I was interested in applying to Oxide a few months back. They ask candidates who reach interviews to provide at least 9 hours of availability, normally arranged as three separate 3-hour blocks. Each block contains three 1-hour interview slots, so the standard schedule is effectively nine one-hour conversations. Not including the follow ups.
I got another great offer after just 1 interview that I took, so I never went through their process, but it looks very exhausting to me. Being rejected after investing so much time must also feel awful.
You are going to potentially spend a major portion of your life there - so it isn't that weird to set aside a full day to get to know them.
In my experience with this format it isn't like you are coding for 9 hours. It starts with soft HR stuff, ends with a sales pitch to you, and most of the middle is just pleasant conversation with interesting people.
> You are going to potentially spend a major portion of your life there - so it isn't that weird to set aside a full day to get to know them.
Right, but you're not just doing it with them, you're potentially doing it with lots of companies you're applying to. It would be untenable to devote that much time to every prospect. Oxide can only do it because most other companies don't.
There are lots of axes on which to judge a company so I wouldn't write off Oxide for this alone, but it doesn't speak well of their respect for their candidates' time.
The reason companies have that many interview hours spread across multiple slots is that then have fallout over the funnel.
They don’t have every candidate scheduled for the entire time of all the rounds. If you don’t pass earlier rounds, they’re not going to waste time (yours and theirs) hauling you through more rounds of interviews.
If you make it to the end of all of those scheduled interviews, there’s probably a very good chance you’re getting an offer.
A full day is a lot unless you get compensated or something for it I feel. In today's world it is a lot of ask. I could also not be spending any time there, in which case that day is wasted. Imagine if all interviews of all your applications took a full day… probably burn off half your PTO just interviewing…
It’s interesting to me that 9 hours of interview time is considered excessive by some people. Over my career I’ve done interviews that required plane flights, hotels, and multiple separate days on site.
I’ve also done interviews that were brief 30-60 minute casual discussions followed by an offer during the hiring craziness that happened in a few years in the past. Anecdotally, coworkers at those companies were a completely random range from smart and kind down to the meanest, most clueless people I ever worked with. They had high turnover both because they were always firing bad hires (hire fast only works if you also fire fast) and people were burning out from the perpetual stream of bad hires being randomly injected into the company after they talked their way through the short interview.
Looking back, the interview processes that took the longest were certainly not perfect, but the companies that had them were much better about maintaining a coherent culture and high bar for the coworkers I would get. Every new hire felt like someone amazing who I was happy to be working with.
Everyone has different priorities, but looking back I think the relatively small amount of time I invested into long interview processes (relative to the 2000 hours I work every year) was time well spent.
I personally don't mind the multiple interview slots or 9 hours of conversations. It's fair since it takes their team members an equivalent amount of time (though it's split across team members, each team member is likely interviewing many others as well).
My blocker has been the initial written answers to the questions. I've had the questions half-answered for nearly a year now. I want to do it properly (sans AI) but other things come up and I question the EV of spending the time, especially since I'm not a strong writer in the first place※.
For Oxide, it makes sense to demand a strong writer due to their culture, so even if technically qualified I might not be a good fit, assuming I even get an interview.
※ - I write unambiguously, but use point form whenever possible and am not great at naturally writing concisely.
IME those kinds of interviews are a waste for the applicant because you have to do your 5-10 minute elevator pitch and 10-15 minute dive into your experience 9 separate times. It’s terribly exhausting.
On the other hand I like meeting a lot of people that I’d be working with. It’s nice to start day 1 knowing who people are.
In our interviews, the interviewer has read the applicant's detailed written materials, and the candidate has received the interviewer's materials from when they applied. So there is no elevator pitch, no walking through resume, no getting to know you. Just a conversation.
We also advance very few candidates to interviews and hire a surprisingly large proportion of those who interview, so it's not like you're doing all this interviewing for the usual slim chance of being hired. The written materials are the primary filter.
Yep, I had two interview processes that did this... 8 times, at the same time.
Both said no after 8 interviews because of one person in the process who didn't like me, everyone else supposedly were on board.
It genuinely took me another year to even consider applying to another job it was so demoralizing.
Is it not good for exceptionally talented employees who want to work with other employees who are also great at their job and good communication skills?
I feel like this topic comes up every single time interview processes are discussed. Lots of people complaining "that process is too onerous! How do they expect me to invest that much time! In person coding problems are worthless!" And I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I do wonder what a lot of folks then expect a good process would look like while still allowing the employer enough information to make a decision.
Oxide can obviously impose a 9 hour interview process because they're a good enough company that lots of smart, motivated people want to work there and thus good candidates are willing to endure that process. Lesser companies obviously can't impose that process because there aren't enough good candidates willing to endure it.
My main point being, different strokes for different folks. If you think that process is too long, great, find a company with a less time consuming process. But Oxide's process obviously seems to work well for them, so I think it's pointless to complain about it (note I don't really think that's what you are doing, but a bunch of reply comments certainly are).
This is the same argument that says YouTube can play 3 unskippable ads, TVs can scan and collect data on all devices in your LAN, because they're a private company and can do what they want, and if you don't like it, just don't buy it. Well in that case, I can also smoke in front of kids, because I am a free agent and there's no laws saying I can't.
That’s not how it works. Interviews are like a funnel. If you don’t pass the first interview they don’t schedule you for all of the other hours just to keep going. You get dropped from the pipeline.
When a company says they have 9 hours of interview time, that’s usually the maximum time if you make it through all the rounds. If you get that far, you’re highly likely to get an offer.
You would also be surprised at how many people will actually do 10-20 long interview rounds to try to maximize their chances for the best job.
There are almost two different bubbles of candidates: Those who refuse to do anything more than a couple quick calls, and those who will rearrange their life to spend days putting in work for each job they want. I think that’s fine and everyone should do what works for them, but if you think 9 hours of interviewing is going to turn candidates away from a company like Oxide you’d be very surprised to see the quantity and caliber of applicants who line up for jobs like this.
I think you also might need to adjust your expectations now that AI interview cheating is getting out of control. A lot of companies are moving back to on-site interviews. I’d happily do 3 x 3 hour video calls more than flying and staying at hotels and renting cars to get to an office in another city just to interview.
Agree. Shotgunning 100 applications a month is not a strategy for finding a good job. It says "I don't care where I work, or what the job is, just hire me." And maybe you're that desperate, but IMO you'll get better returns spending more time on fewer/better opportunities.
That's a loaded question. How about just saying it for what it is. Are you willing to spend 9 hours today (not counting the other interviews you have to do for other companies) for a X% probability of getting a job at company A which you like Y amount.
If X and Y are large enough sure. Most of the time X is hidden and Y is hard to gauge.
I read their "we will respond to every application, even if it has to be a brief non-specific rejection" and thought that sounded like a great policy that I wish more companies would follow. It's been 6 months now and I never heard anything from them, so that's a little disappointing.
They waste very large amounts of candidate time on an essay like assignment before you get to talk to someone.
Truth be told they already know from your resume if you’d be worth interviewing. That’s enough , and maybe a OA.
The best process I’ve experienced, was a quick conversion with a few technical questions, then I can start as a contractor. If it works out it works, if it doesn’t that’s ok too.
No need for me to write a long paper, when HR probably took one look at my resume and sent out a rejection.
It's the full hardware/firmware stack up to and including VM hypervisor. A complete rack solution, but it's the tailored firmware and integrated hypervisor, networking that sets it apart from another OEM that sells you a full rack solution. Afaik.
Why are they paying taxes if they have a huge order backlog. Expand your production capability. Amazon famously had no profits on paper for many years because of their relentless expansion.
"Paying our taxes" in this kind of context is nearly always shorthand for "filling out our tax returns". That part usually takes a substantial hunk of time. The actual payment process is typically writing a check or entering credit card info, which just takes a few seconds.
Well, in this case it was actually literally paying our taxes. (In the photo, Steve is about to initiate a wire to the IRS.) At our size, it's not a check -- and certainly not a credit card.
As to why we're paying taxes: while tax minimization is certainly a thing (and we have taken advantage of things like R&D tax credits), we're paying taxes because we're profitable.
I'm surprised they didn't go the debt route, trade finance could cover their customer orders. I know they are risk averse in case companies back out of orders, but bringing on more shareholders is its own form of risk.
Is something else going on here, are they locking in orders from AMD and other suppliers beyond their current order backlog?
Awesome company, awesome products. I wish they pushed AI less in their socials, like we get it computers and servers means ai workloads. It just devalues their whole image in my opinion. Hope you all do continue to do awesome things and don't become evil.
> Well, yes, it is: most startups don’t pay income tax because most startups aren’t profitable! Indeed, startups seek investment because they have costs long before they have revenue, let alone gross profit — let alone income. This is by design: profitability is a lagging indicator of product/market fit (the adventure in venture capital is investing long before the business has materialized!).
Venture Capital is one of the greatest engines of growth, and fitting for the vast majority of early stage tech companies, it is interesting to see how changes in business economics may result in niche, differing capital structures. Eg. Companies which sell RL envs have vastly different economics than a food delivery app.
They’re raising from a position of strength for capital they don’t need. As far as I know, they haven’t published their valuation, but it is very possible they’re giving up little equity. Plus, giving up some equity to meet customer demand is generally a good idea as more revenue means higher valuation.
A confusing thing about fundraising and dilution is that the new shares don’t take away value from existing shareholders.
If each share is worth $1 at the valuation used in the raise, then an investor adding $100 million gets 100 million shares for it. The shares aren’t taken away from anyone, they're issued in exchange for the capital.
So ideally the dilution is neutral to the value of the equity. In practice this is highly variable because the valuations are fuzzy numbers used for the raise, but you get the idea.
If a company can get the same growth without raising, that would be better because the proportional ownership stays higher. However, the reason companies give equity in exchange for capital is that they need the cash for growth and can’t get it on better terms anywhere else.
That's always struck me as a very idealistic way of looking at dilution.
Another way to look at it, is that it's partly locking in the value of those shares at the time of dilution, effectively reducing the variance of the future value of the existing shares.
As a thought experiment:
If you're holding a lottery ticket that you bought, and someone comes along, says they're going to buy 1,000 lottery tickets, but promises to share any winnings with you pro-rata. You don't really have a choice to say no.
You'd probably be really annoyed, if your ticket is a winning ticket, you split the jackpot and don't even get a life-changing amount of money back for it. If any of theirs wins, you likewise get a modest amount, but you weren't bothered about losing £1.
It's an expectation neutral thought experiment, but reducing variance isn't always wanted!
> You'd probably be really annoyed, if your ticket is a winning ticket, you split the jackpot and don't even get a life-changing amount of money back for it. If any of theirs wins, you likewise get a modest amount, but you weren't bothered about losing £1
Your lottery comparison isn’t logical. I think you’re just repeating the same misunderstanding I was trying to dispel above.
If you want to force the analogy, you would have to imagine a lottery where your win and the investor’s wins are tied together. Either you both win or you both lose. But to make the analogy actually work, you’d have to imagine a lottery where their ticket purchase increase the winnings proportionally.
So in this bad forced lottery analogy, you would have a smaller number of the overall tickets, but the same odds of winning as before and the payout would be the same as before.
You’re making the common mistake of assuming that the company could get the same outcome without taking investment money. It’s common to imagine getting that your 0.1% of a sweet $1 billion IPO without ever getting diluted along the way, but getting a company to that IPO point requires a lot of cash. If a company is lucky enough to have all the cash flow they need to get there then they can do it all without dilution. Most companies need to raise some cash to get there, though.
So raising the money actually lowers your variance of getting a large payout, because the cash is what enables the growth to that liquidity event.
But that's not how shares work. And companies aren't lotteries.
In your example, the additional 1,000 lottery tickets might add nothing whatsoever to the value of the winning lottery ticket in your hand. It's just not a good metaphor. That's not how buying shares in a company works. Investors don't invest using bearer instruments of totally unknown value. They invest using cash. Cash always adds the value of the cash. That's intrinsic to it being cash.
A much better way to think about it is that you have something in your hand that's worth X dollars and has Y shares. If somebody were to give you X dollars in investment in exchange for Y additionally issued shares, then at the end of that operation the company, by definition, would be worth $2x, and your Y shares would be exactly half of that value, meaning that you start with X and you end with X.
As mentioned, knowing exactly what the company is worth in dollars is a little tricky, but that's the premise, and it completely makes sense.
Also time for the quarterly reminder that On the Metal / Oxide and Friends is an excellent podcast if you're into Rust and/or EE. Bryan and co. do such a good job keeping the technical discussions entertaining. Seems like an awesome place to work, too.
I used to think that Oxide's business model sucks in the face of the hyperscalers. When AWS/GCP/Azure "just works" and is generally reliable and cheap, why would I go through the trouble of buying my own computers? Well the past 5 years have been a constant decline towards more concentration of power, lack of care for their customers, and degradation in quality in general. AI is of course accelerating this decline - selling de-slopped products is now a huge competitive advantage. All the best luck to Oxide.
Previously, they’ve stated that they raised merely to give customers confidence that they are in it for the long haul. You don’t want to buy racks from a company that won’t be around tomorrow. Raising money is likely being used to create a war chest, with some amount of it being used to grow the team and operations, to fill demand, and support their customers. Those functions have to grow sustainably, but the demand also signals to investors that it’s working, and continued investment is a good move.
In reality, it could very well be investors just saying “we’re so happy with how things are going, we want more, take our money!!!”
You can still be heavily cash flow negative while being Net Income positive. It's actually one of the big use cases for VC money; you have a flywheel of revenue but not enough cash to pay to service that revenue and actually get cash.
Congrats! Now it does get tricky - because once you tempt investors with a profit they start worrying about your spending and expect you to keep a profit.
Oxide continues to be one of the most inspiring companies in the space, I was just encouraging someone to apply there yesterday. :)
I got another great offer after just 1 interview that I took, so I never went through their process, but it looks very exhausting to me. Being rejected after investing so much time must also feel awful.
In my experience with this format it isn't like you are coding for 9 hours. It starts with soft HR stuff, ends with a sales pitch to you, and most of the middle is just pleasant conversation with interesting people.
Right, but you're not just doing it with them, you're potentially doing it with lots of companies you're applying to. It would be untenable to devote that much time to every prospect. Oxide can only do it because most other companies don't.
There are lots of axes on which to judge a company so I wouldn't write off Oxide for this alone, but it doesn't speak well of their respect for their candidates' time.
They don’t have every candidate scheduled for the entire time of all the rounds. If you don’t pass earlier rounds, they’re not going to waste time (yours and theirs) hauling you through more rounds of interviews.
If you make it to the end of all of those scheduled interviews, there’s probably a very good chance you’re getting an offer.
I’ve also done interviews that were brief 30-60 minute casual discussions followed by an offer during the hiring craziness that happened in a few years in the past. Anecdotally, coworkers at those companies were a completely random range from smart and kind down to the meanest, most clueless people I ever worked with. They had high turnover both because they were always firing bad hires (hire fast only works if you also fire fast) and people were burning out from the perpetual stream of bad hires being randomly injected into the company after they talked their way through the short interview.
Looking back, the interview processes that took the longest were certainly not perfect, but the companies that had them were much better about maintaining a coherent culture and high bar for the coworkers I would get. Every new hire felt like someone amazing who I was happy to be working with.
Everyone has different priorities, but looking back I think the relatively small amount of time I invested into long interview processes (relative to the 2000 hours I work every year) was time well spent.
My blocker has been the initial written answers to the questions. I've had the questions half-answered for nearly a year now. I want to do it properly (sans AI) but other things come up and I question the EV of spending the time, especially since I'm not a strong writer in the first place※.
For Oxide, it makes sense to demand a strong writer due to their culture, so even if technically qualified I might not be a good fit, assuming I even get an interview.
※ - I write unambiguously, but use point form whenever possible and am not great at naturally writing concisely.
On the other hand I like meeting a lot of people that I’d be working with. It’s nice to start day 1 knowing who people are.
We also advance very few candidates to interviews and hire a surprisingly large proportion of those who interview, so it's not like you're doing all this interviewing for the usual slim chance of being hired. The written materials are the primary filter.
Hiring process RFD: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0003
It genuinely took me another year to even consider applying to another job it was so demoralizing.
Oxide can obviously impose a 9 hour interview process because they're a good enough company that lots of smart, motivated people want to work there and thus good candidates are willing to endure that process. Lesser companies obviously can't impose that process because there aren't enough good candidates willing to endure it.
My main point being, different strokes for different folks. If you think that process is too long, great, find a company with a less time consuming process. But Oxide's process obviously seems to work well for them, so I think it's pointless to complain about it (note I don't really think that's what you are doing, but a bunch of reply comments certainly are).
Suppose you get interviews on 10% of those. That’s 10 interview pipelines, and if every company had this policy, 90 unpaid interviewing hours.
Like the comment elsewhere in this thread, candidates will find other roles before your interview gauntlet concludes.
When a company says they have 9 hours of interview time, that’s usually the maximum time if you make it through all the rounds. If you get that far, you’re highly likely to get an offer.
You would also be surprised at how many people will actually do 10-20 long interview rounds to try to maximize their chances for the best job.
There are almost two different bubbles of candidates: Those who refuse to do anything more than a couple quick calls, and those who will rearrange their life to spend days putting in work for each job they want. I think that’s fine and everyone should do what works for them, but if you think 9 hours of interviewing is going to turn candidates away from a company like Oxide you’d be very surprised to see the quantity and caliber of applicants who line up for jobs like this.
I think you also might need to adjust your expectations now that AI interview cheating is getting out of control. A lot of companies are moving back to on-site interviews. I’d happily do 3 x 3 hour video calls more than flying and staying at hotels and renting cars to get to an office in another city just to interview.
If X and Y are large enough sure. Most of the time X is hidden and Y is hard to gauge.
They waste very large amounts of candidate time on an essay like assignment before you get to talk to someone.
Truth be told they already know from your resume if you’d be worth interviewing. That’s enough , and maybe a OA.
The best process I’ve experienced, was a quick conversion with a few technical questions, then I can start as a contractor. If it works out it works, if it doesn’t that’s ok too.
No need for me to write a long paper, when HR probably took one look at my resume and sent out a rejection.
Oxide are so good at comms.
Why are they paying taxes if they have a huge order backlog. Expand your production capability. Amazon famously had no profits on paper for many years because of their relentless expansion.
"Paying our taxes" in this kind of context is nearly always shorthand for "filling out our tax returns". That part usually takes a substantial hunk of time. The actual payment process is typically writing a check or entering credit card info, which just takes a few seconds.
As to why we're paying taxes: while tax minimization is certainly a thing (and we have taken advantage of things like R&D tax credits), we're paying taxes because we're profitable.
a few days ago I migrated a non-trivial firestore app to sqlite
10x less latency (10x requests / second)
migration took a few minutes (+ 2 days of prep)
just a few months ago that would have been infeasible or at least nerve wracking
Is something else going on here, are they locking in orders from AMD and other suppliers beyond their current order backlog?
Venture Capital is one of the greatest engines of growth, and fitting for the vast majority of early stage tech companies, it is interesting to see how changes in business economics may result in niche, differing capital structures. Eg. Companies which sell RL envs have vastly different economics than a food delivery app.
If each share is worth $1 at the valuation used in the raise, then an investor adding $100 million gets 100 million shares for it. The shares aren’t taken away from anyone, they're issued in exchange for the capital.
So ideally the dilution is neutral to the value of the equity. In practice this is highly variable because the valuations are fuzzy numbers used for the raise, but you get the idea.
If a company can get the same growth without raising, that would be better because the proportional ownership stays higher. However, the reason companies give equity in exchange for capital is that they need the cash for growth and can’t get it on better terms anywhere else.
Another way to look at it, is that it's partly locking in the value of those shares at the time of dilution, effectively reducing the variance of the future value of the existing shares.
As a thought experiment:
If you're holding a lottery ticket that you bought, and someone comes along, says they're going to buy 1,000 lottery tickets, but promises to share any winnings with you pro-rata. You don't really have a choice to say no.
You'd probably be really annoyed, if your ticket is a winning ticket, you split the jackpot and don't even get a life-changing amount of money back for it. If any of theirs wins, you likewise get a modest amount, but you weren't bothered about losing £1.
It's an expectation neutral thought experiment, but reducing variance isn't always wanted!
Your lottery comparison isn’t logical. I think you’re just repeating the same misunderstanding I was trying to dispel above.
If you want to force the analogy, you would have to imagine a lottery where your win and the investor’s wins are tied together. Either you both win or you both lose. But to make the analogy actually work, you’d have to imagine a lottery where their ticket purchase increase the winnings proportionally.
So in this bad forced lottery analogy, you would have a smaller number of the overall tickets, but the same odds of winning as before and the payout would be the same as before.
You’re making the common mistake of assuming that the company could get the same outcome without taking investment money. It’s common to imagine getting that your 0.1% of a sweet $1 billion IPO without ever getting diluted along the way, but getting a company to that IPO point requires a lot of cash. If a company is lucky enough to have all the cash flow they need to get there then they can do it all without dilution. Most companies need to raise some cash to get there, though.
So raising the money actually lowers your variance of getting a large payout, because the cash is what enables the growth to that liquidity event.
In your example, the additional 1,000 lottery tickets might add nothing whatsoever to the value of the winning lottery ticket in your hand. It's just not a good metaphor. That's not how buying shares in a company works. Investors don't invest using bearer instruments of totally unknown value. They invest using cash. Cash always adds the value of the cash. That's intrinsic to it being cash.
A much better way to think about it is that you have something in your hand that's worth X dollars and has Y shares. If somebody were to give you X dollars in investment in exchange for Y additionally issued shares, then at the end of that operation the company, by definition, would be worth $2x, and your Y shares would be exactly half of that value, meaning that you start with X and you end with X.
As mentioned, knowing exactly what the company is worth in dollars is a little tricky, but that's the premise, and it completely makes sense.
I used to think that Oxide's business model sucks in the face of the hyperscalers. When AWS/GCP/Azure "just works" and is generally reliable and cheap, why would I go through the trouble of buying my own computers? Well the past 5 years have been a constant decline towards more concentration of power, lack of care for their customers, and degradation in quality in general. AI is of course accelerating this decline - selling de-slopped products is now a huge competitive advantage. All the best luck to Oxide.
- Series C in Feb 2026 $200M
- Series D now $445M
I expect the next round soon :)
In reality, it could very well be investors just saying “we’re so happy with how things are going, we want more, take our money!!!”
Wake me up please