without getting paper tokens to count their score “against” peers by. Even if the crew agrees Picard should be captain and have the quarters closest to the bridge, for some folks that’s not enough, they need to “beat” other humans instead of enjoying making the Enterprise better. FWIW, I categorically disagree on sales commissions. Sales commission culture seems generally toxic to founder values. I’ve never seen a commission structure that doesn’t get gamed in ways beneficial to sales people at either customers’ or the firm’s expense and to its cultural or mission detriment, once the commission plan begins to scale. --- All that said, if there are graduated pay scales, instead of a communal collective at utopian parity, it seems these should be less graduated by org chart level, and more by “toil vs. automation”. How to turn individual or collective labor into individual or collective annuity? We (tech industry labor) haven’t really grappled with this yet, though you see it upstream of us, in valuations multiples differing between service where an hour of work is needed for a dollar of income versus “-as-a-service” where some code can be run as a utility. This is what’s behind “do things that don’t scale”: figuring out how to scale these things, how to take the 1:1 toil part out of the equation, replace it with a multiplier or better zero it out. The craftspeople able to figure these scaling problems out, automate them, are able to generate disproportionate future value per hour, and arguably should be compensated accordingly (think NPV), else in today’s typical system that value accrues to the company management where, frankly, most “management” is probably glorified toil.

caslon 6y ago

What exactly is Oxide doing? Which parts of Sun is it trying to take after? I'm guessing hardware isn't the majority of its focus, since most people who've publicly acknowledged being hired are software people, but the Oxide landing page makes it seem like it is. Love the podcast, by the way! Off-topic, but on the note of retrocomputing and Sun appreciation: Would you consider putting that copy of Spring you have on the Internet Archive? It would be a wonderful act of preserving the history of computing: there isn't a single copy on the Internet.

bcantrill 6y ago
To take these in order: for what we're doing, I would recommend the talk I gave at Stanford about a year ago.[0] It's a bit dated (and of course we have much much more detail now), but it remains broadly on point. For the parts of Sun that we want to take after: the good bits, of course! ;) There were things that have influenced us with respect to mission, and then also with respect to hardware/software co-design (we are, contrary to the impression you might have, doing a lot of hardware[1]). Lest I sound too rosy about Sun, it had a lot of problems too[2] -- so we're trying not to recreate those! ;) Thank you for the kind words on the podcast -- very much looking forward to getting back in the garage and recording some new episodes! Finally, on Spring: yes, I need to find it (we just moved) and then find a CD-ROM drive (feels easier) and then I'll get it uploaded! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc [1] https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1342294298692206593 https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1342294298692206593 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033
- caslon 6y ago
  Thanks for the link to the talk! Putting it on right now. The summary for it mentions open firmware in the generic sense; on the Sun note, will Oxide be reusing OpenFirmware/OpenBoot? It's one of Sun's most fantastic accomplishments, I think, and it would be a shame for it to die off. I love Sun! You can never get rosy enough, unless you're talking about many of its executives in the last twenty years of its life... I'm glad you guys are taking after Sun on the hardware part (and hopefully avoiding replicating its actions in driving SPARC to the ground with RISC-V)! It will be extremely welcome to have another contender in the hardware space! Can't wait to listen to new podcast episodes! And thank you so much on Spring! Any bit of computing history that can be preserved is a win for our field!

gmatejka 6y ago

Great piece and thanks for sharing. Does Oxide face a challenge of feeling the need to creatively compensate especially motivated team members, or do the company values and hiring process promote a general and widespread highly motivated and quality team, with maybe a more consistent level of contributions from each individual than a traditional org structure? Or a different alternative entirely? Love to hear your thoughts on this as you said you hire people 'if we saw them contributing to the company as much as anyone else', but what if some people just don't contribute as clearly/observably? Also are we going to get more On the Metal episodes?

bcantrill 6y ago
Taking these in order: Our hiring process more or less selects for intrinsic motivation at every stage -- that's very important to us. As for "judging" the output of folks: I would say Oxide is just a more extreme example of something that one sees in lots of places, where it is exceedingly difficult (and dangerous!) to make those kinds of comparisons. Not only because the work is highly varied (though certainly that) and not only because it is deeply technical (though that too!), but also because we rely so much on helping one another out. How does one evaluate that? And perhaps a blunter question: what would be the purpose of that evaluation? When I talk about "seeing someone contribute to the company as much as anyone else", I very much mean in the future tense -- namely, during the hiring process. I think it's not an unfair characterization to say that we would much rather take the energy typically wasted on comp, and spend that energy on careful hiring. As for more On the Metal, yes definitely: Steve, Jess, and I very much look forward to being vaccinated and back in the garage!
- gmatejka 6y ago
  Thanks for your input, glad to see a company actually care about principles and not just use them as a break room poster. Please keep these blog posts coming. Really shows people Oxide stands for something and what your values look like in practice. Makes up and coming engineers happy when they feel like some tech companies will actually care about them as a human.