5 ms·

Just a gentle reminder that a company may portray itself as cool to customers, but is not cool to their own current or future employees. Their interview proces

Just a gentle reminder that a company may portray itself as cool to customers, but is not cool to their own current or future employees. Their interview process was shady. There was a post here about 1-2 years ago that was a link to their interview process and how open and transparent they were. The post itself was from an employee and a fellow commenter who was gaslighting folks was also an employee. Several folks complained about the tremendous amount of homework they had to do after the initial screen, and once submitted, were ghosted. One of employees repeatedly rebutted that claim in the comments, and they did this for quite a few commenters. Was a not a good look. I doubt much has improved since then as seeing the comments below confirms the same mess. Don't spend time being amazed by folks who won't treat you right. It just ain't worth it.

dijit 4mo ago
Devils advocate (really not affiliated with oxide, but I have worked for a “desirable” employer before). How would you handle a few thousand applicants for a single role? I think no matter what you do it will feel inhumane, we can argue that a few hours of work for a take home test is inhumane too, being ghosted after doing one definitely wouldn’t pass my personal bar of acceptability, but if its the first stage and the task would take a properly qualified applicant less than 30 minutes then I can’t fault. How would you do things? remember that it has to scale and you cant leave any gaps based on human fallibility (HR/Hiring Managers are humans and will forget if there are too many things going on at once).
- jaggederest 4mo ago
  There's a simple answer, if someone is doing a substantial amount of work for your interview process, pay them an amount of money that is more than zero but less than "do job interviews for a living". Or provide that amount times two to a charity of their choice. I've done this for hiring before, for people who reached the "put substantial effort in" stage (in my case basically 2nd or 3rd round work sample stuff), and it was a great way to make sure we got good signal and they felt respected.
  - fred_is_fred 4mo ago
    From a legal and financial perspective it seems like it would be difficult to pay people to do interview homework. There's tax implications and other issues like state labor laws.
    - icedchai 4mo ago
      People do contract / temporary / 1099 work all the time. It's very simple.
  - dijit 4mo ago
    “put substantial effort into it” is such a personal thing. DDG hires like this, actually, and if I recall correctly I would be paid a flat fee, it would take a week, and the work I did would be part of something genuine in DDG, maybe a bug or something. Now, that probably sounds good to you, but taking a week out of my current employment is not going to happen- there’s an incentive to go “over the hours” inherent to the ask, even if you’re paying me a flat rate, I might lose to someone equally qualified who puts in 1.01n into the task, so I should put 1.02n (etc; ad infinitum). Which is part of the issue with all take home assignments. I have given out take home assignments (given to HR to be administered) which should take a qualified candidate 20 minutes to finish beginning to end (as in, including syncing the project, setting up their editor, exploring the problem, googling around about things, trying it out and then following up with the email to HR). I don’t doubt for even a moment that someone has spent several hours on this problem- because they’re not qualified. Passing the HR barrier in that case will not help them unfortunately, because they’ll get to talk to me, and I will disqualify them in all likelihood, and candidates are told that it should take not more than a half hour, but en masse: people don’t listen. The trouble is, theres thousands of applicants, a handful of HR, and one me. Not to be on some kind of pedestal (I’m not), but the problem doesn’t scale, you need only apply the tiniest amount of systems thinking to see it.
    - jaggederest 4mo ago
      Thousands of applicants reaching the substantial work stage is a failure of the systems thinking you're talking about. Hundreds of resumes nearly always gets narrowed down to perhaps a dozen or two at most at the screening stage. And I would make it very clear that putting in more than 30 minutes of work, timed, is a disqualifier, and I would sleep well at night clearing all those people out of the queue.
- throwaway219450 4mo ago
  If you truly believe you’re “scaling” you do it the Google way and have a strict loop with a good rubric for the interview so applicants are comparable. The whole point of that system is thousands of people and hundreds of interviewers, and a very standard process. I’ve always found it pretty fair even with some randomness in scoring. You shouldn’t be giving take homes unless they’re either short, or the applicant passed a screen and you’re investing time. Otherwise how are you “scaling” the review? Claude? Hidden test suite (not bad)? Some sort of leaderboard (bad, rewards people with time), something else?
  - dijit 4mo ago
    I’ve been through the Google process and I wouldn’t consider it to be the opposite of inhumane.
    - DANmode 4mo ago
      Use less negatives.
      - dijit 4mo ago
        it was intentionally this way
        DANmode 4mo ago
        I probably should have spotted that, lol
    - throwaway219450 4mo ago
      Well “humane” and fair aren’t necessarily the same, and some people hate loops. I like programming problems, spending a day at Google was fun, they put me up in a fancy hotel, and the interviewers were nice. Like it was clear a lot of time and money had gone into the process (6-8 hours of dev time is not cheap), not a zoom and ghost like most companies.
- turtlebits 4mo ago
  Communication is key. Think about a restaurant high in demand. There is implied communication that the initial experience might not be great in A) lines out the door, B) reservations are days/months out. Once you're in the door, service should be good/great. All companies have to do is just be more transparent. Ie, we have a backlog of 1000 applicants. Or just give a time expectation for the resume to be reviewed. Ghosting people who've "gotten in the door" and spent a considerable of time interviewing is extremely disrespectful.
  - steveklabnik 4mo ago
    In this analogy, people submitting materials have walked up to the door and knocked. It is the first step of the process. > Or just give a time expectation for the resume to be reviewed. The standard time given is four to six weeks. I haven't worked there in a long time, so I can't speak to how true that currently is, but sometimes it does take longer than that. Just like the materials are a lot of work to produce, they are also a lot of work to read, and they're read by multiple people.
marshray 4mo ago
I'm seeing the phrases "tremendous amount of homework", "substantial amount", and "few hours". Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?
- steveklabnik 4mo ago
  The process is open, you can go to https://oxide.computer/careers https://oxide.computer/careers and look yourself. Here is the direct link to the materials: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-mi2Bgf3SSNf2AUKTBxBHPiuYkrFHEl2o9SWydzWtwU/edit?pli=1&tab=t.0 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-mi2Bgf3SSNf2AUKTBxBHPiu... I don't remember how much time I put into mine when I applied.
- wmf 4mo ago
  https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003
- sunshowers 4mo ago
  My successful application took around 12 hours of writing and editing across 3 days, though I was lucky that most of my portfolio was already open source or otherwise public. Some people spend more, some spend less. It is worth keeping in mind that we write a _lot_. If you don't enjoy the process of writing, you might not like working here.
- jamesmunns 4mo ago
  My materials probably took 4-6 hours to write the first draft (I did most of it over two evenings, maybe one more just skimming the questions to figure out what things to talk about for each question), probably 2-3 hours or so to edit, then probably another hours over an evening just skimming it too many times before I hit submit. My materials were 16 pages or so, some of that was the original document (which has been linked in this comment section). It's a fair bit of writing to ask for, but for a mostly remote and prose-driven company, you do a lot of long-form writing in the day to day work. The public RFDs and github issues/comments/commits give a good flavor for this. As others have said, lots of my work is open source, and I have public writings and talks, so finding those were much easier for me than it might be for someone with only closed source works.
bcantrill 4mo ago
I'm not sure what "mess" you're referring to -- that we have a writing-intensive hiring process? That we get a lot of applicants? That we therefore end up rejecting a bunch of people? That we read application materials thoroughly? That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)? To state clearly what I feel we have said many times: Yes, it's hard to get a job at Oxide. Yes, we get a lot applicants. Yes, we ask a lot of applicants upfront. But the payoff (and the reason it's worth the risk and the work for the right person!) is an extraordinary and uplifting team -- one that I daresay each of us counts as being of unparalleled breadth and depth in our careers.
- mrcwinn 4mo ago
  I understand that all employees have equal salary pay (apart from sales people who can earn more and are valued higher). Do all have equal equity and voting rights, at least within common stock? And since transparency is a core value and principle, will you commit to sharing your cap table publicly?
  - bcantrill 4mo ago
    I appreciate that our approach to compensation leaves some with overwhelming feelings of whataboutery, but no, we (of course?) do not have equal equity: as we have said (several times?) equity broadly compensates for risk -- and risk has gone down over time. (I used to tell people to "value the equity at zero"; I don't say that any longer because it plainly isn't.) In terms of the cap table: that's a bit of an odd request? On the one hand, there are no real secrets hanging out on our cap table -- but on the other, based on your tone, it doesn't feel like the request is terrible earnest? (And, I hasten to add, transparency is a value -- not a principle.[0]) [0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002
    - segsehhjehj 4mo ago
      [flagged]
oytis 4mo ago
With every interview process you say "yes" only once and "no" many times. Where there are a lot of candidates, then many more times, while spending less time on each candidate. There is no way to design a process that will not leave the majority of candidates disappointed - as soon as they are up front with the amount of work you'll need to do, it sounds ethical to me
tptacek 4mo ago
I have some qualms with Oxide's hiring philosophy (I will have opinions on anything I allow myself to have opinions on, and "opinions on hiring processes" are part of my personal identity) but I want to call this complaint out. You can see from this thread that Oxide is a company with an online fan base. If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open. It is extraordinarily difficult to service those kinds of candidate flows. That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it) or other unfriendly/unfair practices --- which are rife across the industry, most especially at companies that don't have the reputation Oxide is trying to cultivate --- but it does give some context to it. Long story short: you can't really predict how a company treats its team from the first-contact inbound candidate experience. It's a signal, but it's a small signal among a great many others.
- steveklabnik 4mo ago
  > If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open. It is not just that: it's an avalanche of very high quality applicants. If it were a lot of poor ones, that would be easier! I'm sure yinz get lots of great ones too, but I do think that there is a meaningful difference between "thousands of resume spam people you'd never hire" and "hundreds of good applicants, dozens of great ones". It's more than just the numbers, though the numbers do matter. > That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it) I fully agree, both in that it's not an excuse for ghosting, but also that the reality of things is that sometimes things take longer than they should, even though that sucks. And while you can try to avoid it, and Oxide does, startups are very difficult.
  - tptacek 4mo ago
    No, yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about too. I don't expect anybody to have any sympathy for the plight of nerd-popular and well-capitalized tech companies. I'm only saying that understanding all the accurate descriptive claims about these processes will help you make better predictions about the world. "I got ghosted by Oxide" is in fact not a very useful input to the question of how they treat their team.

dijit 4mo ago

Devils advocate (really not affiliated with oxide, but I have worked for a “desirable” employer before). How would you handle a few thousand applicants for a single role? I think no matter what you do it will feel inhumane, we can argue that a few hours of work for a take home test is inhumane too, being ghosted after doing one definitely wouldn’t pass my personal bar of acceptability, but if its the first stage and the task would take a properly qualified applicant less than 30 minutes then I can’t fault. How would you do things? remember that it has to scale and you cant leave any gaps based on human fallibility (HR/Hiring Managers are humans and will forget if there are too many things going on at once).

jaggederest 4mo ago
There's a simple answer, if someone is doing a substantial amount of work for your interview process, pay them an amount of money that is more than zero but less than "do job interviews for a living". Or provide that amount times two to a charity of their choice. I've done this for hiring before, for people who reached the "put substantial effort in" stage (in my case basically 2nd or 3rd round work sample stuff), and it was a great way to make sure we got good signal and they felt respected.
- fred_is_fred 4mo ago
  From a legal and financial perspective it seems like it would be difficult to pay people to do interview homework. There's tax implications and other issues like state labor laws.
  - icedchai 4mo ago
    People do contract / temporary / 1099 work all the time. It's very simple.
- dijit 4mo ago
  “put substantial effort into it” is such a personal thing. DDG hires like this, actually, and if I recall correctly I would be paid a flat fee, it would take a week, and the work I did would be part of something genuine in DDG, maybe a bug or something. Now, that probably sounds good to you, but taking a week out of my current employment is not going to happen- there’s an incentive to go “over the hours” inherent to the ask, even if you’re paying me a flat rate, I might lose to someone equally qualified who puts in 1.01n into the task, so I should put 1.02n (etc; ad infinitum). Which is part of the issue with all take home assignments. I have given out take home assignments (given to HR to be administered) which should take a qualified candidate 20 minutes to finish beginning to end (as in, including syncing the project, setting up their editor, exploring the problem, googling around about things, trying it out and then following up with the email to HR). I don’t doubt for even a moment that someone has spent several hours on this problem- because they’re not qualified. Passing the HR barrier in that case will not help them unfortunately, because they’ll get to talk to me, and I will disqualify them in all likelihood, and candidates are told that it should take not more than a half hour, but en masse: people don’t listen. The trouble is, theres thousands of applicants, a handful of HR, and one me. Not to be on some kind of pedestal (I’m not), but the problem doesn’t scale, you need only apply the tiniest amount of systems thinking to see it.
  - jaggederest 4mo ago
    Thousands of applicants reaching the substantial work stage is a failure of the systems thinking you're talking about. Hundreds of resumes nearly always gets narrowed down to perhaps a dozen or two at most at the screening stage. And I would make it very clear that putting in more than 30 minutes of work, timed, is a disqualifier, and I would sleep well at night clearing all those people out of the queue.
throwaway219450 4mo ago
If you truly believe you’re “scaling” you do it the Google way and have a strict loop with a good rubric for the interview so applicants are comparable. The whole point of that system is thousands of people and hundreds of interviewers, and a very standard process. I’ve always found it pretty fair even with some randomness in scoring. You shouldn’t be giving take homes unless they’re either short, or the applicant passed a screen and you’re investing time. Otherwise how are you “scaling” the review? Claude? Hidden test suite (not bad)? Some sort of leaderboard (bad, rewards people with time), something else?
- dijit 4mo ago
  I’ve been through the Google process and I wouldn’t consider it to be the opposite of inhumane.
  - DANmode 4mo ago
    Use less negatives.
    - dijit 4mo ago
      it was intentionally this way
      - DANmode 4mo ago
        I probably should have spotted that, lol
  - throwaway219450 4mo ago
    Well “humane” and fair aren’t necessarily the same, and some people hate loops. I like programming problems, spending a day at Google was fun, they put me up in a fancy hotel, and the interviewers were nice. Like it was clear a lot of time and money had gone into the process (6-8 hours of dev time is not cheap), not a zoom and ghost like most companies.
turtlebits 4mo ago
Communication is key. Think about a restaurant high in demand. There is implied communication that the initial experience might not be great in A) lines out the door, B) reservations are days/months out. Once you're in the door, service should be good/great. All companies have to do is just be more transparent. Ie, we have a backlog of 1000 applicants. Or just give a time expectation for the resume to be reviewed. Ghosting people who've "gotten in the door" and spent a considerable of time interviewing is extremely disrespectful.
- steveklabnik 4mo ago
  In this analogy, people submitting materials have walked up to the door and knocked. It is the first step of the process. > Or just give a time expectation for the resume to be reviewed. The standard time given is four to six weeks. I haven't worked there in a long time, so I can't speak to how true that currently is, but sometimes it does take longer than that. Just like the materials are a lot of work to produce, they are also a lot of work to read, and they're read by multiple people.

marshray 4mo ago

I'm seeing the phrases "tremendous amount of homework", "substantial amount", and "few hours". Does anyone have an actual estimated time we can discuss?

steveklabnik 4mo ago
The process is open, you can go to https://oxide.computer/careers https://oxide.computer/careers and look yourself. Here is the direct link to the materials: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-mi2Bgf3SSNf2AUKTBxBHPiuYkrFHEl2o9SWydzWtwU/edit?pli=1&tab=t.0 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-mi2Bgf3SSNf2AUKTBxBHPiu... I don't remember how much time I put into mine when I applied.
wmf 4mo ago
https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003
sunshowers 4mo ago
My successful application took around 12 hours of writing and editing across 3 days, though I was lucky that most of my portfolio was already open source or otherwise public. Some people spend more, some spend less. It is worth keeping in mind that we write a _lot_. If you don't enjoy the process of writing, you might not like working here.
jamesmunns 4mo ago
My materials probably took 4-6 hours to write the first draft (I did most of it over two evenings, maybe one more just skimming the questions to figure out what things to talk about for each question), probably 2-3 hours or so to edit, then probably another hours over an evening just skimming it too many times before I hit submit. My materials were 16 pages or so, some of that was the original document (which has been linked in this comment section). It's a fair bit of writing to ask for, but for a mostly remote and prose-driven company, you do a lot of long-form writing in the day to day work. The public RFDs and github issues/comments/commits give a good flavor for this. As others have said, lots of my work is open source, and I have public writings and talks, so finding those were much easier for me than it might be for someone with only closed source works.

bcantrill 4mo ago

I'm not sure what "mess" you're referring to -- that we have a writing-intensive hiring process? That we get a lot of applicants? That we therefore end up rejecting a bunch of people? That we read application materials thoroughly? That we don't provide specific feedback on individual applicants (even though we explicitly state that/why we don't)? To state clearly what I feel we have said many times: Yes, it's hard to get a job at Oxide. Yes, we get a lot applicants. Yes, we ask a lot of applicants upfront. But the payoff (and the reason it's worth the risk and the work for the right person!) is an extraordinary and uplifting team -- one that I daresay each of us counts as being of unparalleled breadth and depth in our careers.

mrcwinn 4mo ago
I understand that all employees have equal salary pay (apart from sales people who can earn more and are valued higher). Do all have equal equity and voting rights, at least within common stock? And since transparency is a core value and principle, will you commit to sharing your cap table publicly?
- bcantrill 4mo ago
  I appreciate that our approach to compensation leaves some with overwhelming feelings of whataboutery, but no, we (of course?) do not have equal equity: as we have said (several times?) equity broadly compensates for risk -- and risk has gone down over time. (I used to tell people to "value the equity at zero"; I don't say that any longer because it plainly isn't.) In terms of the cap table: that's a bit of an odd request? On the one hand, there are no real secrets hanging out on our cap table -- but on the other, based on your tone, it doesn't feel like the request is terrible earnest? (And, I hasten to add, transparency is a value -- not a principle.[0]) [0] https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002 https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0002
  - segsehhjehj 4mo ago
    [flagged]

oytis 4mo ago

With every interview process you say "yes" only once and "no" many times. Where there are a lot of candidates, then many more times, while spending less time on each candidate. There is no way to design a process that will not leave the majority of candidates disappointed - as soon as they are up front with the amount of work you'll need to do, it sounds ethical to me

tptacek 4mo ago

I have some qualms with Oxide's hiring philosophy (I will have opinions on anything I allow myself to have opinions on, and "opinions on hiring processes" are part of my personal identity) but I want to call this complaint out. You can see from this thread that Oxide is a company with an online fan base. If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open. It is extraordinarily difficult to service those kinds of candidate flows. That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it) or other unfriendly/unfair practices --- which are rife across the industry, most especially at companies that don't have the reputation Oxide is trying to cultivate --- but it does give some context to it. Long story short: you can't really predict how a company treats its team from the first-contact inbound candidate experience. It's a signal, but it's a small signal among a great many others.

steveklabnik 4mo ago
> If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open. It is not just that: it's an avalanche of very high quality applicants. If it were a lot of poor ones, that would be easier! I'm sure yinz get lots of great ones too, but I do think that there is a meaningful difference between "thousands of resume spam people you'd never hire" and "hundreds of good applicants, dozens of great ones". It's more than just the numbers, though the numbers do matter. > That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it) I fully agree, both in that it's not an excuse for ghosting, but also that the reality of things is that sometimes things take longer than they should, even though that sucks. And while you can try to avoid it, and Oxide does, startups are very difficult.
- tptacek 4mo ago
  No, yeah, that's exactly what I was talking about too. I don't expect anybody to have any sympathy for the plight of nerd-popular and well-capitalized tech companies. I'm only saying that understanding all the accurate descriptive claims about these processes will help you make better predictions about the world. "I got ghosted by Oxide" is in fact not a very useful input to the question of how they treat their team.