9 ms·

Oxide’s compensation model: how is it going?

264 points by steveklabnik 2y ago

endianswap 2y ago
Wish they would've gone into more detail about the sales exemption - it seems to undermine many of the other points on the page...
- bcantrill 2y ago
  Happy to go into it in more detail, but the salient points are in the piece: sales folks are eligible to make more -- but can also make less. This is in keeping with the way enterprise sales is done more or less everywhere: sales is different from every other company activity in that it is very quantifiable. I don't think that there's a whole lot more to say about it?
  - Arnt 2y ago
    Do you to to quantify promises they make? Sometimes salespeople boost their metrics by promising features that come from other people's work. But they also sometimes provide valuable information on what people are willing to pay for (very different from what they say the want).
    - bcantrill 2y ago
      One important detail: their comp model is different -- but the hiring model is the same. And that has yielded a deeply thoughtful and customer-centric sales team. We are very mindful of go-to-market anti-patterns![0] [0] https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/uncrating-the-oxide-rack-bryan-cantrill-steve-tuck https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/uncrating-the-oxide-rack...
  - theoryofx 2y ago
    "this is in keeping with the way enterprise sales is done more or less everywhere..." For non-sales roles you're doing things very differently than (most) everywhere else, which is why it seems like a compromise to give in to an 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales. The fact that sales is quantifiable doesn't explain why sales people get instantly rewarded with cash comp (+ equity) while everyone else on the team might wait years for a potential liquidity event. The real explanation for why sales people get paid so well is that some really good sales people sold the idea of a highly favorable 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.
    - bcantrill 2y ago
      Do not walk by their lower base! Sales people can make more -- but they won't unless they crush their number.
    - lbotos 2y ago
      > why sales people get instantly rewarded with cash comp while everyone else on the team might wait years for a potential liquidity event. Because sales people also do not make money if they don't sell? What's your counter proposal on how they should pay and attract top sales folks? I know some sales folks who would love to have $200k base with no variable component: The bad ones. Every salesperson that I've ever worked with that was worth their salt was worth the commission they made.
      - ec109685 2y ago
        You could say the same thing about paying everyone a flat salary that you attract the middling ones. And no way all salespeople are worth all the commission they are paid as all times. You think the quality of Anthropic’s salespeople had much to do with them crushing their numbers as Claude exploded? Even the most incompetent salesperson could sell their service if it’s currently the best model out there. While that should increase everyone’s equity, it’s dumb that non-salespeople can’t participate in that abundance.
        lbotos 2y ago
        > You could say the same thing about paying everyone a flat salary that you attract the middling ones. This depends on where your flat salary lands right? 200k base pay for remote is a very good salary for most of America. The hiring process will weed out the middling ones. > You think the quality of Anthropic’s salespeople had much to do with them crushing their numbers as Claude exploded? You are right -- a rising tide raises all ships. > it’s dumb that non-salespeople can’t participate in that abundance. I think most people can't stomach the risk of the variability. Or else they'd become sales people :D
        2y ago
  - zem 2y ago
    do sales folks have the option to take the flat salary instead? or is that seen as a lack of confidence in their abilities?
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  I forget the details, but the rough shape of it is that sales makes a lower base salary, but with a commission component that can lead to a higher salary than the standard one. I can't remember if there's also some sort of cap. You could take it as undermining those other points, but I don't. (I am, of course, biased.) We didn't do this because we needed to address some failing of these other things, we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff. Additionally, some of the points don't work the same way with sales, that is, the variability is easily measured and objective. Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.
  - halestock 2y ago
    In practice, what % of the salespeople make a higher base salary?
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      I don't personally know. We also only started hiring for these roles very recently, so I don't think it would really even be representative yet.
  - neilv 2y ago
    > we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff. SF Bay Area SWEs are famously compensation-focused, and this uniform salary is basically Google new-grad SWE entry-level TC. Are you hiring from the minority of good engineers who aren't driven primarily by compensation, but you just can't find the analog of that among good salespeople? > Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold. And you manage the imperfect alignment? (Imperfect, like the incentive to close a sale by lying to a customer, in a way that won't be discovered until next year. Or incentive to close a sale now, and don't communicate back a customer insight that would nudge the product line in a better direction longer-term, since that insight risks someone at the company wanting to talk to the customer, which puts the imminent commission at risk.)
- skadamat 2y ago
  Honestly it makes sense and resembles how other companies pay sales people. Lower base salary than other roles in the company for similar years of experience (roughly) but with a commission component that's some percentage of each sale. Commission is a big big part of sales culture that I suspect is hard to eliminate in an effort to be different. What's interesting is that often times the commission has no cap, so top sales people can take home higher income than even than executives (at least in cash compensation). But to the commenter's point, true transparency would share the commission % as well :)
- tptacek 2y ago
  Especially if you're doing account manager-type high-touch sales, which I assume Oxide is given its product, it would be difficult to hire strong sales people at all without variable compensation. It's best to think of sales as an entirely different kind of animal as the rest of the company. Like the post says, when they're making lots of money, everybody else is making even more money. One thing people who have never managed direct sales teams might not immediately grok is: good sales people are experts at gaming incentive schemes. Their work and output adapts to their comp schemes in ways nobody else's does. If you cap a salesperson's comp in a quarter, they will work to move sales out of that quarter; exactly what you don't want.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    > One thing people who have never managed direct sales teams might not immediately grok is: good sales people are experts at gaming incentive schemes. Is that just circular though? i.e. I think everyone's like that, it's just unusual that it's tied directly to compensation. e.g. if I feel that my Jira output is being critically monitored, I might push something (or the reporting of something) into the next sprint if it's close and I've already done a lot in this one; I might more diligently create tickets for every little incidental thing that popped up (rather than just quietly getting it done). I'm not comp'd according to that, but it's the same behaviour, it's just 'a measure becoming a target' really isn't it?
    - tptacek 2y ago
      I don't have a more precise way to articulate this other than that adapting your behavior to your compensation is a skill, most of us are not expert in that skill even if we think we are, but even bad salespeople are like ninja masters at it.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    > Like the post says, when they're making lots of money, everybody else is making even more money. I’ve worked with sales people whose compensation had loopholes you could drive a truck through, make sales that cost us more money than we made on the contract. Now a few of those are good for attracting VC money, but you have to be strategic and I’ve seen too much evidence of them not being so. If you lock up your biggest potential customers with bad contracts that makes you default dead and no good way to weasel out.
- boulos 2y ago
  As others have said, the sales compensation model is fundamentally a low base and then a percentage of the sale. I think Ben Horowitz had an early blog post about not trying to innovate on sales compensation models, and having seen a few attempts at "innovation" at Google Cloud, I agree. It's almost never worth the complexity. You can figure out various sliding scales, maybe even caps (but adjusting the scale is more rational), but I think flat pay is basically anathema to being a salesperson. Edit: found it, though it isn't from as long ago as I remembered. https://a16z.com/why-must-you-pay-sales-people-commissions/ https://a16z.com/why-must-you-pay-sales-people-commissions/
jszymborski 2y ago
I wonder why not just make it an employee-owned cooperative at that point? I understand there are funding considerations, and founders won't get the lion share, but it fits the stated values better.
- setheron 2y ago
  Good point. The other aspect that I didn't buy too much was the original blog entry claims the salary is enough since the founders themselves have kids and are living in San Francisco. They are coming from a point of economic safety from prior successful ventures and maybe are on multiple boards with other income streams. Anyways. I like the intent so I won't be too critical.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    The Bay Area is expensive, but I assure you that many families with kids live on less than $207,264. That said, everyone has their own personal requirements, and startups aren't for everyone. Around a quarter of the company, last I checked, lives in the Bay area, so while we obviously miss out on some good people who want more money, we haven't had an issue with finding enough people who are happy with the compensation. (I myself took a pay cut to join Oxide, but I live in Austin, which isn't cheap but also isn't as expensive.)
    - setheron 2y ago
      I disagree based on my own personal experience of raising kids in California but they are all young and I'm paying quite a lot for preschool :P I'm also carrying a mortgage as I'm younger which is ~30-40% of my take home pay. Total tangent: 2024 Jujutsu was my favorite tool to learn and your posts helped me learn it. Thank you.
      - steveklabnik 2y ago
TZubiri 2y ago
Very interesting to see Valve's famous org structure and handbook referenced here. Equal salary was a bold move from the start, but that's exactly what a successful company needs to avoid dropping into commodity terrain. This is especially relevant to the Operating System space, I think there's a lot of creativity here and Oxide's approach embraces that.
throwaway81523 2y ago
Is there a 1 sentence description of the model? It wasn't apparent in a minute of scrolling down the long winded blog post.
- charlotte-fyi 2y ago
  "our compensation is not merely transparent, but uniform" second paragraph
  - throwaway81523 2y ago
    Is equity compensation also uniform?
    - ziddoap 2y ago
      No. This is also covered in their original blog (linked from this post in the first paragraph). "As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth."
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  Everyone but salespeople (who can make more or less based on their sales figures) receives the same salary, currently $207,264. As stated in the blog.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  In short, they pay everyone the same as they pay themselves. "We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. The three of us live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Steve and I each have three kids; we knew that the dollar figure that would allow us to live without financial distress – which we put at $175,000 a year – would be at least universally adequate for the team we wanted to build. And we mean everyone literally: as of this writing we have 23 employees, and that’s what we all make." Later update: "Since originally writing this blog entry in 2021, we have increased our salary a few times, and it now stands at $207,264. We have also added some sales positions that have variable compensation, consisting of a lower base salary and a commission component."
deleted 2y ago
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boulos 2y ago
Apparently, I'm one of the people that would have given feedback on the original proposal :). > Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not cash compensation. I think of compensation as total compensation. It would be fine to say this is Oxide's salary model. And I think it's a fine choice. It sounds like the equity grants are naturally variable, though I doubt it's just newer vs older employees: > As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth. Edit to add: I assume there aren't cash bonuses for salaried employees. (I've always found it a bit weird anyway, but it's not mentioned explicitly, and would seem against the ethos, too)
- bcantrill 2y ago
  We have had cash bonuses but they are (wait for it?) uniform -- and they have been based on company-wide events.
  - boulos 2y ago
    Also reasonable! A little annoying though, since I find most people are better served by uniform paychecks, but I understand the celebratory aspect.
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      It doesn't happen often enough for you to rely on it for budgeting, it's a nice surprise, not something that you think of as part of your regular compensation. (I've worked at places where your "bonus" was regular, until it wasn't: that did not go over well...)
      - tonyarkles 2y ago
        The first startup I worked at had a year-end bonus tied to meeting all of a list of company goals. The last year I was there, the list consisted of 3 engineering goals and 1 sales goal. We had around 25 engineers and 2 salespeople. We nailed the three engineering goals by about October. Sales didn’t hit their goal. No bonus for anyone. You want to build animosity in a company? I can’t think of a better way than that.
michaelt 2y ago
> One of the more incredible (and disturbingly frequent) objections I have heard is: "But is that what you’ll pay support folks?" I continue to find this question offensive, but I no longer find it surprising: the specific dismissal of support roles reveals a widespread and corrosive devaluation of those closest to customers. The easy way to "pay everyone the same amount" when you sorta don't want to is to outsource everything you don't want to pay the same amount for. Don't want to pay $200k to your receptionists and cleaners? Rent a serviced office and you get their services without them appearing on your payroll.
- ec109685 2y ago
  Why is that a good thing?
  - dijit 2y ago
    its not, its a method of “x-washing”. IE; Green-washing[0] and so forth. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing
    - hinkley 2y ago
      More like commoditization of your complement.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    I don't read GP as saying it's a good thing necessarily, just pointing out that it can be or become a bit arbitrary.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    It's not. He's just pointing out that their "we pay everyone the same" line probably isn't true.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I suppose it depends. Maybe something isn’t worth doing in house. Like for instance if the parts show up unfinished or damaged you don’t pay someone to straighten bent rails, chamfer bolt holes and de-burr surfaces. Maybe you pay the vendor a bit more, find a new vendor, or hire a middleman to bring the parts in ready to ship. Paying your support staff well is virtue signaling to be sure but as someone who’s always had a soft spot for top shelf QA and support folk, that’s not a bad thing.
therealdkz 2y ago
[dead]
ec109685 2y ago
While there are a few things highlighted in the post that are unique to this flat comp structure (e.g. no middle managers worrying about comp and leveling), for things like “we hold a high hiring bar”, it isn't at all clear that paying everyone the same has has anything to do with where the bar is set.
cobertos 2y ago
If you free up the peer/employee/worker from thinking about the constraints of scarcity of money, doesn't the next resource of scarcity become time (or perhaps, intellectual property)? Which can still lead to a straying from the candor and other ideals this compensation system hopes to promote. The corporation still owns all your time, and all your production during that time. I just can't help but think this scarcity of resources still causes poor incentives that lead to not as good human/team outcomes. Maybe better than in a "normal" compensation structure though?
- sunshowers 2y ago
  It is true that scarcity along any dimension sucks at some level. (Though it can also help develop the skill set to manage that scarcity well.) But some scarcities are more fundamental than others.
chaosprint 2y ago
Regardless of the content of the article, I was very impressed with the design of this company's website. Very neat.
cashsterling 2y ago
I really hope the best for Oxide and applaud their compensation model. I applied to one of their roles which required me to write about 10 pages of text to answer all their questions... which I think is a big ask but I did it because "why not". They took over 3 months to get back to me, but at least they got back to me (with an apology and a polite "no").
- senderista 2y ago
  I never bothered applying because they explicitly said they didn't want candidates who didn't finish college.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    Where did we say that? My general understanding of our hiring practices is that we do not have minimum education requirements.
    - senderista 2y ago
      No, it was more like dropping out of college is a red flag.
      - steveklabnik 2y ago
        Hm, well I am not sure about that either.
        everial 2y ago
        > The completion of a formal education is much more important than the institution From https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003 -- which was top of mind since I started looking at the postings after reading the article. ;-)
        anonfordays 2y ago
clarkmoody 2y ago
One thing I've been listening for in the podcasts is a discussion of equity. I'd love to get the company's perspective on equity, options, liquidity, etc. The Silicon Valley Way (tm) of using stock options to "juice" compensation while injecting large amounts of risk and drama into the employee's tax returns is certainly something I'd like to hear Bryan's (and Oxide's) take on.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  I can tell you that we receive options pretty much like any other startup. Early exercise is a nice perk.
  - jmrjmr 2y ago
    Are the options grants as transparent (internally) as the cash?
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      There is effectively no difference internally than externally here. There’s no like, big list of who exactly has what amount of equity. Of course, talking about compensation with your coworkers is a legally protected activity, and I have discussed the topic with coworkers before. Personally, I don’t really care how much equity my co-workers have.
      - ahl 2y ago
        This implies that the goal of compensation transparency is to satisfy people's curiosity. I don't think that's the case. Regardless of how it's denominated, I think the goal of compensation transparency is ... uh... equity... no pun intended.
abxyz 2y ago
I like it a lot and their thoughtfulness about it but it's a little hollow when they're spending investor money. I'd like to see how this model evolves once they're off the vc teat: when there's a bottom line to answer to, does the dynamic shift? Everyone has an on-site chef when the money vc hose is on. Valve's flat structure was exciting because it wasn't 3 vc's in a coat larping as a business, it was an actual profitable business. Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, no matter how much you pay someone in support, there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line. The organization as an organism where every organ is as equally important as the other is a beautiful sentiment but the appendix is getting jettisoned at the first sign of trouble. Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person. The exception to the rule for sales is the canary in the coal mine: sales measures itself, but every role can (and will) be measured when the pressure is on, there will be competition for budget, and the support team will get squeezed until they're empty while the engineers coast. I would be more convinced that this model could survive outside of the vc bubble if sales had bought in to too. Sales as a competitive sport is cultural, not fundamental. Anyway, not criticism, just musing, love that they're trying it, even if this doesn't work out, everyone had a few good years, it's worth a shot.
- lbotos 2y ago
  > Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person. I... think you are thinking more "Customer Support Representative" (how to reset a password) and not Support Engineering. An engineer that can talk to customers, find bugs, and fix them, is not worth $200k? One of the Oxide Support engineers was (still is) an INSANELY strong performance engineer who helped solved performance bugs when he was on my team. We were actively using strace weekly to troubleshoot deep process internals to optimize perf. (Hi Will, I miss you, and you are definitely worth $200k don't listen to this guy. <3)
  - schneems 2y ago
    To add: I saw job listings recently posted on bsky and was enjoying how well written they were. The support engineer role description asked that they be able to fly to a customers site at short notice. That’s a whole other level of on-call right there.
zem 2y ago
I looked at the careers page and could not see any administrative roles - I wonder it they pay the same for these (very impressive if so) or outsource those roles to staffing agencies.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  I don't believe we have any traditional dedicated administrative staff at the moment. We're certainly not outsourcing any kind of employees, to my knowledge. (EDIT: I'm told we do currently outsource accounting, I don't interact with that part of the business so I wouldn't know about it, heh. We do have one dedicated finance employee but that's a recent hire.)
  - zem 2y ago
    interesting! how are the administrative tasks managed, or are there just not that many of them? I've worked for a pretty small startup that still had a dedicated admin person who had a ton of stuff to do, though maybe Indian companies need that more.
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      What kinds of tasks are you asking about, specifically? Admin can be pretty far-ranging.
      - zem 2y ago
        off the top of my head, making sure that the building rent was paid and maintenance and supplies taken care of for various offices, managing calendars for the executives, managing software licenses, doing any government paperwork that was needed, perhaps even doing the admin side of HR if there're no dedicated HR roles.
        steveklabnik 2y ago
        As far as I know, our CEO does a lot of this sort of work himself. There's just not very much of it so far. We only have one office, we don't license much software, and we pay a company to manage employee benefits.
serhack_ 2y ago
OT: how does anyone buy their cloud? Is it only available as a public alpha/beta with remote control? I might have a client interested into this, but needs to have some guarantees that their data remains on-premise.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  > how does anyone buy their cloud? https://oxide.computer/contact https://oxide.computer/contact > Is it only available as a public alpha/beta with remote control? I might have a client interested into this, but needs to have some guarantees that their data remains on-premise. You are purchasing hardware. You put it on-premise. Our software gives you a cloud-like deployment model, but it's not going anywhere other than your rack. Happy to answer any other questions, even if they're off-topic :)
  - serhack_ 2y ago
    Ah nice, I thought for a second it was more vertical with its own hardware (which has its pro and cons, maybe it's in your plans..). Would that work as a SAAS? Or price per hardware device/machines I can create?
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      We have built our own hardware, yes. > Would that work as a SAAS? Or price per hardware device/machines I can create? I'm not 100% sure what you're asking. You could use this to build your own SAAS business if you'd like, but you can't rent the hardware from us, or run your software on hardware we own, if that's what you mean.
      - serhack_ 2y ago
        Ah now I understand what you meant with "You are purchasing hardware", I missed completely that point. "You are purchasing hardware from us" :) yeah, then it's what I originally understood. Good :) so I guess one time payment, I get the hardware, I set up with your software into your hardware that I purchased and then I should be good.
latchkey 2y ago
The post I want to see is: "Oxide's revenue model: how is it going?" Looking on the website, I just see "try a vm and play with us", I'm super curious how this translates to sales. Updated: s/rent/try/
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  > I just see "rent a vm and play with us", To be clear, you cannot rent anything from us: you are buying a rack-scale system.
  - latchkey 2y ago
    True, rent was the wrong word. I was referring to this: https://oxide.computer/remote-access https://oxide.computer/remote-access
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      Ah yeah, this is something new I frankly forgot we have. I don't personally know how well it specifically converts.
      - latchkey 2y ago
        It is the primary CTA on your website, so maybe it isn't converting well if you forgot about it. ;-)
        steveklabnik 2y ago
        Hahah, well, you see, I have access to our dogfooding rack, so I'm not in the market right now anyway...
VladVladikoff 2y ago
As someone who is unfamiliar with your product could you maybe explain to me what your company sells? I looked for a while at your website, and it seems like you sell server hardware, however, when I go to the products section, it talks of demos etc, which sounds more like you sell cloud hosted systems. I don't see any way to find the prices or order the hardware itself. Very confusing website.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  Sure thing! > it seems like you sell server hardware, We do! > which sounds more like you sell cloud hosted systems The server hardware we sell has a cloud-like interface. That is, you don't administer individual computers in the rack, you treat it as one big pool of resources that you can use. We handle the details. I wrote a lengthy comment a few years back that has more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 I'm happy to elaborate on this or anything else you're curious about. > I don't see any way to find the prices or order the hardware itself. We do not publish pricing, and to place an order, you can contact sales: https://oxide.computer/contact https://oxide.computer/contact
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    You forgot the in-depth accountability for every piece of the design down to third-party firmware auditing and vetting - I see that kind of vertical integration of the whole stack (including hubris, but also the tight validation of the hardware) as the key thing :)
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      It’s really important to some people and irrelevant to others, so I try to suss that out before I get into it. You’re right though!
- lbotos 2y ago
  they sell you a "cloud in your closet" -- the "apple of enterprise" -- buy their boxes, which run their os with deep integration to the hardware because they make both, and a support contract and you have and end to end solution where Oxide deliver the literal entire stack.
jamietanna 2y ago
Always one for transparency in salary (given I share my own, publicly at https://www.jvt.me/salary/ https://www.jvt.me/salary/) and applaud the model y'all are following!
- sudomateo 2y ago
  Hey Jamie, nice to see you here! I've been a big proponent of salary transparency in previous roles and also publish my history on my website at https://matthewsanabria.dev/posts/salary-transparency/ https://matthewsanabria.dev/posts/salary-transparency/. I think a lot of people here are in a tizzy about this blog post because it's against the norm of how companies view compensation. I'm willing to bet most readers haven't fought for salary transparency personally or professionally or perhaps they are on the negative side of inequitable compensation. Granted, that's perfectly fine and I hope readers reflect on their career and make the positive change they need but don't berate companies for spending money however they choose to. Especially when that spending is truly equitable across employees, barring sales of course but that's already been discussed and I'd be hard pressed to find an Oxide employee that's angry about sales people making commission. I personally took a pay cut to join Oxide. The uniform salary across the board has saved so much time that would otherwise be spent propping up metrics to get a promotion during review season based on some arbitrary goal that's set. Time that I get to spend doing actual work. It also motivates me to stay productive because I know all my teammates count on me the way I count on them to deliver work to sell Oxide racks. If other teammates are doing their best for their $207k salary I need to be doing my best for my $207k salary. On the equity side I'm sure I didn't get as much equity as the people that have been here for years but those people took more risk than I did so who cares? I'm gonna do what I can to help Oxide equity be worth so much that we all come away with a fantastic pay day and I'm sure my teammates are doing the same. Not that it's all about the money but every startup wants their equity to be worth something one day.
whazor 2y ago
I have personally followed the same strategy, but at the expense of my ‘career development’. Trying to perform well or getting a promotion can be a lot of unproductive effort. I think the only downside of 100% uniformity is that you don’t hire and train junior engineers, which should also be like a duty. While you could pay juniors the exact same salary, this might give that person a lot of stress (“ concerned that they aren’t doing enough“). One solution could be to offer traineeships, where the you offer actual coaching for a fixed duration. While clear goals like: finishing first small task, first doc, led first initiative. Then automatically completing after one or two years.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I’ve worked with a lot of engineers who punch down and what they all have in common is that they don’t have a clue how to make lemonade from “lemons”. They just want people who can read their minds. Tough shit. Never going to happen. New people ask questions and make mistakes that reveal organizational problems that would help everyone if fixed. As a company grows there are more parts added to the system and at some point senior staff are going to feel like newbies doing something they haven’t touched in two or three years. All that work you did for newbies now pays off as lower overhead for putting projects into maintenance mode or scaling them up for a big initiative. The worst outcome for everyone is if you hire a new employee and then let them alone. That’s short changing everyone.
  - JonChesterfield 2y ago
    There's a really sad failure mode for talented raw engineers that get no feedback in the first few years. They write a lot of code, and it's trash, but noone steers them in a better direction. Wait maybe three years on zero feedback and they've convinced themselves that their work is great and this new critical feedback they're getting can't possibly be right. You end up with clever and productive and shite, all mixed up in one indignant bug farm.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      One of my most memorable “this interview is over” moments was I used to ask people to reflect on their last project and ask what they would do differently if they knew then what they know now. One fellow, sitting with both myself and the owner, answered with a single word, “nothing.” And that was a very awkward silence. I’ve been asked this question myself, which is why I stole it. Even on a project that went exceptionally well, where you pick the right tech and don’t spend a lot of time working around issues, there is usually at least one question you should have asked a little sooner to save some rework or avoid blocking issues. And I had to answer that way once. I had a feeling we should check on this thing but I or someone else talked me out of it, and three weeks later I regretted it. It reflects on your capacity for continuous improvement. If you can’t think of anything then that’s less about how the project went and more about your opinion of yourself, and your ability to notice feedback from others, or from the situation.
carstenhag 2y ago
I understand that currently (and maybe because you are "only" 75 employees) it feels fair for everyone, or people are even feeling bad about it. Also it sets the bar high when hiring someone, I get that. But what if in a year or two a person is not so great anymore? Just by my own past work experience at 2-3 companies, there were always some colleagues that were definitely not good at their job (and this was pretty much common knowledge, multiple people had the same opinion). Maybe they were good at the beginning, or not even then. I would have felt it to be super unfair for them to get the same money, or the same salary bump as me.
- ahussain 2y ago
  Wouldn't this person be put on a PIP and then fired if their performance didn't improve? Even at companies with non-uniform salaries, it's difficult to down-level someone. Their morale will drop, the team's anxiety will go up, and (if they were genuinely bad for a long time), the team will wonder why they weren't fired.
- sunshowers 2y ago
  The thing is, our team has extraordinary breadth so everyone's good at some things more than others. What matters (and what we select for) is curiosity and openness to learning. I previously worked on distributed systems with lots of immutable state. Here I've learned tons about distributed systems that have lots of mutable state, and it's made me realize immutable state is easy mode.
paddw 2y ago
I'm more curious how the business is going? Have they got a Fortune 1000 on board yet?
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  It's going well! We often can't share details about our customers. We did do a joint announcement with Lawrence Livermore National Labs: https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-computer-company-and-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-computer-company-and-lawre...
  - selkin 2y ago
    Last year Shopify was named as a customer[0], which I found both surprising and not. [0] https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/07/04/oxide-ships-first-cloud-computers/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/07/04/oxide-ships-first-clou...
deleted 2y ago
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wavemode 2y ago
Gonna take a positive sentiment on this one - godspeed, oxide! Middle management can often be such a drain on the effectiveness of an organization, that for that reason alone I readily applaud any effort which eliminates at least some layers of it. Will there be challenges - of course!! What growing business doesn't face challenges? Lots of commenters will argue that your structure won't work for this reason or that... but, what are we comparing to? Most corporate structures don't work either, and are full of crippling amounts of waste. People have just convinced themselves that the usual way of doing things is the only way of doing things.
cryptonector 2y ago
For a startup Oxide's compensation model is fine. Eventually it won't be, and that's fine too. Eventually Oxide will get past the early startup phase and mature as a business, and then it will need a much more traditional compensation model in order to acquire and retain talent because new-hires then will not have gotten on at the ground floor. Compensation is a business tool.
time4tea 2y ago
Variable pay for sales roles is the driver of vast amounts of broken behaviour. You've seen it it your own companies, but also in the various financial crashes. It immediately sets everyone's goals in non-coherent directions. Wonder why your favourite software is getting so crap? Pressure from "sales execs" cos they are getting a bonus for the poorly thought out, inconsistent crappy feature they sold to some enterprise.
florbnit 2y ago
> And, importantly: if/when those folks are making more than the rest of us, it’s because they’re selling a lot — a result that can be celebrated by everyone! This is such a toxic mentality. Yes sales always sits at the end of the value stream, but they aren’t selling thin air. Everyone in the company contributes to making that sale possible. The waiter gets a tip because “everything tasted amazing” but the chef gets stiffed because “he just made it” As always, they have equality but some are more equal than others. And they are transparent, but obviously not on the parts where transparency would expose the inequality because that wouldn’t be popular.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  You can’t hire sales people without a carrot, and the variable component is very much a part of the sales mindset since they are all used to have immediate feedback on their success and have an unshakable belief that they control how much they earn by succumbing to the “gotta catch them all” impulse. It’s addictive, and, ultimately, far more toxic than what you describe.
sebstefan 2y ago
You can get most of the benefits of this without the downsides with profit-sharing The downside is 200k is not enough to compete with the silicon valley for top engineers, but enough to compete with everyone for support, designers etc The upsides are the ones they listed: getting rid of the bad incentives that yearly reviews bring, focusing people on what really matters (success of the company) With profit sharing you design per role how much of a share of the profits one should get and everyone in the same role is paid the same. It's not tied to your output, your yearly review, nor your experience and the only way to make it go up is switch roles or make the company grow
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  We are far from making a profit, so that’s not an option right now.
  - sebstefan 2y ago
    That makes sense
sevensor 2y ago
This seems like the sort of thing that’s only going to work if you have great leadership. Which oxide has, no doubt. It takes a truly unusual leader to channel the ego into making something great for humanity. A lot of executives pay lip service to this, but are actually petty kings who just want to be in charge.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
"On premise cloud computer offering a virtual machine on demand, easily hardware extendable in most directions, using proprietary hardware¹ and software²" IBM mainframe on premise, offering virutal machines on demand, easily hardware extendable in most directions, "using proprietary hardwareand software" ¹ Will Oxide certify 3rd party vendors as fully integratable and offering the same support as harware solutions from themsevles. ² What other operating systems cna Oxcide Cloud Computer run aside from the default one? (IBM LinuxOne "bare metal(?))
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  I'm not sure what that quote is from. Regardless: 1. We'd have that conversation if we had a third party vendor exist. No point in having that conversation until then. 2. It's your hardware. You can run whatever software you'd like on it. You're probably going to need to port something, though, I doubt anything other than our software runs out of the box. To be clear on 2, I thought you're asking about the host software. You can run anything on the VMs that you want, with our host software, via standard images.

264 points by steveklabnik 2y ago

Wish they would've gone into more detail about the sales exemption - it seems to undermine many of the other points on the page...

bcantrill 2y ago
Happy to go into it in more detail, but the salient points are in the piece: sales folks are eligible to make more -- but can also make less. This is in keeping with the way enterprise sales is done more or less everywhere: sales is different from every other company activity in that it is very quantifiable. I don't think that there's a whole lot more to say about it?
- Arnt 2y ago
  Do you to to quantify promises they make? Sometimes salespeople boost their metrics by promising features that come from other people's work. But they also sometimes provide valuable information on what people are willing to pay for (very different from what they say the want).
  - bcantrill 2y ago
    One important detail: their comp model is different -- but the hiring model is the same. And that has yielded a deeply thoughtful and customer-centric sales team. We are very mindful of go-to-market anti-patterns![0] [0] https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/uncrating-the-oxide-rack-bryan-cantrill-steve-tuck https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/uncrating-the-oxide-rack...
- theoryofx 2y ago
  "this is in keeping with the way enterprise sales is done more or less everywhere..." For non-sales roles you're doing things very differently than (most) everywhere else, which is why it seems like a compromise to give in to an 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales. The fact that sales is quantifiable doesn't explain why sales people get instantly rewarded with cash comp (+ equity) while everyone else on the team might wait years for a potential liquidity event. The real explanation for why sales people get paid so well is that some really good sales people sold the idea of a highly favorable 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.
  - bcantrill 2y ago
    Do not walk by their lower base! Sales people can make more -- but they won't unless they crush their number.
  - lbotos 2y ago
    > why sales people get instantly rewarded with cash comp while everyone else on the team might wait years for a potential liquidity event. Because sales people also do not make money if they don't sell? What's your counter proposal on how they should pay and attract top sales folks? I know some sales folks who would love to have $200k base with no variable component: The bad ones. Every salesperson that I've ever worked with that was worth their salt was worth the commission they made.
    - ec109685 2y ago
      You could say the same thing about paying everyone a flat salary that you attract the middling ones. And no way all salespeople are worth all the commission they are paid as all times. You think the quality of Anthropic’s salespeople had much to do with them crushing their numbers as Claude exploded? Even the most incompetent salesperson could sell their service if it’s currently the best model out there. While that should increase everyone’s equity, it’s dumb that non-salespeople can’t participate in that abundance.
      - lbotos 2y ago
        > You could say the same thing about paying everyone a flat salary that you attract the middling ones. This depends on where your flat salary lands right? 200k base pay for remote is a very good salary for most of America. The hiring process will weed out the middling ones. > You think the quality of Anthropic’s salespeople had much to do with them crushing their numbers as Claude exploded? You are right -- a rising tide raises all ships. > it’s dumb that non-salespeople can’t participate in that abundance. I think most people can't stomach the risk of the variability. Or else they'd become sales people :D
        2y ago
- zem 2y ago
  do sales folks have the option to take the flat salary instead? or is that seen as a lack of confidence in their abilities?
steveklabnik 2y ago
I forget the details, but the rough shape of it is that sales makes a lower base salary, but with a commission component that can lead to a higher salary than the standard one. I can't remember if there's also some sort of cap. You could take it as undermining those other points, but I don't. (I am, of course, biased.) We didn't do this because we needed to address some failing of these other things, we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff. Additionally, some of the points don't work the same way with sales, that is, the variability is easily measured and objective. Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold.
- halestock 2y ago
  In practice, what % of the salespeople make a higher base salary?
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    I don't personally know. We also only started hiring for these roles very recently, so I don't think it would really even be representative yet.
- neilv 2y ago
  > we did it because sales has an incredibly strong culture of this compensation model, to the degree that it would be difficult to hire otherwise. That isn't an issue with other staff. SF Bay Area SWEs are famously compensation-focused, and this uniform salary is basically Google new-grad SWE entry-level TC. Are you hiring from the minority of good engineers who aren't driven primarily by compensation, but you just can't find the analog of that among good salespeople? > Sales people don't write promo packets, you count up the amount they sold. And you manage the imperfect alignment? (Imperfect, like the incentive to close a sale by lying to a customer, in a way that won't be discovered until next year. Or incentive to close a sale now, and don't communicate back a customer insight that would nudge the product line in a better direction longer-term, since that insight risks someone at the company wanting to talk to the customer, which puts the imminent commission at risk.)
skadamat 2y ago
Honestly it makes sense and resembles how other companies pay sales people. Lower base salary than other roles in the company for similar years of experience (roughly) but with a commission component that's some percentage of each sale. Commission is a big big part of sales culture that I suspect is hard to eliminate in an effort to be different. What's interesting is that often times the commission has no cap, so top sales people can take home higher income than even than executives (at least in cash compensation). But to the commenter's point, true transparency would share the commission % as well :)
tptacek 2y ago
Especially if you're doing account manager-type high-touch sales, which I assume Oxide is given its product, it would be difficult to hire strong sales people at all without variable compensation. It's best to think of sales as an entirely different kind of animal as the rest of the company. Like the post says, when they're making lots of money, everybody else is making even more money. One thing people who have never managed direct sales teams might not immediately grok is: good sales people are experts at gaming incentive schemes. Their work and output adapts to their comp schemes in ways nobody else's does. If you cap a salesperson's comp in a quarter, they will work to move sales out of that quarter; exactly what you don't want.
- OJFord 2y ago
  > One thing people who have never managed direct sales teams might not immediately grok is: good sales people are experts at gaming incentive schemes. Is that just circular though? i.e. I think everyone's like that, it's just unusual that it's tied directly to compensation. e.g. if I feel that my Jira output is being critically monitored, I might push something (or the reporting of something) into the next sprint if it's close and I've already done a lot in this one; I might more diligently create tickets for every little incidental thing that popped up (rather than just quietly getting it done). I'm not comp'd according to that, but it's the same behaviour, it's just 'a measure becoming a target' really isn't it?
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I don't have a more precise way to articulate this other than that adapting your behavior to your compensation is a skill, most of us are not expert in that skill even if we think we are, but even bad salespeople are like ninja masters at it.
- hinkley 2y ago
  > Like the post says, when they're making lots of money, everybody else is making even more money. I’ve worked with sales people whose compensation had loopholes you could drive a truck through, make sales that cost us more money than we made on the contract. Now a few of those are good for attracting VC money, but you have to be strategic and I’ve seen too much evidence of them not being so. If you lock up your biggest potential customers with bad contracts that makes you default dead and no good way to weasel out.
boulos 2y ago
As others have said, the sales compensation model is fundamentally a low base and then a percentage of the sale. I think Ben Horowitz had an early blog post about not trying to innovate on sales compensation models, and having seen a few attempts at "innovation" at Google Cloud, I agree. It's almost never worth the complexity. You can figure out various sliding scales, maybe even caps (but adjusting the scale is more rational), but I think flat pay is basically anathema to being a salesperson. Edit: found it, though it isn't from as long ago as I remembered. https://a16z.com/why-must-you-pay-sales-people-commissions/ https://a16z.com/why-must-you-pay-sales-people-commissions/

jszymborski 2y ago

I wonder why not just make it an employee-owned cooperative at that point? I understand there are funding considerations, and founders won't get the lion share, but it fits the stated values better.

setheron 2y ago
Good point. The other aspect that I didn't buy too much was the original blog entry claims the salary is enough since the founders themselves have kids and are living in San Francisco. They are coming from a point of economic safety from prior successful ventures and maybe are on multiple boards with other income streams. Anyways. I like the intent so I won't be too critical.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  The Bay Area is expensive, but I assure you that many families with kids live on less than $207,264. That said, everyone has their own personal requirements, and startups aren't for everyone. Around a quarter of the company, last I checked, lives in the Bay area, so while we obviously miss out on some good people who want more money, we haven't had an issue with finding enough people who are happy with the compensation. (I myself took a pay cut to join Oxide, but I live in Austin, which isn't cheap but also isn't as expensive.)
  - setheron 2y ago
    I disagree based on my own personal experience of raising kids in California but they are all young and I'm paying quite a lot for preschool :P I'm also carrying a mortgage as I'm younger which is ~30-40% of my take home pay. Total tangent: 2024 Jujutsu was my favorite tool to learn and your posts helped me learn it. Thank you.
    - steveklabnik 2y ago

TZubiri 2y ago

Very interesting to see Valve's famous org structure and handbook referenced here. Equal salary was a bold move from the start, but that's exactly what a successful company needs to avoid dropping into commodity terrain. This is especially relevant to the Operating System space, I think there's a lot of creativity here and Oxide's approach embraces that.

throwaway81523 2y ago

Is there a 1 sentence description of the model? It wasn't apparent in a minute of scrolling down the long winded blog post.

charlotte-fyi 2y ago
"our compensation is not merely transparent, but uniform" second paragraph
- throwaway81523 2y ago
  Is equity compensation also uniform?
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    No. This is also covered in their original blog (linked from this post in the first paragraph). "As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth."
Jtsummers 2y ago
Everyone but salespeople (who can make more or less based on their sales figures) receives the same salary, currently $207,264. As stated in the blog.
ziddoap 2y ago
In short, they pay everyone the same as they pay themselves. "We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. The three of us live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Steve and I each have three kids; we knew that the dollar figure that would allow us to live without financial distress – which we put at $175,000 a year – would be at least universally adequate for the team we wanted to build. And we mean everyone literally: as of this writing we have 23 employees, and that’s what we all make." Later update: "Since originally writing this blog entry in 2021, we have increased our salary a few times, and it now stands at $207,264. We have also added some sales positions that have variable compensation, consisting of a lower base salary and a commission component."

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

boulos 2y ago

Apparently, I'm one of the people that would have given feedback on the original proposal :). > Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not cash compensation. I think of compensation as total compensation. It would be fine to say this is Oxide's salary model. And I think it's a fine choice. It sounds like the equity grants are naturally variable, though I doubt it's just newer vs older employees: > As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth. Edit to add: I assume there aren't cash bonuses for salaried employees. (I've always found it a bit weird anyway, but it's not mentioned explicitly, and would seem against the ethos, too)

bcantrill 2y ago
We have had cash bonuses but they are (wait for it?) uniform -- and they have been based on company-wide events.
- boulos 2y ago
  Also reasonable! A little annoying though, since I find most people are better served by uniform paychecks, but I understand the celebratory aspect.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    It doesn't happen often enough for you to rely on it for budgeting, it's a nice surprise, not something that you think of as part of your regular compensation. (I've worked at places where your "bonus" was regular, until it wasn't: that did not go over well...)
    - tonyarkles 2y ago
      The first startup I worked at had a year-end bonus tied to meeting all of a list of company goals. The last year I was there, the list consisted of 3 engineering goals and 1 sales goal. We had around 25 engineers and 2 salespeople. We nailed the three engineering goals by about October. Sales didn’t hit their goal. No bonus for anyone. You want to build animosity in a company? I can’t think of a better way than that.

michaelt 2y ago

> One of the more incredible (and disturbingly frequent) objections I have heard is: "But is that what you’ll pay support folks?" I continue to find this question offensive, but I no longer find it surprising: the specific dismissal of support roles reveals a widespread and corrosive devaluation of those closest to customers. The easy way to "pay everyone the same amount" when you sorta don't want to is to outsource everything you don't want to pay the same amount for. Don't want to pay $200k to your receptionists and cleaners? Rent a serviced office and you get their services without them appearing on your payroll.

ec109685 2y ago
Why is that a good thing?
- dijit 2y ago
  its not, its a method of “x-washing”. IE; Green-washing[0] and so forth. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing
  - hinkley 2y ago
    More like commoditization of your complement.
- OJFord 2y ago
  I don't read GP as saying it's a good thing necessarily, just pointing out that it can be or become a bit arbitrary.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  It's not. He's just pointing out that their "we pay everyone the same" line probably isn't true.
- hinkley 2y ago
  I suppose it depends. Maybe something isn’t worth doing in house. Like for instance if the parts show up unfinished or damaged you don’t pay someone to straighten bent rails, chamfer bolt holes and de-burr surfaces. Maybe you pay the vendor a bit more, find a new vendor, or hire a middleman to bring the parts in ready to ship. Paying your support staff well is virtue signaling to be sure but as someone who’s always had a soft spot for top shelf QA and support folk, that’s not a bad thing.

therealdkz 2y ago

[dead]

ec109685 2y ago

While there are a few things highlighted in the post that are unique to this flat comp structure (e.g. no middle managers worrying about comp and leveling), for things like “we hold a high hiring bar”, it isn't at all clear that paying everyone the same has has anything to do with where the bar is set.

cobertos 2y ago

If you free up the peer/employee/worker from thinking about the constraints of scarcity of money, doesn't the next resource of scarcity become time (or perhaps, intellectual property)? Which can still lead to a straying from the candor and other ideals this compensation system hopes to promote. The corporation still owns all your time, and all your production during that time. I just can't help but think this scarcity of resources still causes poor incentives that lead to not as good human/team outcomes. Maybe better than in a "normal" compensation structure though?

sunshowers 2y ago
It is true that scarcity along any dimension sucks at some level. (Though it can also help develop the skill set to manage that scarcity well.) But some scarcities are more fundamental than others.

chaosprint 2y ago

Regardless of the content of the article, I was very impressed with the design of this company's website. Very neat.

cashsterling 2y ago

I really hope the best for Oxide and applaud their compensation model. I applied to one of their roles which required me to write about 10 pages of text to answer all their questions... which I think is a big ask but I did it because "why not". They took over 3 months to get back to me, but at least they got back to me (with an apology and a polite "no").

senderista 2y ago
I never bothered applying because they explicitly said they didn't want candidates who didn't finish college.
- steveklabnik 2y ago
  Where did we say that? My general understanding of our hiring practices is that we do not have minimum education requirements.
  - senderista 2y ago
    No, it was more like dropping out of college is a red flag.
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      Hm, well I am not sure about that either.
      - everial 2y ago
        > The completion of a formal education is much more important than the institution From https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003 -- which was top of mind since I started looking at the postings after reading the article. ;-)
        anonfordays 2y ago

clarkmoody 2y ago

One thing I've been listening for in the podcasts is a discussion of equity. I'd love to get the company's perspective on equity, options, liquidity, etc. The Silicon Valley Way (tm) of using stock options to "juice" compensation while injecting large amounts of risk and drama into the employee's tax returns is certainly something I'd like to hear Bryan's (and Oxide's) take on.

steveklabnik 2y ago
I can tell you that we receive options pretty much like any other startup. Early exercise is a nice perk.
- jmrjmr 2y ago
  Are the options grants as transparent (internally) as the cash?
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    There is effectively no difference internally than externally here. There’s no like, big list of who exactly has what amount of equity. Of course, talking about compensation with your coworkers is a legally protected activity, and I have discussed the topic with coworkers before. Personally, I don’t really care how much equity my co-workers have.
    - ahl 2y ago
      This implies that the goal of compensation transparency is to satisfy people's curiosity. I don't think that's the case. Regardless of how it's denominated, I think the goal of compensation transparency is ... uh... equity... no pun intended.

abxyz 2y ago

I like it a lot and their thoughtfulness about it but it's a little hollow when they're spending investor money. I'd like to see how this model evolves once they're off the vc teat: when there's a bottom line to answer to, does the dynamic shift? Everyone has an on-site chef when the money vc hose is on. Valve's flat structure was exciting because it wasn't 3 vc's in a coat larping as a business, it was an actual profitable business. Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, no matter how much you pay someone in support, there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line. The organization as an organism where every organ is as equally important as the other is a beautiful sentiment but the appendix is getting jettisoned at the first sign of trouble. Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person. The exception to the rule for sales is the canary in the coal mine: sales measures itself, but every role can (and will) be measured when the pressure is on, there will be competition for budget, and the support team will get squeezed until they're empty while the engineers coast. I would be more convinced that this model could survive outside of the vc bubble if sales had bought in to too. Sales as a competitive sport is cultural, not fundamental. Anyway, not criticism, just musing, love that they're trying it, even if this doesn't work out, everyone had a few good years, it's worth a shot.

lbotos 2y ago
> Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person. I... think you are thinking more "Customer Support Representative" (how to reset a password) and not Support Engineering. An engineer that can talk to customers, find bugs, and fix them, is not worth $200k? One of the Oxide Support engineers was (still is) an INSANELY strong performance engineer who helped solved performance bugs when he was on my team. We were actively using strace weekly to troubleshoot deep process internals to optimize perf. (Hi Will, I miss you, and you are definitely worth $200k don't listen to this guy. <3)
- schneems 2y ago
  To add: I saw job listings recently posted on bsky and was enjoying how well written they were. The support engineer role description asked that they be able to fly to a customers site at short notice. That’s a whole other level of on-call right there.

zem 2y ago

I looked at the careers page and could not see any administrative roles - I wonder it they pay the same for these (very impressive if so) or outsource those roles to staffing agencies.

steveklabnik 2y ago
I don't believe we have any traditional dedicated administrative staff at the moment. We're certainly not outsourcing any kind of employees, to my knowledge. (EDIT: I'm told we do currently outsource accounting, I don't interact with that part of the business so I wouldn't know about it, heh. We do have one dedicated finance employee but that's a recent hire.)
- zem 2y ago
  interesting! how are the administrative tasks managed, or are there just not that many of them? I've worked for a pretty small startup that still had a dedicated admin person who had a ton of stuff to do, though maybe Indian companies need that more.
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    What kinds of tasks are you asking about, specifically? Admin can be pretty far-ranging.
    - zem 2y ago
      off the top of my head, making sure that the building rent was paid and maintenance and supplies taken care of for various offices, managing calendars for the executives, managing software licenses, doing any government paperwork that was needed, perhaps even doing the admin side of HR if there're no dedicated HR roles.
      - steveklabnik 2y ago
        As far as I know, our CEO does a lot of this sort of work himself. There's just not very much of it so far. We only have one office, we don't license much software, and we pay a company to manage employee benefits.

serhack_ 2y ago

OT: how does anyone buy their cloud? Is it only available as a public alpha/beta with remote control? I might have a client interested into this, but needs to have some guarantees that their data remains on-premise.

steveklabnik 2y ago
> how does anyone buy their cloud? https://oxide.computer/contact https://oxide.computer/contact > Is it only available as a public alpha/beta with remote control? I might have a client interested into this, but needs to have some guarantees that their data remains on-premise. You are purchasing hardware. You put it on-premise. Our software gives you a cloud-like deployment model, but it's not going anywhere other than your rack. Happy to answer any other questions, even if they're off-topic :)
- serhack_ 2y ago
  Ah nice, I thought for a second it was more vertical with its own hardware (which has its pro and cons, maybe it's in your plans..). Would that work as a SAAS? Or price per hardware device/machines I can create?
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    We have built our own hardware, yes. > Would that work as a SAAS? Or price per hardware device/machines I can create? I'm not 100% sure what you're asking. You could use this to build your own SAAS business if you'd like, but you can't rent the hardware from us, or run your software on hardware we own, if that's what you mean.
    - serhack_ 2y ago
      Ah now I understand what you meant with "You are purchasing hardware", I missed completely that point. "You are purchasing hardware from us" :) yeah, then it's what I originally understood. Good :) so I guess one time payment, I get the hardware, I set up with your software into your hardware that I purchased and then I should be good.

latchkey 2y ago

The post I want to see is: "Oxide's revenue model: how is it going?" Looking on the website, I just see "try a vm and play with us", I'm super curious how this translates to sales. Updated: s/rent/try/

steveklabnik 2y ago
> I just see "rent a vm and play with us", To be clear, you cannot rent anything from us: you are buying a rack-scale system.
- latchkey 2y ago
  True, rent was the wrong word. I was referring to this: https://oxide.computer/remote-access https://oxide.computer/remote-access
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    Ah yeah, this is something new I frankly forgot we have. I don't personally know how well it specifically converts.
    - latchkey 2y ago
      It is the primary CTA on your website, so maybe it isn't converting well if you forgot about it. ;-)
      - steveklabnik 2y ago
        Hahah, well, you see, I have access to our dogfooding rack, so I'm not in the market right now anyway...

VladVladikoff 2y ago

As someone who is unfamiliar with your product could you maybe explain to me what your company sells? I looked for a while at your website, and it seems like you sell server hardware, however, when I go to the products section, it talks of demos etc, which sounds more like you sell cloud hosted systems. I don't see any way to find the prices or order the hardware itself. Very confusing website.

steveklabnik 2y ago
Sure thing! > it seems like you sell server hardware, We do! > which sounds more like you sell cloud hosted systems The server hardware we sell has a cloud-like interface. That is, you don't administer individual computers in the rack, you treat it as one big pool of resources that you can use. We handle the details. I wrote a lengthy comment a few years back that has more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30678324 I'm happy to elaborate on this or anything else you're curious about. > I don't see any way to find the prices or order the hardware itself. We do not publish pricing, and to place an order, you can contact sales: https://oxide.computer/contact https://oxide.computer/contact
- rcarmo 2y ago
  You forgot the in-depth accountability for every piece of the design down to third-party firmware auditing and vetting - I see that kind of vertical integration of the whole stack (including hubris, but also the tight validation of the hardware) as the key thing :)
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    It’s really important to some people and irrelevant to others, so I try to suss that out before I get into it. You’re right though!
lbotos 2y ago
they sell you a "cloud in your closet" -- the "apple of enterprise" -- buy their boxes, which run their os with deep integration to the hardware because they make both, and a support contract and you have and end to end solution where Oxide deliver the literal entire stack.

jamietanna 2y ago

Always one for transparency in salary (given I share my own, publicly at https://www.jvt.me/salary/ https://www.jvt.me/salary/) and applaud the model y'all are following!

sudomateo 2y ago
Hey Jamie, nice to see you here! I've been a big proponent of salary transparency in previous roles and also publish my history on my website at https://matthewsanabria.dev/posts/salary-transparency/ https://matthewsanabria.dev/posts/salary-transparency/. I think a lot of people here are in a tizzy about this blog post because it's against the norm of how companies view compensation. I'm willing to bet most readers haven't fought for salary transparency personally or professionally or perhaps they are on the negative side of inequitable compensation. Granted, that's perfectly fine and I hope readers reflect on their career and make the positive change they need but don't berate companies for spending money however they choose to. Especially when that spending is truly equitable across employees, barring sales of course but that's already been discussed and I'd be hard pressed to find an Oxide employee that's angry about sales people making commission. I personally took a pay cut to join Oxide. The uniform salary across the board has saved so much time that would otherwise be spent propping up metrics to get a promotion during review season based on some arbitrary goal that's set. Time that I get to spend doing actual work. It also motivates me to stay productive because I know all my teammates count on me the way I count on them to deliver work to sell Oxide racks. If other teammates are doing their best for their $207k salary I need to be doing my best for my $207k salary. On the equity side I'm sure I didn't get as much equity as the people that have been here for years but those people took more risk than I did so who cares? I'm gonna do what I can to help Oxide equity be worth so much that we all come away with a fantastic pay day and I'm sure my teammates are doing the same. Not that it's all about the money but every startup wants their equity to be worth something one day.

whazor 2y ago

I have personally followed the same strategy, but at the expense of my ‘career development’. Trying to perform well or getting a promotion can be a lot of unproductive effort. I think the only downside of 100% uniformity is that you don’t hire and train junior engineers, which should also be like a duty. While you could pay juniors the exact same salary, this might give that person a lot of stress (“ concerned that they aren’t doing enough“). One solution could be to offer traineeships, where the you offer actual coaching for a fixed duration. While clear goals like: finishing first small task, first doc, led first initiative. Then automatically completing after one or two years.

hinkley 2y ago
I’ve worked with a lot of engineers who punch down and what they all have in common is that they don’t have a clue how to make lemonade from “lemons”. They just want people who can read their minds. Tough shit. Never going to happen. New people ask questions and make mistakes that reveal organizational problems that would help everyone if fixed. As a company grows there are more parts added to the system and at some point senior staff are going to feel like newbies doing something they haven’t touched in two or three years. All that work you did for newbies now pays off as lower overhead for putting projects into maintenance mode or scaling them up for a big initiative. The worst outcome for everyone is if you hire a new employee and then let them alone. That’s short changing everyone.
- JonChesterfield 2y ago
  There's a really sad failure mode for talented raw engineers that get no feedback in the first few years. They write a lot of code, and it's trash, but noone steers them in a better direction. Wait maybe three years on zero feedback and they've convinced themselves that their work is great and this new critical feedback they're getting can't possibly be right. You end up with clever and productive and shite, all mixed up in one indignant bug farm.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    One of my most memorable “this interview is over” moments was I used to ask people to reflect on their last project and ask what they would do differently if they knew then what they know now. One fellow, sitting with both myself and the owner, answered with a single word, “nothing.” And that was a very awkward silence. I’ve been asked this question myself, which is why I stole it. Even on a project that went exceptionally well, where you pick the right tech and don’t spend a lot of time working around issues, there is usually at least one question you should have asked a little sooner to save some rework or avoid blocking issues. And I had to answer that way once. I had a feeling we should check on this thing but I or someone else talked me out of it, and three weeks later I regretted it. It reflects on your capacity for continuous improvement. If you can’t think of anything then that’s less about how the project went and more about your opinion of yourself, and your ability to notice feedback from others, or from the situation.

carstenhag 2y ago

I understand that currently (and maybe because you are "only" 75 employees) it feels fair for everyone, or people are even feeling bad about it. Also it sets the bar high when hiring someone, I get that. But what if in a year or two a person is not so great anymore? Just by my own past work experience at 2-3 companies, there were always some colleagues that were definitely not good at their job (and this was pretty much common knowledge, multiple people had the same opinion). Maybe they were good at the beginning, or not even then. I would have felt it to be super unfair for them to get the same money, or the same salary bump as me.

ahussain 2y ago
Wouldn't this person be put on a PIP and then fired if their performance didn't improve? Even at companies with non-uniform salaries, it's difficult to down-level someone. Their morale will drop, the team's anxiety will go up, and (if they were genuinely bad for a long time), the team will wonder why they weren't fired.
sunshowers 2y ago
The thing is, our team has extraordinary breadth so everyone's good at some things more than others. What matters (and what we select for) is curiosity and openness to learning. I previously worked on distributed systems with lots of immutable state. Here I've learned tons about distributed systems that have lots of mutable state, and it's made me realize immutable state is easy mode.

paddw 2y ago

I'm more curious how the business is going? Have they got a Fortune 1000 on board yet?

steveklabnik 2y ago
It's going well! We often can't share details about our customers. We did do a joint announcement with Lawrence Livermore National Labs: https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-computer-company-and-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory https://oxide.computer/blog/oxide-computer-company-and-lawre...
- selkin 2y ago
  Last year Shopify was named as a customer[0], which I found both surprising and not. [0] https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/07/04/oxide-ships-first-cloud-computers/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/07/04/oxide-ships-first-clou...

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wavemode 2y ago

Gonna take a positive sentiment on this one - godspeed, oxide! Middle management can often be such a drain on the effectiveness of an organization, that for that reason alone I readily applaud any effort which eliminates at least some layers of it. Will there be challenges - of course!! What growing business doesn't face challenges? Lots of commenters will argue that your structure won't work for this reason or that... but, what are we comparing to? Most corporate structures don't work either, and are full of crippling amounts of waste. People have just convinced themselves that the usual way of doing things is the only way of doing things.

cryptonector 2y ago

For a startup Oxide's compensation model is fine. Eventually it won't be, and that's fine too. Eventually Oxide will get past the early startup phase and mature as a business, and then it will need a much more traditional compensation model in order to acquire and retain talent because new-hires then will not have gotten on at the ground floor. Compensation is a business tool.

time4tea 2y ago

Variable pay for sales roles is the driver of vast amounts of broken behaviour. You've seen it it your own companies, but also in the various financial crashes. It immediately sets everyone's goals in non-coherent directions. Wonder why your favourite software is getting so crap? Pressure from "sales execs" cos they are getting a bonus for the poorly thought out, inconsistent crappy feature they sold to some enterprise.

florbnit 2y ago

> And, importantly: if/when those folks are making more than the rest of us, it’s because they’re selling a lot — a result that can be celebrated by everyone! This is such a toxic mentality. Yes sales always sits at the end of the value stream, but they aren’t selling thin air. Everyone in the company contributes to making that sale possible. The waiter gets a tip because “everything tasted amazing” but the chef gets stiffed because “he just made it” As always, they have equality but some are more equal than others. And they are transparent, but obviously not on the parts where transparency would expose the inequality because that wouldn’t be popular.

rcarmo 2y ago
You can’t hire sales people without a carrot, and the variable component is very much a part of the sales mindset since they are all used to have immediate feedback on their success and have an unshakable belief that they control how much they earn by succumbing to the “gotta catch them all” impulse. It’s addictive, and, ultimately, far more toxic than what you describe.

sebstefan 2y ago

You can get most of the benefits of this without the downsides with profit-sharing The downside is 200k is not enough to compete with the silicon valley for top engineers, but enough to compete with everyone for support, designers etc The upsides are the ones they listed: getting rid of the bad incentives that yearly reviews bring, focusing people on what really matters (success of the company) With profit sharing you design per role how much of a share of the profits one should get and everyone in the same role is paid the same. It's not tied to your output, your yearly review, nor your experience and the only way to make it go up is switch roles or make the company grow

steveklabnik 2y ago
We are far from making a profit, so that’s not an option right now.
- sebstefan 2y ago
  That makes sense

sevensor 2y ago

This seems like the sort of thing that’s only going to work if you have great leadership. Which oxide has, no doubt. It takes a truly unusual leader to channel the ego into making something great for humanity. A lot of executives pay lip service to this, but are actually petty kings who just want to be in charge.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

"On premise cloud computer offering a virtual machine on demand, easily hardware extendable in most directions, using proprietary hardware¹ and software²" IBM mainframe on premise, offering virutal machines on demand, easily hardware extendable in most directions, "using proprietary hardwareand software" ¹ Will Oxide certify 3rd party vendors as fully integratable and offering the same support as harware solutions from themsevles. ² What other operating systems cna Oxcide Cloud Computer run aside from the default one? (IBM LinuxOne "bare metal(?))

steveklabnik 2y ago
I'm not sure what that quote is from. Regardless: 1. We'd have that conversation if we had a third party vendor exist. No point in having that conversation until then. 2. It's your hardware. You can run whatever software you'd like on it. You're probably going to need to port something, though, I doubt anything other than our software runs out of the box. To be clear on 2, I thought you're asking about the host software. You can run anything on the VMs that you want, with our host software, via standard images.