The amount of written material (work samples, writing samples, free-form essay responses) they request is staggering. There is no guarantee they will read your responses with the same care you put into writing them - almost certainly they won't, since they have actual work to do and an honest reading of over a dozen responses, on technical subjects, is easily a huge chunk of a day. At least with a real-time interview, if you're wasting my time, I'm wasting an equal amount of yours. There is an incentive for the interviewer to get the signal they need to make a decision and respect the candidate's time, since it's their time too. This hiring approach won't scale, for them, or the people they need to hire, if they expand, so at some point they will be forced to change it. Until then, I think the better approach if you're interested in a place like this is to be so awesome they have to call you first.
The time investment specific to this one employer seems to be a big weeder for interest and time availability, which is partly a problem.
One anecdatum, but which might not be that unusual:
When I applied (while working a very time-consuming and stressful key role), I had a small amount of time to catch my breath and context switch, that I could passably focus on thinking about other companies or interviewing.
So I decided that I had to choose between applying to Oxide and spending the same time prepping for a certain FAANG's Stanford fratbro shibboleth hazing rituals. I decided to go with my heart, and with the opportunity that seemed more inspiring, rather than a bit jerky.
After suffering through the "tenure packet" assembly headache, I waited, and waited, and then got a rejection email, without even a screening call. And a key sentence in the rejection email actually came across as snide, given that the writer seemed strong verbal. Which made me doubly regret not spending the same time practicing the FAANG's Leetcode whiteboard performance art.
(I ended up taking a comparable principal engineer job at an even more exotic hardware&software company, where they could hire people just by having very experienced other engineers, managers, and execs talk with them, no nonsense.)
The bad experience with the bespoke tenure packet also biased my decisions on my current search. One very interesting place I looked at, the extensive screening with a very knowledgeable person went exceedingly well, but when they presented me with the hiring group's systems programming take-home (huge time investment, with a dozen cleverly-spec'ed hard problems to nail, basically solving most of their hard software systems problems), and I didn't have time for that, I demurred.
I also now have even less tolerance for the Leetcode cargo-culting, and any other obnoxiousness, while having more appreciation for wise and intuitive hiring teams.
One factor, put loosely and jokingly, but there's a lot of truth to it: "If you like me, you must be good people."
> spending the same time prepping for a certain FAANG's Stanford fratbro shibboleth hazing rituals... Which made me doubly regret not spending the same time practicing the FAANG's Leetcode whiteboard performance art.
Lol, Do you have a blog? I would subscribe to your substack.
It is true that we ask a lot upfront. But just to be clear about a few things:
> There is no guarantee they will read your responses with the same care you put into writing them
Multiple people review every single submission.
> almost certainly they won't, since they have actual work to do an honest reading
This is why there is such lag time in even getting a response; you are correct that it takes a tremendous amount of work, but also that there's a tremendous amount of non-hiring work to do. We are not always perfect at balancing these things, and the queue can grow.
> so at some point they will be forced to change it.
I am in full agreement that as companies grow and change, their processes must also grow and change. That doesn't mean that the initial processes are inappropriate. That's the nature of building something new.
We will see at what point changing this process makes sense. It's worked decently well from the first founders (who themselves underwent this process, with each other) up to our current size of about sixty. And speaking purely for myself, the problem as I see it is that we have to say "no" to some wonderful folks, not that we struggle to find people to apply.
With the large up front ask, do you put an equal amount of time and effort into explaining why you pass on a candidate? My biggest issue with tech hiring is the complete and utter lack of feedback of any sort.
I am not personally involved in rejecting candidates, but I have heard anecdotally that people have found what gets sent out to be nicer than what they've heard from others.
Have you gotten more feedback in other industries? To be honest, I thought that general standard is essentially silence. But it's been many years since I've worked in not-tech.
Most companies are totally silent on what went wrong for legal reasons, although many will give you the courtesy of saying "no" instead of ghosting you once you have had an interview.
It does seem a little bit suboptimal to ask so much upfront from people who you would never hire. A company with a similarly large early screening form, Reservoir Labs, does a first resume screen before sending an invitation to respond to their screening questions. I would suggest that you do the same out of politeness to candidates.
We're not going to do a resume screen, because too often we have found that a resume does not accurately predict the quality of the materials (in both directions!). People are certainly welcome to not apply to Oxide; the world is large, and this company emphatically isn't the right fit for everyone! Indeed, part of the reason that we chose to make this process public is to allow people to better decide if it's worth the investment of time and energy -- or not!
I would advise caution at hiring someone who is excessively willing to go through an immense set of hoops just to get hired, as this might indicate a disproportionate willingness to work for you.
Honestly, it feels suspicious.
It’d probably be better to invest the (substantial) work done in reviewing the submission in a more structured interview process where the traits can be better assessed.
We do not evaluate people on “how much they want to work here” but instead on relevant skills. As mentioned in this thread (and on our jobs page) we get enough applicants that it takes 4-6 weeks to even read materials, on average, and so have to necessarily reject a large number of people. Simply wanting to work at Oxide is not a differentiator. Everyone who applies does!
> We do not evaluate people on “how much they want to work here”
If you make the candidacy process a significant burden to the candidate, I’m weary you might make it a similarly significant part of the selection criteria, just because otherwise good candidates who are less eager to work for the company might not have the time to apply to it. That the process rejects a large number of promising candidates is already predicted in the article.
Can you observe any signal on the candidate background that’d indicate they could be consistently eager to leave their present companies?
If the hiring process is a significant burden to the candidate when compared to your competitors, it might become, even if not formally recognised.
This is why I asked if you can detect any interesting signals in your candidate’s profiles that diverge from the overall candidate pool (hard to get stats on the people who don’t apply, but I think you understand where I’m going).
For the record, I’d LOVE to see that kind of data.
You're conflating a couple of things here -- while we don't select for enthusiasm as such, we very much do select (both implicitly and explicitly) for intrinsic motivation. (So the signal of candidates that choose not to apply is not only hard to get, it's also not necessarily interesting.) In terms of where that intrinsic motivation comes from (which is perhaps what you're asking?), we have found that it can be found in a wide variety of places and backgrounds. And indeed, such as there's a common theme at all, it's that it doesn't necessarily follow from a resume.
You touched a very good point - in order to apply, the candidate must be very motivated to apply. Unlike, say, the hundreds of random resumes we (present employer) get every day (feels like a DDoS attack sometimes) - those candidates are motivated enough to fill out a form, but not enough to read the job posting.
More feedback? No. Less time demanded? Yes. And your company's application process is more demanding and more personal than most in your industry. Does a generic response show Oxide's values of candor, courage, empathy, and transparency?
We don't provide feedback on folks that we don't interview -- for reasons not dissimilar to Y Combinator's logic for the same policy.[0] I wouldn't phrase it quite the same way, but we are grossly oversubscribed as a company, and we as a result end up rejecting people who would probably succeed here.
If someone demands hours of free labour for "code exercises" or whatever, the absolute bare minimum is that you put some portion of that back into meaningful code review.
So you should probably be spending _more_ time on the feedback for rejected candidates. Be specific, tie it back to your evaluation criteria that you wrote down before asking for the exercises to be completed.
I read the parent as metaphorical; if we did code samples, code review would be expected, so since we do not, an equivalent review would be nice.
I get the sentiment but it’s very tricky; most places do a screen and then an interview and so review takes place during said interview, we are heavier allocated on “the screen” in a sense. It would be even more work in our circumstances to do so, since we have more people in that stage of the process than others.
Yes, I was making a more general comment (I think it does still apply whether there's actual code-exercises or not though).
If it's "too much work" for you, might be time to re-examine how much work you're asking for.
I also think these sorts of things select for candidates that have lots of time for "applying to places" (which will naturally select against people already in jobs, or who already value work/life balance).
Your process doesn't look as onerous as some I've seen for sure -- but perhaps you _should_ add a "screen" portion and thereby not ask for the "long form" work from candidates you'd reject anyway (also buying more time for meaningful feedback to those you do ask the work of).
This puts you in a vulnerable position to attacks with generative AI. Assume a person using such a tool could generate a relatively large number of credible submissions in addition to their own as a way to limit your ability to assess possibly real competition.
I’m not sure if they read the responses I wrote with any care at all (in 2021); I never heard anything back beyond the “we got your submission!” auto-reply.
I am still kinda salty about it; I was proud of the writing and presentation samples I sent in, and was hopeful I was a good fit.
I am sorry we failed you. As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, we are not perfect. There have been some times where some things have slipped through the cracks, and speaking for myself (and a few others), I have not been happy when that has happened. I am not sure what was in your specific case, but that doesn't change the fact that that is us not living up to what we set out to do.
> There is no guarantee they will read your responses with the same care you put into writing them - almost certainly they won't,
Nothing is guaranteed in hiring. Demanding that another person “waste time” sitting in front of you before you’ll answer questions is strange. Wouldn’t you rather answer the questions on your own time without someone else putting you on the spot?
It’s not very rational to avoid applying to a company just because you think they might not read what you wrote.
> Until then, I think the better approach if you're interested in a place like this is to be so awesome they have to call you first.
So answering a few questions is too much work, but becoming so “awesome” that you’re top 0.01% of industry talent who maintains a public profile so prevalent that they seek you out is the better way to apply?
Applying to a company and investing a few hours interviewing is accessible to everyone. Becoming a high-visibility, industry leader with active public profiles that attract companies is very, very hard.
> Nothing is guaranteed in hiring. Demanding that another person “waste time” sitting in front of you before you’ll answer questions is strange. Wouldn’t you rather answer the questions on your own time without someone else putting you on the spot?
No, because if that's the process, for all you know they're requesting answers from 1000 people for one position. With synchronous interviews, you have reasonable confidence that there's a limited number of people they're going through this process with, that you have a decent chance at the position.
> Why would any company engage with 1000 candidates and request these samples from them with no expectation of reading them?
Because there's little downside to do doing so. And of course they would read some of them, they do need to hire someone, but they might not read all.
> I don’t understand this desire to assume the absolute worst, even when it’s illogical for the company to do so.
It's not necessarily illogical. They can just blast out "give us samples" to a large number of people, and then filter out most of them based on whatever they feel like later on.
It also means that later on they can brag about they're so elite that "they only hire 0.1% of the people they interview", if the company culture bends that way.
The company culture does not bend that way at all. To the contrary, as I have said repeatedly (and other Oxide folks have said), it has been really difficult to turn away folks who could plausibly succeed at Oxide.
They're not really engaging if they're asking you to asynchronously do paperwork. The effort asymmetry makes it a bad bargain for those who do put in the work as there's no way to know that it'll even be looked at.
> Wouldn’t you rather answer the questions on your own time without someone else putting you on the spot?
Honestly no, as you might spend loads of time crafting the perfect response, only to find that they hadn't really worded the question in a way that meant your answered what they were really thinking. This happens often enough in in-person interviews as it is, but atleast you can hope to course-correct by looking at how they respond.
The lack of time-bounding is a real problem for those who have genuine time-commitments outside of work
Also, if "everyone" has a 1 hour interview (or whatever) then you're more-or-less comparing equal things. If some people use a week to craft their "asynchronous" responses while some have an hour to do so (because they're already employed, say, or have a family) then you're not comparing apples to apples.
Similar for "take home code exercises": it's impossible to compare them meaningfully because you have no idea if the better-looking one took the candidate an hour or several days (and yes, I've been on both sides of this).
>So answering a few questions is too much work, but becoming so “awesome” that you’re top 0.01% of industry talent who maintains a public profile so prevalent that they seek you out is the better way to apply?
That's definitely the better strategy. Or networking can replace having the public profile. That being said if you haven't gotten there yet, it might make sense to do all this work anyway because that puts you in the 5% of candidates willing to jump through all these hoops to apply, but you'll definitely have a lower chance of getting in as just some rando applying on the internet than someone they already know.
There is that and the other side as well. There are so many open positions even if I like where Oxide is going I might not apply because there are so many things that can go wrong with such hiring process.
I liked the Amazon, Google hiring process circa 2015. Come in for a day after passing some basic loops and see if we can work with each other.
I continue to feel that the best interview material is to simply do good work, in public, as much as possible, and let the network effects eventually tilt in your favor.
> "What work have you found most challenging in your career and why?
What work have you done that you are particularly proud of and why?
When have you been happiest in your professional career and why?
When have you been unhappiest in your professional career and why?
For one of Oxide’s values, describe an example of how it was reflected in a particular body of your work.
For one of Oxide’s values, describe an example of how it was violated in your organization or work."
I feel like these are a test of creative writing skills, storytelling, believable exageration, and imagination more than their stated purpose.
> "In other cases, it’s even more nuanced: there have been many later-in-life converts to the beauty and joy of computers, and such candidates should emphatically not be excluded merely because they discovered their calling later than others. For those that concentrated in entirely non-technical disciplines, further probing will likely be required, with greater emphasis on their technical artifacts."
If companies do whiteboard coding, people get mad.
If companies ask for longform answers, people get mad.
If companies ask for code examples or public repos, people get mad.
What I learned over a decade of running a company is that everyone gets mad about hiring practices, just do whatever you think is best and adjust over time. And stop taking advice from people since the Internet is full of many factions whose slices make up 100% of criticism over hiring practices, so it's impossible to get any signal out of it.
True about many other things. Advice is largely useless. But especially for hiring.
If the question is just left hanging than I will agree, but ...
Normally, I do ask these story telling questions. Tell me a story, then I will deep dive into them, dissect them, drill into the technology, relationships, communications, budgets, time frames and more.
This is in lieu of me coming up with a set of rote questions that can answered in a sentence or two, then move to next topic.
If the candidate is just telling me "believable exageration [sp], and imagination", it will come out real quick.
> Values are often not evaluated formally at all in the hiring process — yet shared values are essential for long-term success. Some questions should be asked to suss out a candidate’s values, e.g.: [the questions]
I suppose that a candidate that fundamentally doesn’t have shared values could B.S. their way through this part, but I’m struggling to understand why they would.
As a woman of integrity and current Oxide employee, I answered those questions quite honestly. Standard behavioral interviews have the same issue where you can certainly embellish or fabricate stories.
So much effort is put in to coming up with these systems and convincing ourselves that we've got the perfect hiring process, when in the end it's very likely that it doesn't work and is just a kind of ritual that has to exist so that you can defend your decisions by pointing to all the hoops you made people jump through.
No hiring practices work. Which means that you might as well go with the one you like most.
There are some hiring practices that really suck, of course. So probably don't do those, like choosing people randomly or based on illegal discrimination. But beyond that, just do whatever and iterate.
The best hiring I've done, and been a part of, has had 2 very clear features:
1. The expectations and details in the job were specific to the actual exact role I would be filling and were clearly laid out in the job posting.
2. The "interview" was really just a single long conversation on those specific details and a discussion over whether I fit them and can show/discuss examples of how I fit them.
A lot of hiring nonsense is because the actual job requirements and posting is so generic as to be practically meaningless, so you create these pointless hoops to jump through in order weed out an individual from a pool of other generic individuals. The actual employee you pick ends up simply being really good at jumping through hoops rather than a good hire for the specific role. Crazy multi-step hiring processes just seem like selecting for endurance over any ability as a future employee.
I mean, 70 percent is pretty good for a selection strategy. I wasn't aware H&S had published a followup and now I'm curious if it ever got a peer review, because their table contradicts some earlier work suggesting that structured works better than unstructured.
It's also pretty keen to recommend Integrity tests which I think the authors play a role in studying.
edit: I guess it's "operational validity" which maybe isn't "percent that did well later"?
No hiring process is perfect, but when your company’s hiring process is more complicated than my college admission process, it’s a bad sign.
If I wanted this I’d have stayed in academics, with its 20-page CVs and multiple statements of purpose.
At least there if you win the tenure-track position lottery, and then the grant lottery, you have a good shot at winning the tenure lottery and getting some job security doing something you (probably) love.
Any application process is a two-way street. It is absolutely fine for you to decide to opt to not apply. Maybe someday we'll have a different process, or maybe it was just never meant to be :)
Seeing as AWS is probably the king of the BS leetcode interview track, your aping their behavior in this area as the ANTI-AWS does not bode well for you. I hope I'm wrong here as AWS needs serious competition.
They say to expect 9 hours of interviews, on top of all this homework. All-in, this looks like it would take at minimum one full day of work just writing on top of at least one extra-full day of interviewing and that's not including time to research, think, and copyedit the written homework or generate work samples if they don't already exist. Later on it insinuates the candidate would be expected to read internal issues and documentation requiring yet more of the candidates time - all for free without even the promise of an offer yet. This is essentially the same as Canonical's well-known and ridiculed process, except this is from a hot startup so it might get a pass.
I have nothing but the strongest distaste for LeetCode interviews but this is another flavor of absurd that still takes a huge time commitment from the interviewee which inherently discriminates against those already employed, those later in life, and those interviewing at more than one company.
More evidence for my big binder of evidence that interviewing culture in our industry is entirely some grotesque form of hazing ritual that builds upon itself, with each company and team deciding that the specific form of pain that they had to go through is the ideal form to subject candidates to in order to justify the pain inflicted on them.
For what it's worth, I hear your concerns re: the kind of person that can apply, but in practice, my co-workers at Oxide are more "later in life" than in any other job I have previously worked at. I have personally regarded that as a positive.
Appreciate the response, and I'm glad you have a team of experienced teammates. This industry struggles with ageism so it's nice to hear when that cycle is broken.
As you can tell I take a dim view of most of our industry practices around hiring and it's one of those things that can rile me up. I think the vast majority of interview structures are heavily weighted toward favoring fresh grads (more time to dedicate to prep, fresher knowledge of the type of rote CS stuff that you learn in college but rarely used in industry, more willingness to put up with onerous interview requirements). I think it's likely because less experienced employees tend to be easier for companies to exploit, and so companies allow it to continue by feeding into my above-mentioned theory of hazing. Interview practices like we have impact people in negative ways small and large, yet I have seen no evidence that they produce better results than more humane methods.
I hope that as Oxide grows and succeeds (and I do wish y'all the best!) that you're able to either streamline your interview process to be more accessible and/or offer alternate paths.
Thanks. As said elsewhere in the thread, I don’t think we’re perfect. Hiring is very hard. Notably we don’t really have room for more junior folks at this stage of the company, not because we don’t want to help people grow in their careers, but just because we only recently achieved our first revenue. Many folks are looking forward to the days when we can have an internship program and similar. But we have to build a sustainable company first, otherwise we wouldn’t be helping those people grow, but instead invite them into a dead end. Things are tending positively! It just takes time.
To assess analytical ability, candidates should be asked to provide an analysis sample: a written analysis from the candidate. As with the work and writing sample, the specifics of the prompt will vary by domain: for engineers, this should be the analysis that the candidate performed of a system behaving pathologically; for sales, this might be the research the candidate performed of a prospect and their fit with the product before reaching out to them; for operations, this might be the examination of an existing process with an eye towards improvement; for product management, this might be the exploration of a new system or of a new aspect of the system. Regardless of domain, the sample should contain enough concrete detail to assess analytical ability, with the candidate asked to recall details to the best of their ability.
Given the level of detail requested here, in writing, this feels like it’s requiring proprietary information from a previous job.
I don’t think many people do “analysis [...] of a system behaving pathologically,” or “perform[] [analysis] of a [sales] prospect and their fit with the product before reaching out to them” on their own.
We do not solicit proprietary information. It is true that it is more difficult for a candidate who has done more private, or NDA'd, work than someone who has done a lot of open source work. But we understand if details need to be elided in order to be respectful of previous commitments. We have hired people in all of these various states before.
> I don’t think many people do [snip] on their own.
It is true that many people need to do new work as part of the application process. I wrote a large portion of my packet from scratch.
Most people are in the middle. They can discuss previous work on some level. Yes, most people’s jobs are not purely in open source. That doesn’t mean they can’t discuss previous work they’ve done. Every employer wants to hear about past accomplishments in some form.
I applied almost two years ago. I am excited about what Oxide is doing and it felt like a fun opportunity. While I respect what they do around comp, for where I was in my life and goals I had set, it was going to be rough. I applied anyway at the encouragement of a friend who worked there. I think the packet process is awful. So much unnecessary work and frankly by the end I just sort of phoned it in because I lost interest. It took about two months to hear back (I applied in December 2021 and heard back February 2022) and get rejected and got nothing more than a generic form rejection letter after all the time spent on preparing the packet.
———
We are so humbled by your application to join Oxide Computer Company. At this
stage of the company we are hyper-focused on certain areas of the stack and
when we need specific domain space experience such as yours, please engage
with us. Our roles will be updated as we need them.
We are grateful you took the time to apply and put so much thought into the
candidate materials, we loved reading them. We would absolutely love to work
with you in the future and cannot wait for that stage of the company!
> Interviews shouldn’t necessarily take one form; interviewers should feel free to take a variety of styles and approaches
I guess we still don't know.
> Author: Bryan Cantrill
> the act of writing — like so much else that we do — requires not only the ability to create wholly new material, but also the ability to reflect, correct, revise, and polish.
Oh Bryan, you could have spent your time doing some actual work instead of being pretentious to the tune of 4700 words and still not saying anything useful to anyone.
So, hiring is the most important thing we do -- and much of the reason that we've been able to do what we've been able to do with an extraordinarily small team is because of the care the team takes with respect to hiring. I appreciate that our style and yours differ greatly; it sounds like we wouldn't particularly like working with one another -- and we both can take solace that with this document (and your comment here!), there is no doubt.
100% agreed. Almost feels like the author is trying to write poetry in parts of it.
This style of writing gets in the way of actually communicating. It's harder for me to see what the actual process is.
Though, maybe they want to filter for people who enjoy writing this way, and to filter out anyone who wants more straightforward comms. In that case, it'd be low key brilliant.
The current job market is breeding some really crazy hubris stuff like this.
I was foolish enough to do a huge project (wish we could all agree against as an industry wide boycott, but alas I fell into it as well) this summer. It landed over 1200 lines. In the end it wasn't even viewed! and i have proof.
So any output of this magnitude ends up being a colossal waste of time, i sure hope wouldn't make again. Fingers crossed.
"They must be able to build castles of imagination, and yet still understand the constraints of a grimy reality: they must be arrogant enough to see the world as it isn’t, but humble enough to accept the world as it is. Each of these is a balance, and for each, long-practicing engineers will cite colleagues who have been ineffective because they have erred too greatly on one side or another."
Ooof... where are you going to find these paragons of balance? It almost sounds like they're searching in Zen temples or something.
As a Swede working in tech I can't relate to that salary at all, but at a glance it sounds like it would be a really, really great salary. A "good" salary here is less than $80,000 gross (with addition of employer fees of 31.42%) - 9 hours do sound exhausting, but for that salary and working with the next big thing could well be worth it and perhaps a reason to apply as they are remote friendly.
The material requested though, sounds a bit like a showstopper for all of us that haven't been public speakers and so on.
To be clear about it, we also pay that salary to folks outside of the US. It is a bit tough given the desire to have overlapping work hours. But we have a couple of hires in Europe, and they are great folks, who are compensated the same.
And we have tons of folks who are not speakers or are even active on social media. Being well known is not an important factor in being hired, having skills that fit with what we need is the most important thing.
It was even less money when I joined. You're also leaving out stock, which absolutely makes sense to value at $0 at this early stage of the company, but there is more upside potential as well.
No regrets on taking a pay cut, personally. It is true that I could make a larger salary elsewhere; I also would not be working on this product with this team.
After reading the policy when the blog post came out, I think one negative thing about it is that it can self select for people generally later in their career or with a much bigger safety net. When you have a 10-20+ tech career and the money saved up, like the founders and many of the early employees, it can be much easier to say that’s enough to cover expenses. I have nothing against it as a policy and I think there are definitely benefits to it. I just think that the biases aren’t clearly talked about either.
> self select for people generally later in their career or with a much bigger safety net
They're still basically a startup / pre-stable revenue, and most folks at startups are not risk-averse. So I'm not sure this bias really affects them at this stage of the company; even if they didn't have this hiring policy the people who want to work at startups have the same characteristics.
Is that unreasonable? I recently took a job where the interview process was over 6 weeks. Basically one hour a week speaking with another person on the team. I honestly enjoyed it as a candidate, it wasn't a huge ask on my part (easily to do one hour a week than take a PTO/sick day to interview) and I felt like I was able to "live" while interviewing and working too.
If it's 9 hours in one day that's a lot, but if it's over 3 or 4 days it seems reasonable to me.
I will say the worse interview I ever done was for Capital One. It's literally an entire 8 hour day where you get ask the same questions with different groups of people, scheduled with no breaks (no 10 minutes between sessions is not a sufficient break), getting ask LC-esque questions twice, system design, and 5 different behavioral sessions. Worst of all I never spoke with a single person who would be on my team, to make matters worse Capital One doesn't exactly pay well. It's a very average company, with average salaries, and average benefits.
My interview at Meta was easier and more straight forward, it felt like they actually cared about my time as a candidate whereas Capital One puts you through the meat grinder and forces you into their terms.
> If it's 9 hours in one day that's a lot, but if it's over 3 or 4 days it seems reasonable to me.
We ask candidates to give us a schedule of when they are available, and then schedule against that. Some folks would prefer a long gauntlet all in a row, some folks prefer things to be spread out. This lets them do that.
It sounds like, in order to work at Oxide, I must be able to write, pitch, and engineer. I wonder if people who joined Apple, IBM, Dell, HP, Alienware etc.. were all renaissance artists.
>The elite at Sun Microsystems largely did all three out of necessity
Some of it quite poorly, which is why Sun lost to Linux and other hardware companies, and why basically no one used Joyent.
>And that's who runs Oxide.
It's basically "rewrite it in Rust" Sun Microsystems. Best of luck, but I don't see them being anything besides a niche player with some interesting tech that doesn't beat the competition enough to matter.
Sensitivity and specificity [0] seem relevant here.
Every interview stage which is designed to reject bad candidates (true negatives) will also accidentally reject some good candidates (false negatives). The more eagerly you filter out bad candidates, the more you'll also filter out good candidates; sensitivity decreases as specificity increases.
This means that building more pass/fail tests into your interview pipeline may produce worse results - even if you have an enormous number of applicants, all with infinite time and patience! At each interview stage, there's a risk of accidentally rejecting the best remaining applicant, the one who would have outperformed all others if they were hired. For example, the article mentions "values mismatch" as a particularly good reason to hard-reject a candidate, but several of the company's values seem like they ought to be optional. Surely some truly excellent software developers lack courage, humour, and thriftiness? Could those qualities just as well be taught on-the-job? Could a non-courageous hire have useful things to teach you about caution?
Good hiring processes should draw a clear distinction between "must-have" qualities and "nice-to-have" qualities. Beyond a certain point, the problem stops being "filter out bad candidates", and starts being "out of several great candidates, make sure we choose the best one"; to solve those two problems, different tools are required.
American companies often seem to be out of touch with reality. Who would want to waste so much of their time on a process that ultimately benefits the company's CEO? This seems to be a good example of such a company.
The hiring process in most German companies is much more humane and efficient
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That's a classic one. I bet they are either rendering a date and the server timezone is different than your browser, or some browser extension is injecting HTML and messing the diff up.
I never understand why these kinds of practices gets so much hate.
If you have the qualifications for this type of job (high skill high pay) then life is pretty much choose your adventure mode.
There are people in this world who would willingly play a modded version of a game which has a level harder than hardcore. On the other end of the extremes, you have people actively looking for "Rest and vest" gigs.
The people working at SpaceX or Apple under Jobs are one of the most highly sought after talent in the world.
They are no forced out of circumstances or coerced into any of this.
I believe it's primarily because companies with such high requirements are not on par with big players like Apple or SpaceX. Yet, they seek highly skilled individuals —who could secure better-paid positions elsewhere, to dedicate multiple days merely to apply to their organization, which is relatively insignificant compared to others. Why would someone with high-level skills even consider wasting their time on such a task when the potential salary doesn't match what they could earn elsewhere? For those with exceptional abilities, time is money, and this essentially amounts to unpaid time wasted. These requirements are just out of touch with the reality.
These kinds of takes really rubs me the wrong way. Its basically saying "X doesn't make sense to me so it must be wrong therefore it shouldn't exist".
In reality, people (especially the exceptional kind) have all sorts of seemingly unintuitive motivations.
It bears repeating that these are not low skilled unsophisticated people in untenable situations vulnerable to coercion. They are the opposite of that in every way possible.
It is true that not everyone is going to find the salary or process works for them, even if they are fantastic engineers. However, we have found that many people do find it compelling. Not everyone is purely looking at base salary as a reason to take a job. As mentioned elsewhere, I took a pay cut for this job, and am happy with my decision.
My goal in life is not to make the greatest amount of money possible. Mission, vision, values, culture, peer group—these matter a lot to me as well. I also have been lucky to have enough saved, and can take risks for something I believe in.
(I currently work at Oxide, having taken a pay cut.)
So true the part about writing, I had a hard time articulating my thoughts about writing skill before reading this:
> As a company, we believe that good writing is found in the best practitioners, regardless of role: the act of writing — like so much else that we do — requires not only the ability to create wholly new material, but also the ability to reflect, correct, revise, and polish.
1. Something about this thread is really bad taste: A user "steveklabnik" responds to many of the questions with point blank "if it sucks, you're welcome to not apply here" and other prescriptive/absolute type explanations to the concern rather than actually addressing it. Examples: "Multiple people review every single submission." " Any application process is a two-way street. It is absolutely fine for you to decide to opt to not apply. Maybe someday we'll have a different process, or maybe it was just never meant to be :)"
I would advise Oxide that if SteveKlabnik is not in the PR field with experience in handling HR style topics such as this thread, then to have Steve refrain from doing so, because this isn't helping the community perception of Oxide. You're getting destroyed in the comments.
2. Publishing the exact hiring process is a refreshing and welcome step in the industry where interviews are a black box. I also welcome the work that's been done to reduce as much bias as possible. However, this all begs the question: Do we really need this much evaluation in trying to hire an employee? I believe the pandemic and WFH has shown that people want to prioritize their personal and family lives more than "giving it all" to the workplace. The sense I get from reading the Oxide hiring process is one where you truly have to believe and be in love with the Oxide culture. Why? Why can't we just treat work as a means to an end, and that you can still good quality work with that style of thinking? It does not have to be an either/or, but the hiring process document makes it seem like it's "you either fit into our style and values, or you don't". Why the gatekeeping?
2a. The amount of hoops software engineering folks have to go through to land a job is just mostly made up stuff, based on no studies or research on workforce hiring, and at a startup, HR is just really payroll, with no formal processes on handling grievances, human process, etc.
2b. Having said 2 and 2a. Why do we, as an industry seem to mired in spending so much effort on weeding people out? What are we scared of? All of us have worked with people we don't like, or that we feel were not good enough (caliber, skillset, professionalism, etc.), but this and other process isn't helping. What if we changed our mindset to actually trusting and believing in people to do the best they can rather than send them so much homework, have them sit through panel interviews and then conclude with "hire, do not hire" and then provide the candidate absolutely no feedback on what went wrong. Why can't we seem to disrupt this. It's tiring, and it shows in this thread that people are quite honestly sick of it.
3. Personally, when I attend future interviews, I want to have a hard boundary for the type of questions that get asked. If I get thrown a "reverse this integer" style question or "lets do TDD on the white board", I think as a collective we need to walk out or stop the interviewer and put them on the spot and go "You really want to waste an hour of my time asking basic questions like this? Don't you want to know how to solve real problems that you're currently facing or are you not facing any challenging problems so you want play with puzzles and waste my time?" I would bet if the masses resisted and took this course, interviews would change drastically and quickly.
EDIT: @Oxide, bcantrill isn't helping in the comment section either. This isn't going well for you and I strongly advise you to hire HR or PR to handle commentary and writing about these things rather than engineers/founders.
