I am an undergraduate right now and looking at the people working there, it doesn't seem likely they would hire a fresh grad, I think I have found the yardstick I am going to measure myself by going forward, "Am I skilled enough that I could work at Oxide?". Hope more companies follow suit in putting the people forward!!
Total chaos.
[0] https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Free...
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
See perhaps Le Guin's novel:
For an organization that has definite goals and have to ship a product by a deadline, a flat structure can surely be detrimental to any progress. In an environment of competition (from outsiders) and scarcity, a flat structure will only create either chaos or an implicit form of hierarchy that is even more cruel than what should have been.
For the business guys they're focusing on price and sovereignty. Owning your business. For technical people they are focusing on quality. Not having to deal with integration bugs.
IIRC, Bryan Cantrill has compared the value proposition of an Oxide (rack?) to an IBM AS/400.
Oxide seem to be the best and most thorough in their space because they have chosen to own the stack from the firmware upwards. For someone who cares in that dimension they are a clear leader already on that basis alone, for other buyers who don’t, hopefully it also makes their product superior to use as well.
Oxide is a really nice platform. I keep trying to manipulate things at work to justify the buy in (I really want to play wiht their stuff), but they aren't going for it.
Happy to see their success. Especially so if you've been following their journey through their podcasts (easily the best tech podcast out there if you care about your craft; no filler, all killer).
I would try to apply but as far as I know they require 4 hours overlap with PST which excludes Europe
Wouldn't that depend less on where you are and more about your sleeping schedule? I generally go to bed around 04:00Z, up around 11:30Z sometime, seems that would work regardless of location, no?
That said I like Bryan Cantrill as an engineer and leader, but I would never put him on a pedestal.
Listen to the words, don't follow "personalities", don't listen to specific individuals just because of their status. Not a single time have I been disappointed by an idol, because I've made the conscious choice of not having following any. Bunch of smart people say smart stuff all the time, until they don't. I read everything as if I don't know the author, I think more people should do this and less celebrity worship would make the entire ecosystem better. We need less of it, not more.
The original On The Metal podcast they did is incredible too. The interviews they had with computing legends are just fantastic.
This isn't the worst though, I recently went through an interview with another startup company, and after six interviews and a take-home project I found myself getting the same generic rejection. The CEO went out of his way to tell me he didn't like my resume since I've had to hop around a little bit to stay employed.
Concerns that should have been handled in the initial call, somehow get pushed back till after I've wasted monumental amount of time.
Things are looking up though, I'm starting a job soon and the entire interview process was more or less a 30 minute phone call with the technical manager. That's it, two days later or so I had a verbal offer. I don't need to change the world, I need to pay my rent.
Honestly these "reasons" they give are usually BS excuses when it basically amounts to they don't like your personality or looks.
It's a contractor life for me, I work for money, not "purpose" or anything else.
Hell my Facebook (technically a fully owned subsidiary to be fair) interview loop was easier. I didn't get the job that time either, but at least it was straight up.
In previous HN threads they said something to the effect that they expect their applicants to have read what’s online about their equal base salary. Equity is not equally applied though.
The short stints on a resume is likely not the only reason you didn’t get to 100%, but unfortunately you should know that it’s seen as a pretty bad signal. The general expectation is 2 years minimum at a gig. If you have multiple short non-contract jobs it raises the concern that a candidate doesn’t commit to their jobs, or that they don’t do well at their jobs and are getting let go.
Company A got their funding pulled and shut down. Company B, where I was actually at for about a year and a half, switched owners and shutdown my entire office. Company C merged into it's main competitor and effectively fired most of us.
I will admit I was at one fantastic job and after around 3 years I probably could of stayed indefinitely. But back then I didn't recognize the value of a solid job. If you land somewhere and you're well liked by people, and able to do quality work, you really should just stay there instead of chasing slightly more money.
The topics were good. The guests were great.
But Bryan Cantrill was just terrible at letting his guests actually talk.
Bryan, if you’re listening, please let your guests talk. We have a large amount of content on YouTube if we want to hear the Bryan Cantrill take on, well, anything and everything. And it’s often amusing and sometimes right.
People don’t tune in to a podcast with guests to hear the host pontificate. They tune in to hear the guest, and sometimes the guest/host dynamic. When the host talks over the guest, you don’t get either.
After the Jonathon Blow episode, I gave up. Dude had interesting things to say about C, C++, and Rust, but most of what we got was Bryan talking about Rust. I guarantee anyone tuning into the Oxide podcast knows Bryan Cantrill’s opinions about Rust. And firmware. And Oracle. And Linux. Etc. etc.
Let your guests talk.
Like do they sell a service or a product. Do they sell hardware, software or something else? it is very confusing.
Compute Sleds (Total) 16, 24, or 32
CPU Cores 1024–2048
Memory (DRAM) 8–32 TiB
Storage 465.75–931.5 TiB
Network Switches 2
Switching Capacity 12.8 Tbit/s
Power Shelves Up to 2
Power Supplies per Shelf 6 (5+1 or 3+3)
Typical / Max Power Draw 12 / 15 kW
Dimensions H × W × D 2354mm (92.7”) × 600mm (23.7”) × 1060mm (41.8”)
Weight Up to ~2,518 lbs (~1,145 kg)
Max Thermal Output 61,416 BTU/hr
Airflow Requirements 145.8 × kVA CFM
Hopefully raising money helps them iterate faster on their hardware so they’re not so far behind.
Looking forward to the discounted DDR3 Opteron-based option.
> if they had gone with DDR5 it would have doubled
They charge a premium for their hardware due to the software. They have plenty of room for RAM price fluctuations. It would nowhere near double the price.
> Looking forward to the discounted DDR3 Opteron-based option.
I know you’re joking, but anything DDR3 based is really slow and power inefficient relative to current gen hardware.
Disclaimer: I work at Oxide.
From the inside, is Oxide a place where a fresh grad can actually be useful? Or is the "complexity floor" of hardware/software co-design so high that you really just need a few decades of experience to be effective? I'd love a reality check on whether I should keep Oxide as a long-term 10-year goal or if there’s a path for people starting out.
API driven, have "elastic resources", etc, etc. Rather than bolting together various solutions you get to have a "Cloud-like" stack in your own datacenter.
If the answer is no, then you might own the hardware on paper, but you don't control any of the software that makes said hardware useful.
If the answer is yes, on the other hand, then one must ask who is paying for those updates, because that can't be sustainable.
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-history-of-se...
Traditional hosting still, to some extend, struggle to provide the API, on demand, drive requirements for modern developers, who expect to be able stand up a bunch of virtual machines in a minute or so, especially if you also want a new private network, maybe some IPs and storage pools.
Having a single provider for your entire stack, software, hardware and network avoids the annoying back and forth with vendors, blaming each other. Having just one support contract for your entire stack is a pretty large plus.
If you don't like vSphere (who does?) you can do all that in Proxmox.
There is some company who for reason X and Y rather (or are obligated to) do on-prem for their hosting needs. But setting up a full (or several) racks, with all the required equipment for proper networking, storage, etc, can be quite the hassle. And if you want cloud-like functionality (completely API manageable virtual network, VM, storage pools, ...) it's another can of worm. Having a "plug'n'play" cloud-like system on-prem that do not require several engineers who know 10's of different vendors tech is definitely worth the premium for those company.
If you idea of installing a server is "terraform", you're not going to get it.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/gb200-nvl72/ https://www.amd.com/en/blogs/2025/amd-delivering-open-rack-s...
Databases, K/V stores, crawlers, services, etc all still necessary besides GPU's. The closer to GPU's the better and if you have GPU's in your own DC.
They also need to grow and iterate faster. Their software stack is great, but their hardware is quite dated in a fast moving industry. This limits them to domains that value their software and security but don’t need the latest hardware for performance and aren’t necessarily concerned with performance per dollar, which is a small market.
> ...it's not uncommon for us to be asked directly: "How do I know you won’t be bought?"
Raising ~infinite runway from investors who are already known quantities signals that you can safely buy into their product knowing they're not getting snapped up by $megacorp anytime soon. That's where the faster growth comes from--customers who feel secure in the knowledge that the company isn't going anywhere.
> "So if we didn’t need to raise, why seek the capital? Well, we weren’t seeking it, really. But our investors, seeing the business take off, were eager to support it."
From this of course the VCs will back and support Oxide (they are mentally thinking that Oxide will move into supplying hardware for AI datacenters) eventually want their money back at many many multiples and the pressure is there to achieve this.
Can you even invest in Oxide?
I just wish Oxide wouldn't have to keep getting owned by VCs which would inevitably lead to enshittification to pay back the VCs.
If Oxide followed the model of Valve (100% founder and employee ownership, profitable, vast unlikelihood of enshittification or pressure to get acquired or IPO) then it would be a different situation.
How long until Oxide needs $2BN, $4BN or $8BN from VCs, further getting owned by them?
They do both as they need many multiples to return the fund.
And it also sounds very predatory to me and not aligning with any startup's mission other than for the VCs to pressure Oxide to get acquired for over $20BN+ or go to the public markets.
Not even Hetzner did this. DigitalOcean could have followed Hetzner, but I guess VC money is very attractive and now DigitalOcean is now the slave of Wall St.
Going into deals with VCs and IPO'ing to Wall St. always leads to enshittification.
I predict in less than 10 years Oxide exits by way of being acquired or an IPO. The enshittification would have already begun by then.
> You seem very sure of yourself in how business works! I'm curious now, how did you create your $100MM++ revenue hardware business? I'd love to learn from you. [deleted]
You don't need to create a $100MM++ revenue hardware business to know how this ends when you get into bed too many times with VCs.
We already know it is a huge capex spend (which is why they keep going to VCs) the question is, how many times does Oxide need to go back to VCs to keep raising (even though they said they didn't need to raise?)
I hope they become immensely profitable enough to buy out the VCs stakes and get control back and become independent.
But I am doubtful that Oxide will do that if they keep raising and they will just be sold down the river in less than 10 years.
Where Oxide provides the hardware ownership.
There are tools to automates the delivery ( CI/CD deployment ), and manages the multi-cloud cost arbitrage.
Their hardware is multiple generations behind at this point, however. I wonder if they’re starting to reduce the price because it’s hard to justify paying so much for old hardware. They could just be targeting customers who don’t care as much about performance or efficiency as they do the software stack.
In previous HN threads they said that equity was not equal for all employees.
What to do with so much money?
An AI product is of course the 'no-brainer', I would love to see them partner with Tenstorrent for the CPU/AI part. I think Bryan described this as Door 3 'doing something crazy'.
A product around AMD APU was talked about, but in a recent talk Brain said AMD doesn't seem to care about that product.
OpenTitan is now getting ready for production uses, maybe makes sense to switch to that in the future. Moving Hubris onto that shouldn't be to big of a lift.
A conventional server without DC bus bar maybe? Not talking about homelab server but something in a class where you can't have a whole rack and the bus bar. The main seller would be the fireware and software ontop to get people into the control plane ecosystem. And you could make Linux boot on it too for more market reach potentially. I'm not sure how much such a platform could share with current system.
An SSD or NIC with open fireware would be great, but not sure if you can develop that only for your own product or if you would want to sell it separatly to make sense. But that would be big departure from the current All-in-One product.
Amazing what you can do when all you try to do is make podcast. Maybe now they have money to bring back 'On the Metal'. I enjoyed the more structured interview style podcast about history of computing quite a bit. That said the more discussion oriented 'Oxide and Friends' is also nice.
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