11 ms·
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 the
by abxyz 1y 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 1y 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 1y agoTo 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.
- Aeolun 1y ago> The support engineer role description asked that they be able to fly to a customers site at short notice. Kinda makes sense if you sell physical hardware?
- mastax 1y agoAlso some of their customers are airgapped so if they’ll let you touch the machine that’ll make debugging a lot easier.
- lolinder 1y agoThis is a very interesting point. I wonder how many roles there are like this: low valued because they are low valued, in a vicious cycle. We hire people to fill a prescribed low-value role and don't expect much of them so we don't pay them much and so we don't get much out of them, because we designed the role to be low impact. If we treat every role as a $200k/yr role, it makes sense that the first thing that would happen is that we find a way to give people leverage to make >$200k of difference in each role! And that's a really exciting proposition from both the employee and customer perspective.
- pm90 1y agoSo much this. We also underestimate how motivated people can be in these roles when they make an atypical comp; my experience has been that people push themselves hard to prove they’re worth that rather than coast.
- jwr 1y ago> An engineer that can talk to customers, find bugs, and fix them, is not worth $200k? I always watch these kinds of discussions on HN with interest, because depending on what is being discussed, one of two viewpoints dominates: * If we are discussing salaries, of course people deserve compensation, and good work is worth a good salary. * If we are discussing software cost, HOW DARE THE DEVELOPER ask for subscription pricing, and everything should really be a $5 one-time purchase. BTW, a very good point in the thread above is that the company is spending VC money.
- numpad0 1y ago"Let's remove all fire extinguishers from campus buildings!" vs "We can't appraise extinguishers as worth $50k each quarters", the reasonable PoV must be somewhere inbetween.
- steveklabnik 1y ago> when there's a bottom line to answer to Having VC money doesn't mean that you can ignore finances. We are in a relatively capital-intensive business compared to a lot of the startups on HN. > Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, Respectfully, I think this attitude is flat-out wrong. Because of this: > there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line. Directly, sure. But that's the fundamental error. Good support is absolutely worth it, and do bring in value, only indirectly. That customer you kept because when they had an issue, it was resolved quickly and professionally? That's money, even if it's more difficult to quantify than sales. And it's not like support engineers aren't doing engineering as well.
- dapperdrake 1y agoLong-term growth really seems to come from keeping paying customers. Thank you, Steve.
- marcinzm 1y ago> We are in a relatively capital-intensive business compared to a lot of the startups on HN. Doesn't that just mean that employee compensation is an even smaller percentage of expenses versus other companies? So you can ignore that side of finances even more than other startups?
- steveklabnik 1y agoIt means we need to make every dollar count, because we need a lot of them.
- zem 1y agoI think of it as "we have a team developing this product, the product makes money, and we use that money to compensate the team". if the team as a whole needs support people in order to do its work, it seems like a great thing to consider those people full-fledged team members deserving of equal compensation. to the point that their labour does not scale in the same way a software engineer's does - think of the fact that you need more support people to do the amount of revenue generation that fewer devs could do as part of the cost of running the business, rather than as a measure of the fraction of the rewards that should go to them.
- tgma 1y agoYou hit the nail on the head re sales being the canary in the coalmine. I just read the original post which I found distasteful and on-brand with Cantrill virtue signaling. Everyone is equal but some people are more equal: some get founder equity and some measly basis points. To boot, founders already made their money from Sun Microsystems looking for retirement entertainment and more than 175 or 200k is gonna be taxes anyway. If they hit it big they’ll be billionaires and their employee number 24 will do as much as if they’d gone to FANG with much stress and liquidity concerns along the way.
- ahl 1y agoSeveral mistakes here, perhaps most egregious: Sun Microsystems might have made some people rich but that was looooong loooooong ago.
- tgma 1y agoSun or otherwise it’s not the beginning of his career. I don’t mean they are billionaires but I’m willing to bet they don’t need to collect cash to pay downpayment like an average Google L4 on their first starter townhouse in Sunnyvale which will get more expensive while they receive their 200ks, so yeah I know exactly what I’m talking about. He knows very well too.
- Retric 1y agoDepends on the business model, cater to high end clients and having a ~1M$/year doctor be the once answering the phone can be a major selling point. Further you optimize around costs, when having people answer phones is expensive you try a minimize the need for someone to answer a phone. A 5 minute call with someone making 200k is like 8.50$. Empower them to figure out and fix the underlying issue thus avoiding the next 1,000 calls and that looks cheap.
- throwaway2037 1y agoI don't want to wade too deeply into the argument is a computer support engineer worth 200K USD per year, but this comment really stands out to me: > Empower them to figure out and fix the underlying issue thus avoiding the next 1,000 calls Some of the best software engineers that I have worked with saw every support issue as a chance to fix a bug and/or improve logging/docs. Sometimes they built little tools to do more complex support tasks (update complex config) in moments instead of hours. (Yeah, yeah, I know about this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/) If I were to guess about Oxide's view of "support engineers": They aren't traditional L1/L2 support. They are essentially software devs who happen to excel at support. As a mentioned earlier, if they respond to a customer call (or email), they might have a quick workaround, then go and fix a bug or update logging/docs.
- dragonwriter 1y agoI mean, if a software system is not behaving as the user expects, either the software system behavior is incorrect or the system producing the user expectations of the software is incorrect, and wherever the problem is, if it is not fixed it is likely to recur.
- ethbr1 1y agoMoving the goalposts so that support engineers with deep technical skillsets are actually software devs is kind of a dick move. From someone who's worked both sides of the glass -- support engineering is way harder. You don't get to play in a nice, standardized, performant environment. You're often parachuted into a random customer issue, with little context and an unstable environment, someone nervously watching over your shoulder, and a customer director/VP demanding updates every hour. And from watching traditional software devs be pulled into those calls and flounder past "works on my machine," live debugging is a very different skillset on top of technical expertise. Not only do you have to thoroughly understand the happy path, but you also have to tread both known and unknown failure paths. One of my litmus tests for product companies is how they set up their support orgs and escalation paths: as checkboxes or continuous improvement loops. The former approach tends to produce shitty products.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sunshowers 1y agoI work at Oxide, and support engineering is worth far more than that. It literally means the rest of us don't have to be on customer oncall all the time — I've spent long stretches of my career doing that and it's extraordinarily stressful. Do you know how valuable that can be?
- alistairSH 1y agoSure, but at some size, the support engineers are at max workload and you hire somebody to triage calls for them.
- sunshowers 1y agoWe're building our product in a way that we stave that off as long as possible! In many ways the whole theory of our product is to avoid that kind of issue.
- jzelinskie 1y agoNo commentary on your latter points about Oxide's compensation structure, but I fundamentally don't share the same sentiment you have about the dynamics of cash flow for venture-backed startups. Maybe there are still VC-backed companies having catered food, but I think they're by far the exception and not the rule. ZIRP is long over and a decent portion of this generation of startups began in COVID and subsequently don't even have an office. Maybe I'm the one that's in the bubble, but when you take VC money you're on the line to hit growth numbers in a way that you aren't when you bootstrap and can take your time to slowly grow once you've hit ramen profitability.
- ralph84 1y agoI imagine they had to introduce variable comp for sales because they weren’t able to hire even a single good enterprise sales rep for a flat $200k. It’s not a culture thing, it’s just the market rate for the role. If they paid a flat $500k they’d stand a better chance of avoiding variable comp.
- Aeolun 1y agoI find the whole variable comp for sales so bizarre. It’s like people trying to claim that the only way to get decent work out of programmers is by giving them comp on lines of code written. Why can’t a salesperson be properly motivated by just, you know, doing their job?
- atonse 1y agoThey are. And they have one job. To sell. So they’re motivated by the only output that matters in their job, how much they sold. A lot of selling is zero sum. For you to win, if usually means someone (a competitor) has to lose. So it attracts competitive people just like programming tends to attract more analytical people. The right skills for the right job.
- ethbr1 1y ago> And they have one job. To sell. There's an underappreciated corollary to sales comp. 1. If they're variable comp. 2. And corp controls equations. 3. Then corp can drive sales outcome it wants by changing equations. For how messy ground-level sales at scale is (read: relationships, promises, conversations), this nicely simplifies and aligns what leadership wants to happen in sales with what actually happens. Simply by tying sales comp to whatever the specific sales plays leadership wants more or less of. Smart sales people are excellent at self-aligning their behavior to compensation incentives.
- plorkyeran 1y agoThe thing that's unusual about sales is that it's the only metric that anyone's ever found that's (mostly) an exception to Goodhart's Law. Companies would love to pay a lot more people on commission if you could find a way to calculate commissions that gave the desired incentives.
- tw04 1y ago> Sales as a competitive sport is cultural, not fundamental. Can you name a single successful business that reflects your claim? Because I don’t know of any successful sales organizations that don’t pay commission.
- fuzztester 1y ago>Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person. self-contradictory statement if there ever was one. related: have you heard of system administrator appreciation day? or heard of: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2b4n7a/til_henry_ford_once_balked_at_paying_10000_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2b4n7a/til_h... ?
- mac-mc 1y agoYou didn't read the article and the previous article that it came from closely.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- levi-turner 1y ago> 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. As someone who was in Support and moved to the sales (engineering) side, I'll put it this way, if we had 3-4 of me in Support, my job would be 2-3-4x as easy.
- scargrillo 1y ago> Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person. This reads more like a reflection of how we’ve historically designed support roles than a fundamental truth about them. Oxide’s approach seems to invert the premise: instead of paying people based on a low-leverage job description, they design roles where every team member is expected to operate at high leverage — including support engineers. That means hiring differently, scoping differently, and building a product that aligns with that structure. It’s fair to be skeptical of anything cushioned by VC — but skepticism cuts both ways. Just because traditional comp structures haven’t empowered support doesn’t mean they can’t. We’ve seen engineering, design, and even ops roles evolve dramatically when companies raised the bar. Why not support?
- ary 1y agoLoading up this thread I knew this kind of response would be here. Like, I was willing to bet money on it. Examples of support people worth $200k+ are abundant, and the business case is the same every time. When you do the work to place a monetary value on customers and their retention your support personnel costs relative to that are easy to justify. When a support person is preventing churn of X number of customers worth $Y dollars a year the math becomes trivial. The (American) tech industry is so accustomed to massive scale and lack of competition that the notion of giving a damn about customer retention has risen to the level of a cultural, not economic, problem.