[HN Gopher] Our $100M Series B
___________________________________________________________________
Our $100M Series B
Author : spatulon
Score : 587 points
Date : 2025-07-30 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oxide.computer)
(TXT) w3m dump (oxide.computer)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Big congrats to the Oxide team.
| kamranjon wrote:
| Anyone here using oxide hardware? I remember reading their blog
| post when they were spinning up and it seems like they have
| actual products now.
| flobosg wrote:
| They have for a while already, see
| https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023891).
| nahimn wrote:
| Rooting for this team -- just wish i could afford one of these
| racks... =)
| dijit wrote:
| Same.
|
| I think it brings an interesting point actually.
|
| "Who will buy these", the obvious answer is anyone with a need,
| but the "standard pizzabox" server is ubiquitous for the same
| reason that x86 and miniPC's outcompeted mainframes.
|
| ((controversial take warning))
|
| Mainframes are objectively better at high uptime and high
| throughput than rube-golderging a bunch of semi-reliable x86
| boxes together, yet, the ubiquity of cheap x86 hardware meant
| that the lions share of development happened on them.
|
| People could throw a pentium 2 PC in a corner and have it
| serving web traffic, and when things started growing too much
| you could add more P2 machines or even grab a Xeon 4socket
| machine later down the line.
|
| This isn't possible with mainframes, and thus, people largely
| don't mess with them.
|
| The annoying thing is that this kind of problem has some kind
| of stickiness effect. If you need a server, and then another,
| you buy them as you need them and if you're already 20 pizza
| boxes in; it's a pretty big ask to rip them all out and moving
| to a different vendor entirely than staging replacements one
| after another.
|
| So I guess their target audience is the "we don't want to touch
| cloud" organisations that have a good IT spend that are willing
| to change vendors?
|
| I don't think I've worked for any of those.
|
| (FD: I'm actually a fan of the Oxide team, and the concept, and
| I would buy into the ecosystem except I have needs that are at
| most 3 servers at a time)
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| > So I guess their target audience is the "we don't want to
| touch cloud" organisations that have a good IT spend that are
| willing to change vendors?
|
| Companies do modernization/migration projects from time to
| time; I guess one way to solve the audience issue is to find
| companies that have such a planned event and try to market a
| "better" alternative.
|
| While I'm also a fan of Oxide; my primary concern is whether
| they can actually get companies to ignore the marketing that
| comes out of cloud services.
| ipdashc wrote:
| A great point regarding mainframes, but isn't it somewhat
| irrelevant given that Oxide's computer is x86 and mainly
| (...only?) intended as a VM host? And I assume most people
| are running things in VMs nowadays, so you can "just" migrate
| over images to the new system (I know it's not that simple,
| but it's also not quite as complicated as, I imagine, porting
| something from a bunch of bare-metal x86 boxen to a
| mainframe).
|
| Also, I'm given the impression that Oxide prioritizes user
| experience - their website shows off a clean UI and they
| presumably have modern, easy-to-use APIs. Mainframes, in
| contrast, seem like a whole different world - if I convinced
| my company to move to a mainframe, who would even operate it?
| I know modern mainframes are closer to "normal" servers than
| their old reputation, but still, I'd imagine it's pretty
| esoteric stuff, and IBM is famous for not being the cheapest
| to work with.
|
| I do find it pretty funny that their business model seems to
| be reinventing mainframes, but I feel like there are
| important distinctions too. Hopefully they do well (I'd also
| love to have access to this stuff, but yeah, same "needs that
| are at most 3 servers" deal).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Mainframes are the original VM host. Oxide racks seem
| closer to midrange computers from a RAS (Reliability,
| Availability, Servicing) perspective, but that's pretty
| much to be expected to begin with. They also have a lot of
| scope for improvement and are kind of a natural candidate
| for eventually intruding on that market.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I guess if you have big pile of pizza boxes, buying an Oxide
| could feel like buying Oxide Family Pizza and going from
| there. Maybe you don't migrate everything at once.
| tryauuum wrote:
| governments maybe?
| cdaringe wrote:
| Not very controversial, tbh. Your observation is essentially
| that there is momentum on a current platform, which yields
| availability, pricing, and general convenience benefit. It's
| borderline indisputable!
|
| The market is complex. Those who will buy will be those who
| find that the existing ying doesn't snap perfectly into their
| own business' yang. They'll be at the margins first (the post
| references a lab for instance, not a booming tech company),
| then over time less so.
| bpt3 wrote:
| The target audience as I understand it is companies that have
| gone cloud-only or close to it and are big enough where
| moving workload on-prem makes financial sense.
|
| They can migrate to an Oxide "cloud" without too much
| difficultly as opposed to procuring, installing, and
| maintaining the rube goldberg machine you mentioned.
|
| They also attract interest among the "we don't want to touch
| cloud" organizations where trying out $1M in hardware is a
| rounding error, but I don't know how much traction they'd end
| up getting.
| sneak wrote:
| Always refreshing to see people who actually believe in software
| freedoms (and not just doing open source cosplay like many big
| corporations) forge a pathway to big success.
|
| There are many things that suggest free software and the movement
| for software freedoms might be on its way to a historical
| footnote. This is absolutely not one of them.
|
| Hey Bryan, one day when you're very successful market-wise (you
| and your team have already obviously been massively successful
| from an engineering standpoint) and aren't in crash-priority-
| override mode to get cash flow, please consider a project to
| build SME stuff that reaps the security and integration benefits
| of your big enterprise stuff that is affordable for end users
| like entrepreneurs and home hobbyists, like Ubiqiti does. I'd
| love a lil' $5-10k homelab unit, and I bet a number of smaller
| universities and organizations would go for stuff in the low 5
| figure 2-3kW range. Obviously your bread and butter comes from
| companies that size their orders by number of racks, but if you
| never go downmarket then thousands of us hackers that love what
| you're doing will never get to touch Oxide stuff except at a job
| in a megacorp.
| immibis wrote:
| The term "open source" was created by corporations in
| opposition to "free software", as a watered-down version of the
| latter. Open source itself is already free software cosplay.
| cestith wrote:
| It would be a good onramp into their ecosystem. Compare this to
| the deep educational discounts and the school-targeted
| platforms from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and such.
| kensai wrote:
| All the best! I personally came to know Oxide for their cool RFD
| culture. It's worth a read:
|
| https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/
|
| Start from RFD 1 ;)
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| I love the idea. RFD 1 mentions taking inspiration from Golang
| and Rust proposal processes. The Haskell Foundation also uses
| the same proposal process, and I love it.
|
| I'm a big proponent of the "writing is thinking" mantra.
| Unfortunately, in my experience, not all technical leaders
| value grassroots proposal processes like the Oxide RFDs
| bcantrill wrote:
| Just because it's hopelessly on-brand for us to offer up a
| podcast episode for everything, you may also be interested in
| our Oxide and Friends episode on RFDs with our colleagues
| Robert Mustacchi, David Crespo, Ben Leonard, and Augustus
| Mayo.[0]
|
| [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/rfds-the-
| ba...
| ghaff wrote:
| I need to dive back in. Lots of distractions recently.
| KetoMojito wrote:
| Bryan you absolute legend. You give the best technical
| seminars i've ever watched (& countlessly rewatched). Ty for
| inspiring a generation of engineers. Best of luck with
| everything at Oxide!
| bflesch wrote:
| the rfd interface looks really nice. I couldn't find the github
| repo for it, is it proprietary?
|
| Edit: some popup on their page links to
| https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd but it's a 404
|
| Edit2: it's at https://github.com/oxidecomputer/rfd-site
| jppope wrote:
| Love what they are putting out in the world! Congrats on the
| round, and being able to proliferate the work!
| setheron wrote:
| Isn't Oxide kind of like Oracle now building polished vertically
| integrated monster machines ? A bit humorous from that
| perspective given Cantrills dislike for Larry Nevertheless cool
| company and product.
| immibis wrote:
| Competing with someone you don't like who has a monopoly on
| something makes a lot of sense.
| atonse wrote:
| Isn't the main issue with Oracle the aggressive sales and
| exploitation of captive customers?
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| I'd assume oracles main issue is that personal-computers-on-
| steroids as servers mostly won, and we don't all need AS/400
| or mainframe architectures. 99% of problems can be solved
| with practically commodity hardware and software.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| They don't call oracle "a law firm with a software division"
| for no reason.
| cpach wrote:
| To me they are much more similar to Sun than Oracle (before the
| latter aquired the former).
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Isn 't Oxide kind of like Oracle now building polished
| vertically integrated monster machines ?_
|
| Oxide is kind of like Sun Microsystems, building polished
| vertically integrated monster machines, e.g. Sun E10k.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Enterprise
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| Very bullish on this team! Congrats. I've been pushing my company
| to adopt their hardware, and we have!
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| How do you like using their stuff? I would be interested in
| reading an experience report
| htrp wrote:
| Same! also curious about how you think about the potential of
| vendor lock-in?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| (Not your parent) What kind of lock in are you worried about?
| oldpersonintx2 wrote:
| great people and vision, but the hardware market went apoplectic
| for GPUs at scale just as they were pushing a better way to
| manage VMs
|
| in the midst of everyone making a land grab for GB200s, does
| anyone have time to evaluate their alternative OS?
| mrcwinn wrote:
| Everyone at Oxide makes the same salary:
|
| >We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary
| that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that
| to everyone. [https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-
| reflection-of-...]
|
| Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| That would be even more outlandish, I don't think that's
| possible.
| lumost wrote:
| It depends, there are certainly founders who come from
| sufficient money that the value of founding a unicorn is not
| material to their Net worth.
|
| However I'd also suggest that the concentration of tech in
| the last decade is also partly due to startups chronically
| stiffing their employees on equity. The difference in
| compensation potential naturally forces a talent split where
| talent joins larger and _much_ better compensated firms.
| illegalmemory wrote:
| They have since updated it slightly
|
| > Since originally writing this blog entry in 2021, we have
| increased our salary a few times, and it now stands at
| $207,264. We have also added some sales positions that have
| variable compensation, consisting of a lower base salary and a
| commission component.
| ekianjo wrote:
| so basically everything converges to having specific reasons
| to have different salary schemes.
| liamkinne wrote:
| Yes, but you aren't wasting time early on negotiating
| compensation.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| One exception, for sales. I don't see how they could have
| done it differently.
|
| We have a "one rate per level" rule. The rates are
| published, and so are the definitions of the levels, and
| everyone's level (i.e. indirectly you can know everyone's
| salary)
|
| Worked great, untill we started to look for sales. Doesn't
| work. They only know incentive-based schemes.
|
| So now they have an incentive-based scheme just for the
| sales, which is (essentially) budgetted from their stock-
| option package (that everyone gets). I.e. they benefit from
| growth a little bit earlier and directer.
|
| If we hadn't done that, we wouldn't have a sales
| department.
| abxyz wrote:
| I argued this in the previous discussion about oxide's
| compensation structure: I disagree that sales must be
| commission based. Yes, finding sales staff that are
| willing to work for a salary and equity shrinks the pool
| but the same is true of engineers willing to work for a
| flat rate across the company.
|
| Sales might seem mystical and magical to engineers but it
| isn't. A small company with a small sales team can
| absolutely work without commission. Yes, it is harder,
| but it is not impossible. The carve out for sales
| undermines the ideas behind a flat salary structure. Just
| because we can measure a sales person's contributions in
| dollar amounts does not mean we must measure it in dollar
| amounts. Sales is as much about the partnerships between
| sales people and product/engineering, why aren't all the
| people who work on a deal getting commission?
|
| I'd go as far as to argue that oxide is in the perfect
| position as a big-ticket long-cycle business to abandon
| traditional sales commission structures. They take on all
| the negatives (sales people overselling to get
| commission) with no benefits. There are other ideas.
| Company wide bonus based on sales made during the year?
| tock wrote:
| > Just because we can measure a sales person's
| contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must
| measure it in dollar amounts.
|
| This is the fairest form of compensation. It's
| unfortunate that engineering contribution cannot be
| measured the same way. If we could engineers would all be
| getting a nice pay hike.
| ghaff wrote:
| And many would be getting let go because they weren't
| meeting some number.
| tock wrote:
| Companies already do layoffs without commissions. They
| are always optimising to reduce salaries and increase
| profit margins. And its not "some number". Its the amount
| of $ brought in. Thats what companies care about.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, but sales reps have very specific targets and sales
| managers have no problem routinely letting people go if
| they miss those targets. It really is a somewhat
| different situation from engineering--although projects,
| for example, certainly get canceled and teams let go.
| There's a more direct correlation to quarterly
| revenue/margin input in the case of sales.
| tock wrote:
| But its a more transparent system. Right now no-one has
| any idea if they get laid off or if they are being
| underpaid. I think the overall compensation would likely
| go up if you are good at your job.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's still just a market. You've got to make offers that
| people will accept. It's mostly silly to try to come up
| with some objective theory of value, except in the
| context of what potential employees will consider to be
| fair, which is right back at "you've got to make offers
| that people will accept."
|
| Basing compensation on supposedly objective things like
| "the dollar amount a sales person brought in" might be
| important to a given pool of potential employees, but
| resist the temptation to think of it as objectively
| determining the value of the employee's work. Remember
| that all you're doing is making offers that people will
| accept.
| tock wrote:
| I agree. But if employees know their objective value I
| believe it will change what they will consider an
| acceptable offer.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Only if the salesperson also implements & supports the
| things they sell. Selling false promises of something the
| rest of the organization has to fulfill is not fair --
| but that's the way to the biggest commission!
| yencabulator wrote:
| > Just because we can measure a sales person's
| contributions in dollar amounts does not mean we must
| measure it in dollar amounts.
|
| I don't even know if we can.
|
| Yes, you can measure the number of deals signed they
| called dibs on. But:
|
| 1. You don't know if the _salesperson_ earned it, or the
| whole product. There 's a baseline demand driven by the
| whole company. This is the whole old argument that nobody
| can prove that ads work; you just can't pinpoint the
| purchase decision to exposure to an ad. So yeah I guess
| you can make your salespeople compete against each other
| and reward the one who stochastically floats to the top
| while punishing others. Sounds like such a fun workplace,
| I thought everyone agreed Microsoft's rank system sucked.
|
| 2. Several times I have witnessed salespeople selling
| non-existent, non-planned, functionality and forcing the
| rest of the company into crunch mode to not have a major
| client semi-publicly end the contract early. You're often
| just rewarding the biggest liar while everyone else has
| to cover up for their shit. Once again, sounds like such
| a fun workplace.
|
| It comes down to, competitive sales is a cancer, and
| you're choosing to have it.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Why is sales special? Why not just have some performance bar
| for that, just like all the other positions?
| sofixa wrote:
| Because sales people are used to work on incentives,
| including going over and getting rewarded for it.
|
| If they have a fixed salary with a high objective to "make
| it" (e.g. if you sell less than $X, you get fired), lots of
| sales folks will skip on it because they can't go over, and
| most probably prefer to have a quarter or two or year at
| e.g. 70% salary while working on longer term deals, rather
| than losing their job for not being good enough within that
| arbitrary time period. And going over their quota can be
| wildly lucrative depending on the terms.
| Quarrel wrote:
| FWIW, it seems like nowhere is this truer than SF/SV.
|
| Outside the bubble, it isn't always the case, or the
| structure can be a bit different, but salespeople in the
| Valley (as it were) are a different breed.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Sales has been commission-based everywhere I've worked,
| including companies based in other countries.
|
| Commission based sales was definitely not a Silicon
| Valley invention.
| sofixa wrote:
| No, it's just how sales works, it's almost always on
| commission.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Tesla salespeople do not work on commission. Also you can
| align incentives through stock grants which appreciate by
| you selling more.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Tesla salespeople do not work on commission
|
| I work with tech salespeople with a variety of former
| employers as tech sales people, and I've never heard of
| anyone having worked without a commission. I'm vaguely in
| tech sales myself (solutions architect) and I'm on
| commission too, and so is everyone who joins our division
| from similar employment (solutions engineers/architect,
| or even customer success folks).
| cestith wrote:
| Ask a local real estate agent or real estate broker how
| much base pay they make. Or, heck, a car salesperson or
| an ad salesperson at your local TV or radio station. It's
| all commission-based. In some of these fields in the US
| the norm is 100% commission-based with no base pay. In
| others someone might make one to three times minimum
| wage, but will end up being some of the highest-paid
| people in the company based on commissions of anywhere
| from 1% to 50%, depending on the industry.
| rubicon33 wrote:
| If you're asking this question then you have really no idea
| how the sales engine works at a company. It's inherently
| incentive driven.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Sales culture is heavily incentive and performance based.
|
| It sucks but they like to think that if they work harder
| they'll get paid more.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not universal but B2B sales in particular have
| evolved to incentive/performance compensation to a large
| degree. Wasn't always the case but (most?) of those
| companies aren't in business any longer. Also extends to
| the sales hiring process. Not that companies don't look
| at track records but it's also the case that sales
| managers don't have any issue firing people who don't
| meet their numbers.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| Because good sales staff make a ton of money through a ton
| of sales. Any other incentive structure is unlikely to
| attract high performers.
| bobsomers wrote:
| How is this not exactly the same in engineering though?
| Performance reviews at top tech companies are pretty much
| designed to identify the super high performers and shove
| massive bonuses and equity grants their way.
|
| And those equity grants are effectively as good as cash,
| since they are publicly tradable stock.
| darren0 wrote:
| It's pretty fundamental to the personality of people in
| sales to be driven by getting the sale and getting
| compensated based on the deal size. If you remove that
| carrot, it just doesn't work. Some sales people will make
| millions, some will make nothing.
| diggan wrote:
| > If you remove that carrot, it just doesn't work
|
| How come it works for basically every other job on this
| planet? Developers aren't paid per feature
| implemented/bug fixed, and we still do those things, how
| come sales people are unable to do things for a fixed
| monthly salary?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sales works that way in every industry.
|
| A top salesman can make more than the CEO from
| commission. Many top salespeople have a zero base salary.
|
| The pressure is pretty crazy, though. I'm not cut out for
| that kind of thing.
| diggan wrote:
| I do know that (I myself also worked in sales for a short
| stint, unrelated to software though), what I don't
| understand how these magical "sales people" apparently
| can't work for a fixed salary when literally everyone
| else can. Apparently the rest of us can do high quality
| work without being paid for each feature/bug fixed, yet
| these individuals cannot?
|
| > Many top salespeople have a zero base salary.
|
| Hmm, probably true in some places, but here (Spain) that
| wouldn't even be legal. When I worked in sales we had
| minimum wage + commission, but I'm sure the salary would
| be 0 if they were allowed to set it up like that.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have a few [wealthy] salespeople friends. Most have
| "commission-only" (0 base) jobs.
|
| Many jobs will start you with a base for a few months,
| while you build commissions, but they stop it, after a
| while.
|
| They can also get fired at the drop of a hat. Not much
| job security.
|
| Sales are easy to convert to incentives. Just take a cut
| of the sale. It's not so easy to calculate value from
| other jobs.
| geodel wrote:
| > the rest of us can do high quality work without being
| paid for each feature/bug fixed, yet these individuals
| cannot
|
| Yes they can not. It is not high quality work but high
| quality results for sales guy. Developer work is complete
| once service deployed. It wouldn't be developer failure
| if user volume doesn't reach x thousands per day on their
| web service. It would definitely be salesman failure
| sales does not reach x dollars in certain duration.
|
| Developer equivalent of sales would be to say "I have
| distributed x sales brochures and call x number of
| clients this month. My job is done."
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Hmm, probably true in some places, but here (Spain)
| that wouldn't even be legal. When I worked in sales we
| had minimum wage + commission, but I'm sure the salary
| would be 0 if they were allowed to set it up like that.
|
| In the United States having "zero base bay" is
| hypothetical. If a full-time employee had no commission
| payouts they'd be compensated minimum wage as necessary
| to comply with laws.
|
| Sales jobs often come with a warm-up period with either a
| higher base salary or they get paid part of their
| commission target for a number of months regardless of
| how many sales they make.
| marcusb wrote:
| > what I don't understand how these magical "sales
| people" apparently can't work for a fixed salary when
| literally everyone else can
|
| It isn't that "sales people"[0] _can 't_ work for a fixed
| salary. The good ones just _won 't_ because they can find
| another employer that will pay commission, and they know
| they will make more with commission than without.
|
| Employers will pay commission because that's how you
| attract the best sales people, and the best sales people
| are worth orders of magnitude more to their business than
| average sales people. Despite how much they earn, in
| general and compared to their average peers, the best
| sales people don't cost orders of magnitude more (5x is a
| more typical spread in tech sales.)
|
| The advantage of 100% commission -- where it is legal --
| is pretty obvious from the employer's view point. The
| company only pays for production. These sales people are
| commonly (but not always) independent contractors. The
| benefit for the sales person is a little less obvious,
| but, generally, they have more autonomy, a simpler comp
| plan without any caps, and earn more per dollar sold than
| they would on a base + commission plan.
|
| 0 - whether magic or not
| bpt3 wrote:
| It's not that they're unable to; it's that the field
| attracts people who are financially motivated and other
| companies have compensation structures that reward
| personal performance.
|
| Top salespeople generally won't work for a fixed salary
| because they want to make as much as they can, and the
| way they do that is by having as much of their
| compensation tied to personal performance as possible.
|
| I personally think more engineers/developers should think
| the same way, but it's also much harder to directly tie
| job performance to compensation when contributing to a
| product.
| diggan wrote:
| > because they want to make as much as they can
|
| But that's the same no matter if you work in sales,
| customer support or many other roles, a lot of people
| just care about the money with little regards to anything
| else, yet the sales department are the only ones who
| _must have_ commission?
| bpt3 wrote:
| > But that's the same no matter if you work in sales,
| customer support or many other roles, a lot of people
| just care about the money with little regards to anything
| else,
|
| It's actually not the same for many roles. See the
| comments from people in this thread alone who scoff at
| the notion of maximizing compensation. I don't get it
| personally, but it's not an uncommon thought.
|
| > yet the sales department are the only ones who must
| have commission?
|
| I think there's a very high likelihood that a salesperson
| is primarily driven by compensation, and good salespeople
| will already be working in a commission-driven
| compensation model elsewhere.
|
| Why would a top salesperson at Dell, HPE, Oracle, or
| wherever else a hardware salesperson comes from move to
| Oxide to take less money and completely decouple their
| compensation from their performance?
| cestith wrote:
| Even if your intent is to maximize income in customer
| support, you often don't have the market option to do
| that. I have seen (and even worked at) places where chat
| support, phone support, and support administrators have a
| quota of chats, calls, or ticket responses and make
| bonuses based on how much they exceed their numbers.
| Unfortunately sometimes that results in people updating
| tickets several times an hour saying things like "we're
| still looking into this and haven't forgotten you"
| without actually looking into anything.
|
| One place I worked I tried to move the quota system more
| towards being the final response on a resolve issue, but
| upper management didn't want to ever judge whether an
| issue was resolved even when the customer said they were
| happy. They did incorporate an NPS query for every
| interaction, though, and a multiplier against the volume-
| based quota. Unfortunately that favored people who were
| good BS artists when lying to the customer about looking
| into things.
|
| The fallout from the above paragraph was that quality,
| caring staff would get punished for actually solving
| customer problems.
| bpt3 wrote:
| Almost every other role is at least one level removed
| from putting cash in the company's account, which is what
| leads to the shenanigans you described with metrics that
| are a poor proxy for revenue generation (and/or are too
| easy to game).
| jasode wrote:
| _> , how come sales people are unable to do things for a
| fixed monthly salary?_
|
| You have to separate out 2 different ideas of the _"
| theoretical idealized salesperson that works for fixed
| salary"_ -vs- _" real-world salesperson that works for
| variable commissions"_.
|
| The businesses that have attempted to pay fixed salaries
| for salespeople _end up attracting incompetent
| salespeople who can 't sell_. They become a negative cost
| on the company's payroll because they can't bring in any
| revenue. In contrast, the high-performance salespeople
| (the "rainmakers") are attracted to the variable high-
| commission, _because they know they have the hard-to-find
| skills to actually sell and bring in the money_. If a
| salesperson has the skills to get a customer to sign a
| contract and pay money, they have the leverage to get a
| percentage of that.
|
| Developers, db sysadmins, tech support staff, etc are not
| in situations to directly influence and shake the hand of
| a new potential customer and convince them to write a
| check.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Because sales are quantifiable and directly mapped to
| performance.
|
| To get that kind of proportional payback in engineering
| you'd need very clear financial objectives for a project.
| I could see that happening in optimization scenarios
| where consultants are brought in and get paid for
| whatever they can trim from operational costs.
| cestith wrote:
| In fact I've seen both tech and manufacturing efficiency
| consultants whose quotes include $x up front plus
| monitoring and reporting that shows the efficiency gains.
| Then rather than taking a closing fixed payment, they get
| a percentage of the savings to the client over the first
| six or twelve months.
| cestith wrote:
| Freelancers and consultants do absolutely have the option
| to get paid by the feature. It's exceedingly rare for
| internal employees or contract employees though. That
| means there's no market competition based on it yet. Some
| places do have bonuses or even profit sharing. Some
| senior ICs and many managers across the industry can get
| equity through either grants or options.
|
| Sales professionals have a lot of different places they
| can sell things. The market-rate compensation for sales
| includes commissions. So to get the best sales people,
| you want something easy and exciting to sell with a good
| commission structure tied to the sales.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Sales is unique because the monetary benefit to the
| company is mostly objective: If someone closes a $10
| million sales contract, that becomes $10 million in
| revenue.
|
| If a team of developers work together to fix a bug, how
| would you calculate the revenue value of the bug and how
| would you distribute that to the team that solved it?
| Technically the value of a bug is _negative_ because it
| costs the company, so do you subtract that from the pay
| of the engineers he worked on it? If 5 people implement a
| feature that uses a library developed by 5 other people,
| which was built on the platform team 's infrastructure,
| how do you divide up the commission? It doesn't work.
| tshaddox wrote:
| A $10 million sales contract is objectively $10 million
| in revenue, sure, but it's silly to attribute that
| entirely to the sales person just like it would be silly
| to attribute it entirely to the engineers that built the
| product or the marketing team that bought billboards.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The key difference between everyone else in a company and
| Sales is that Sales is where the money comes in, directly.
| It's approximately trivial to point at a sale, see how much
| money it made, and then who made the sale. So commission is
| a natural compensation structure for salespeople. For
| everyone else at a company, their individual contribution
| to the company making money is a lot more diffuse, and any
| metric you might be tempted to try and put a commission on
| is at risk of being gamed. Whereas "how much $$$/worth of
| stuff did we sell" is pretty much THE metric by which we
| judge a business as a whole.
| dustingetz wrote:
| indeed, founders are generally compensated at half the
| competitive rate
| NewUser76312 wrote:
| Of course not, what's the purpose of asking such as silly
| question?
|
| Are you being snarky and suggesting that employees deserve the
| same upside that founders deserve?
| diggan wrote:
| > Of course not, what's the purpose of asking such as silly
| question?
|
| How is it silly if they already do that for salaries? Co-ops
| with equal ownership isn't unheard of, and isn't silly at
| all.
| AngryData wrote:
| Yeah they aren't unheard of at all, co-ops have had slow
| but steady growth in the market for some decades now.
| cpach wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. In what market(s)?
| aapoalas wrote:
| One famous example is Igalia, doing Open Source
| consulting for various companies, including Google,
| Apple, and others.
|
| They're a worker owned co-op and have grown very nicely
| over the years.
| cpach wrote:
| Igalia are very cool! Not sure if it's so easy to
| reproduce their success (if I'm wrong on that point,
| that's only good I guess).
| sneak wrote:
| That isn't a snarky position; early employees in high output
| orgs like this generally work just as much as founders do.
|
| The founders aren't really taking on that much more risk than
| the rest of the early team; it's the VC's money, not theirs.
|
| I absolutely don't agree with the idea that employees deserve
| the same upside as founders (because I think initiative and
| persistence against adversity/inertia is insanely rare and
| valuable and should be rewarded immensely), but it is not an
| insane proposition.
|
| It's especially popular among people who think the actual
| work output is more important than the leadership initiative.
| Both are obviously essential, and founders do both, while
| employees do only the first (or they'd be founders
| themselves).
| no_wizard wrote:
| >rewarded immensely
|
| Let's define this. Let's say 1:25? 1:50? What ratio is
| appropriate?
| sneak wrote:
| We don't need to define it; employees define it by who
| they choose to work for given the equity granted to them
| by the founders.
|
| If they didn't like the deal, they would become founders
| themselves, or choose a company that offers a better
| deal.
|
| It turns out that leadership drive and the compulsion to
| bring something new into existence from scratch is
| actually quite rare.
|
| Your figures seem to be roughly in line with what the
| employment market has settled on, although price
| discovery could be better (most employees don't get to
| see the cap table during hiring negotiation, which, IMO,
| is wrong).
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Salary and equity have nothing to do with what you "deserve",
| only what you're able to negotiate.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Would love to engage in a discussion with you on this. How
| would you describe "deserve" in the sense of compensation?
| I agree with your premise that what you get is ultimately
| bound by the ceiling of the payer's generosity and your
| ability to negotiate.
|
| But what sorts of things input into the function of
| "deserve"?
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Everyone deserves healthcare, a place to live, food to
| eat. Some people deserve to live happy lives and some
| people deserve to rot in prison. These are about your
| personal conduct and how much you contribute to society.
|
| How much equity or salary you get in a company is a
| function of supply/demand and the marginal product of
| your labor. I would say there are probably fewer CEOs who
| can take a company from startup to unicorn status than
| there are really good founding engineers out there, so
| CEOs tend to get more equity in a company. Sometimes the
| founding engineer knows something that nobody else in the
| world does, so their equity reflects that. It's also a
| reflection of how much risk the engineer is willing to
| take on (they'll probably take a salary cut to be a
| founding engineer, and they also risk the company
| randomly running out of runway and finding themself
| suddenly unemployed).
|
| But it has nothing to do with what you _deserve_. Maybe
| if the CEO /President is a sentimental type, he'll award
| you equity based on how much he _feels_ you deserve but
| ultimately it 's about supply and demand.
|
| If a CEO puts in 90 hours a week at a tobacco company
| while his engineers put in 20 hours a week, does he
| _deserve_ lots of money (and therefore a more comfortable
| life) because he puts more effort into killing people? Or
| does he deserve every bad thing that happens to him
| because he decided to spend his limited time on this
| earth making it a worse place?
| lumost wrote:
| For early/mid stage startups - this is an awful position to
| take. These orgs are heavily influenced by who they hire -
| what you pay defines your incentive structure.
|
| Does the world class engineer or business development lead
| just take it easy and travel around after they join?
|
| Does the new manager push the team and business forward or
| prioritize stability?
|
| Do engineers spend their time on reactors and impressive
| sounding projects or figuring out what customers need?
|
| Do people feel lucky to have a seat in the org or do they
| spend their time complaining and looking for the exits?
|
| Money isn't the only lever, but its a strong one - startups
| will never compete with established firms on cash outlays.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| People are paid salary and awarded equity based on
| supply/demand for labor, the marginal product of that
| labor, and the amount of risk engineers are willing to
| accept by joining a startup. It's an economic
| transaction, the same as buying office equipment and
| signing contracts for cloud resources. Trying to imbue
| mysticism into it is just asking to be lied to by your
| employees
| lumost wrote:
| There is no mysticism in incentive structures. My point
| was rather that if you provide strictly below market
| compensation (as most startup equity is positioned these
| days). You are likely to get below average talent, or
| below average results from poor incentives.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| A company can't function without employees, so why not?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Are you being snarky and suggesting that employees deserve
| the same upside that founders deserve
|
| The founders are excluded from the employee compensation
| discussion. They own the company because they founded it.
| Nobody thinks they just put the equity into a structure that
| nobody owns.
|
| The question is whether all _employees_ are compensated
| equally, which is a very important detail. Giving everyone
| the same salary is very different than giving everyone the
| same total compensation.
| lostmsu wrote:
| A lot of people with broken /s detector are replying to this
| comment.
| diggan wrote:
| It would seem like parent's _something_ detector is off if
| they think the grand-parent 's comment was snarky.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?
|
| I thought I saw this question answered in a previous thread and
| the answer was basically "no", but the question has been
| avoided a lot.
|
| Aspects of equity compensation would inherently need to be
| different over time due to valuation, fundraising stage, and so
| on. However I always thought it was strange that they made a
| big deal about paying everyone the same base salary but then
| were silent on the equity comp strategy. Everyone knows that in
| a job like this the _total comp_ is important.
|
| The old Oxide compensation discussions were interesting. There
| was discussion about how they thought candidates asking about
| compensation to be something of a negative signal because they
| wanted people who weren't in it for the money, basically. I
| heard this from a now ex-employee of Oxide who was describing
| how to navigate their hiring process, so take with a grain of
| salt.
|
| EDIT: I checked their website again. The compensation link goes
| to a blog post ( https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-
| reflection-of-... ) which has this section about equity:
|
| > Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not
| cash compensation. While it's true that startup equity is
| important, it's also true that startup equity doesn't pay the
| orthodontist's bill or get the basement repainted. We believe
| that every employee should have equity to give them a stake in
| the company's future (and that an outsized return for investors
| should also be an outsized return for employees), but we also
| believe that the presence of equity can't be used as an excuse
| for unsustainably low cash compensation. As for how equity is
| determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but
| in short, equity compensates for risk - and in a startup, risk
| reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than
| the hundredth.
|
| Which doesn't answer the question.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Anyone who doesn't ask about compensation (at least at a
| later point in the interview process) would be a red flag to
| me.
|
| Most valuable people know they're valuable, and do (and
| should!) negotiate compensation.
| ge96 wrote:
| self esteem problem ha (not asking or thinking low)
| Aurornis wrote:
| Red flagging a candidate for not asking about compensation
| during the interview is not a good practice. This is an
| example of penalizing people for not following a specific
| script or candidate archetype you have in mind instead of
| judging them by their skills and abilities.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I am not sure I fully agree with the characterization above
| (that asking about salary is a 'red flag' in our process),
| but if I had to try and steelman it: we prominently put
|
| > Everyone at Oxide makes $207,264 USD, regardless of
| location. (Some sales positions have a lower base salary
| and contain a commission component.)
|
| On our applications page (see it here:
| https://oxide.computer/careers/sw-control-plane)
|
| It's also a pretty well known aspect of the company.
| Combine this with the fact that our hiring process is
| different, where interviews are the very last thing before
| possibly being hired, and someone who has missed this fact
| could come across as having not done some very basic
| research about the company that they're applying to.
|
| To be clear, I still think calling it "a red flag" is a
| stretch. I fully agree with you in a general sense, for
| places that are willing to negotiate compensation in the
| first place, but we make it very clear up front that we do
| not.
| ghaff wrote:
| FWIW, my last job I didn't negotiate. Company I really
| wanted to work for. Wanted to close the deal. So I didn't
| gum up the works with salary negotiation and it ended up
| being very good for me in a lot of ways.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > (that asking about salary is a 'red flag' in our
| process)
|
| > To be clear, I still think calling it "a red flag" is a
| stretch.
|
| In my comment above I did not call it a "red flag". My
| specific wording was "somewhat of a negative signal".
| That seems consistent with what you said about judging
| someone for asking about a well-known aspect of the
| company because it signals they haven't done enough
| research.
|
| It also dodges the question that keeps getting asked:
| Does everyone receive the same _equity_ compensation as
| well? As far as I can tell, that question is not answered
| on your website. Asking it seems like fair game.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > In my comment above I did not call it a "red flag".
|
| The person I was responding did, you are right that you
| did not.
|
| > It also dodges the question that keeps getting asked:
|
| This question gets asked in every thread about this,
| nobody is trying to dodge anything. The equity portion is
| variable, and the salary is identical. We do not do
| bonuses.
| cestith wrote:
| I think in general, at many companies a candidate asking
| is a red flag. Also for many candidates a company not
| wanting to discuss it until the offer is a red flag.
|
| It seems that specifically your open disclosure very up
| front bypasses at least most of this from both sides.
| mystraline wrote:
| > There was discussion about how they thought candidates
| asking about compensation to be something of a negative
| signal because they wanted people who weren't in it for the
| money, basically.
|
| I've heard this from multiple hiring managers and C levels.
| The cognitive dissonance is amazing.
|
| Do you know why I show up and work? Because I am paid for it,
| and in this country, medical is also gatekept by employment.
|
| If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them.
|
| But somehow, I'm supposed to not care about money at the same
| time caring about money.
| diggan wrote:
| > If I wasn't paid, I wouldn't work for them.
|
| That's great, but useful to know not everyone thinks the
| same. When I transitioned to software development (from
| basically random "whatever pays my rent" jobs), besides my
| first software job, they were all because I liked the
| particular product in some way or another, and what the
| compensation was is basically the least interesting thing
| for me.
|
| Of course, some level of base payment is needed, because I
| still needed to pay rent, but if I was choosing between two
| jobs where one was utterly boring but paid 3 times more
| than a fascinating job, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat.
| And no, I'm just an individual contributor who wants to
| like what I work with, not an executive, manager or
| similar.
| mystraline wrote:
| The hypothetical situation you set up is interesting, in
| that past a base amount of money to survive and thrive,
| that you would choose the more intellectually stimulating
| position. And I do get that.
|
| For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the
| higher paying one. And then, I would create and make
| outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage,
| it could be a jump start on my own business.
|
| And, enough money can buy independenance in that you can
| get this flexibility of doing as you choose.
| diggan wrote:
| > For me, if the hours were equal, I would choose the
| higher paying one. And then, I would create and make
| outside of work. And since I have that much higher wage,
| it could be a jump start on my own business.
|
| Yeah, I guess I've been lucky to be able to chose daily
| jobs in the past that basically gives me what you would
| create outside of work, except I got a fixed payment each
| month for doing something I really enjoyed. So I never
| had the need to do that stuff outside of work to derive
| enjoyment of most of my time, which I guess is my top
| priority and been most of my life.
| duped wrote:
| That's reasonable, but signalling this to a startup
| during hiring is going to be a negative. There are three
| kinds of capital they get to play with, cash, equity, and
| culture. Cash is the least pliable of the three to them,
| equity the least liquid, but culture is actually
| something they can control.
|
| If you have a team full of people who are just there for
| the paycheck, the only thing that will keep them there is
| increasing the paycheck. Which startups can't do in a
| crunch.
| baq wrote:
| Culture is smoke and mirrors. When investors say frog,
| founders jump and guess who gets the cultural shaft then.
|
| Better to be thinking in transactional terms from the get
| go _especially_ in early startups, where majority of
| total comp is an illiquid call option.
| duped wrote:
| I mean it's not smoke and mirrors, when I'm picking
| between jobs I'm strongly considering the people I'm
| spending 35-40% of my waking hours interacting with. If I
| cared solely about maximizing personal returns I wouldn't
| work for startups.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| > but if I was choosing between two jobs where one was
| utterly boring but paid 3 times more than a fascinating
| job, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat.
|
| I chose my current job against competing offers because
| it was a good thing for the world, but I would not have
| taken significantly reduced pay for it. Let me tell you
| why: nobody that insists on paying you below market rates
| is going to treat you right. Some of the worst
| professional interactions I've ever dealt with involved
| high ranking individuals at nonprofits. These were orgs
| may have had genuinely good missions, but also paid rank
| and file employees quite poorly. On the other side, the
| 3x above market rate job is just a fantasy. I could
| believe it if you were talking about a 20% bonus.
| matwood wrote:
| I hear you, and I've never solely chased money either.
| But, we unfortunately live in world driven by money, and
| if I'm going to pour myself into work I want to be
| compensated appropriately. I also have a huge issue with
| feeling like I'm getting taken advantage of. So, what I
| have done is try to find jobs where those things align
| somewhat.
| dpritchett wrote:
| It's a bit of a class thing, isn't it?
|
| Independently wealthy folks can stay in the game longer
| without needing to extract a lot of cash compensation in
| the company's early years.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| This is true in the abstract, but we're talking about a
| salary of $207,264 in this case. You don't need to be
| independently wealthy to make it on our salary.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Exactly. It's also important to know that they support
| remote work, so these salaries really are not bad at all.
| For someone in a non-tech city who doesn't want to move
| this would be a great startup job.
|
| My only reservation is that I've interviewed with or
| worked for multiple companies that made some claim about
| paying everyone the same and there was always some
| loophole: The company might have a fixed base pay but
| then use very different equity grants. One company
| claimed to give everyone the same base comp and equity
| but then it was discovered that some people were getting
| huge annual "guaranteed bonuses" that were effectively
| base compensation. It has left me tired of seeing
| companies push the idea of everyone being paid the same
| while not being open about the entire compensation
| structure.
|
| EDIT: To be 100% clear, I don't know what Oxide's entire
| comp structure looks like. The examples above were for
| past companies I worked for.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| We have salary and equity, no bonuses. Salary is
| identical, equity is not. I certainly agree with you that
| that kind of shenanigans can be annoying; I had a former
| employer who hired people with "oh it's a bonus but you
| always get 100% of it" and then, we did not get 100% of
| it.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Salary is identical, equity is not.
|
| Thank you. This is the question I was hoping to see an
| answer for.
| brettgriffin wrote:
| More important than just getting answer, do you
| understand _why_ every employee isn't granted the same
| amount equity?
| Aurornis wrote:
| Isn't it obvious? This is where they vary compensation
| for the same reasons everyone else varies compensation.
|
| If they gave everyone the same equity compensation
| presumably they'd put that front and center like they do
| for the base salary.
|
| The claims about paying everyone the same are a red
| herring because it's only about base salary.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Because if you want to poach talent then you'll likely
| need to induce them to leave their existing employer and
| will need to match their existing equity grants that
| might soon vest. Obviously that number is different for
| different people.
| throwanem wrote:
| It's bullshit to talk about salary equality as though
| that mattered when equity is the real upside, and you
| know it. The claim to strive for a "generational company"
| is just "we're a family here" in other terms. Congrats on
| the raise.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I think there are tremendous benefits to having a flat
| salary structure, regardless of upside. My other friends
| in tech are envious of the lack of having to waste time
| doing perf, for example.
|
| > Congrats on the raise.
|
| Thank you.
| throwanem wrote:
| From your perspective of course it has benefits. From
| mine? Getting stack ranked wasn't even in my top 10 as
| concerns went, but I'm really good at my job, and I keep
| quality notes that make it easy to recap a quarter or
| half. (But like I said, I'm good at my job.) I don't
| really see what that has to do with focusing your
| rhetoric on 10% of startup comp as though it were 100% -
| especially now that your tax discount on cash comp has
| been restored! - but you're welcome, of course.
| growse wrote:
| > but I'm really good at my job
|
| How good you think you are at your job is pretty
| meaningless if some manager above you wants to weaponise
| the company's perf policy against you.
| throwanem wrote:
| I'm good enough at my job to see that when it's
| happening. That's one reason why I didn't say 'I think.'
| Another is because I know the way to bet is that, with
| this weapon forbidden, others will be found to replace
| it. Why go into any of that without even the promise of
| hazard pay? I'd rather just do honest work.
| bcantrill wrote:
| This "job" that you speak of, that you are so good at.
| Are you... at it now?
| throwanem wrote:
| > This "job" that you speak of, that you are so good at.
| Are you... at it now?
|
| Hello, Bryan! No, I'm on my own dime, no one else's. But
| it's decent of you to show such concern over my
| situation, in these uncertain times.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > I keep quality notes that make it easy to recap a
| quarter or half. (But like I said, I'm good at my job.)
|
| The point is not that my friends don't do a good job, the
| point is that this is work that does not actually further
| the organization's goals directly, but is necessary in
| order to keep their job. They'd rather be doing the
| actual work they are hired to do.
| throwanem wrote:
| Oh, come on. Administrative overhead is a reality of
| business everywhere and at every level; the idea that to
| manage an organization somehow necessarily impairs it is
| absurd. So is purporting falsely to eliminate that
| overhead on behalf of others, when basic professional
| competence instead involves for oneself learning to
| minimize it - to dispose of it, not by panicking or
| catastrophizing or sweeping it under a rug, but instead
| in a fashion such as that I described ie _efficiently._
| To claim otherwise is infantilizing nonsense. It 's
| fundamentally dishonest, though I grant you probably have
| never before so directly been told as much.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The issue is, you're speaking from the position of the
| organization itself. Yes, staff work is just as important
| as line work. The issue with perf isn't that it's staff
| work, it's that people who are ostensibly hired to do
| line work are forced to do staff work just to keep their
| jobs. And sure, you can argue "tough, that's just life,"
| but it's not hard to see why people resent it. They want
| to be writing code, not putting together promo packets.
|
| Anyway this is mostly just one example, it's just one
| that comes up often when I speak with my peers about how
| Oxide works vs other companies.
| throwanem wrote:
| I see why people resent it; I'm saying they're foolish to
| do so. Why should I _not_ seek involvement in staff work
| that determines so much of my future? Why should I not
| make myself responsible for the conduct of the business
| within the scope of my role, rather than just the parts
| which I happen to like and enjoy?
|
| And since you can't seriously mean me to believe
| performance is not _evaluated_ at Oxide, I really can 't
| see how I'm meant to take any of what you're saying at
| face value. Instead it seems something much akin to
| "don't worry your clever little head about the boring ol'
| _money_ stuff, darlin '! Don't you trust me to take good
| care of you?"
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > I see why people resent it; I'm saying they're foolish
| to do so.
|
| Okay, sure. I am also not a "I only want to put my head
| down and code" person either.
|
| > And since you can't seriously mean me to believe
| performance is not evaluated at Oxide,
|
| Not formally, no. Because there are no levels, no
| corresponding salary bands, there's no need to have a
| formal process, with all of the justification work that
| has to go in from the employee, and all of the reading
| and evaluating all of that stuff from management.
|
| It is true that if you don't do your job, you'll be let
| go. However, that's a conversation that would happen
| between you and Bryan/Steve, not an annual or quarterly
| process with all of the paperwork and such that those
| formal processes demand.
|
| Instead, we simply do our jobs, and get paid our salary.
|
| It sounds like it isn't an environment for you, and
| that's okay.
| throwanem wrote:
| > Instead, we simply do our jobs, and get paid our
| salary.
|
| And some of "us" have an ownership stake, and some of
| "us" do not. But "we" like to talk about how everyone's
| working on a level playing field, anyway.
|
| You're quite right. It isn't an environment for me.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Small nit, everyone has an ownership stake, it's that
| some are larger than others.
| throwanem wrote:
| The clarification is welcome, inasmuch at least as it's
| good to know there are no missing grants. It doesn't
| really surprise to hear some are larger than others,
| which is invariably the case, usually by one or two
| orders of magnitude. I assume you're satisfied with
| yours.
|
| I wouldn't wish to be taken as saying no employee is ever
| more valuable to the business than another. That would
| also be absurd. What I don't understand is why all the
| circumlocution.
| sunshowers wrote:
| I moved from Meta, infamous for its performance reviews,
| to Oxide. The culture difference is night and day. The
| level of self-interested behavior seen at Meta just
| doesn't exist here.
|
| By the way, I received every rating from Greatly Exceeds
| (including an additional equity grant) down to Meets
| Most, and the rating I got overall had very little
| correlation with either effort or impact. I got Meets
| Most for some of the most valuable and industry-impactful
| work I've done in my career, and Greatly Exceeds for
| something that got replaced in a year.
| throwanem wrote:
| Well, sure. That's Meta, the model for much of the
| industry, where that isn't the likewise and just as
| deservedly infamous Amazon. So when you say Oxide is
| better, I'm sure I can believe you that it is, but can
| you see why that still might not convince? It's like if I
| say I'd rather be beaten than stabbed. Obviously this is
| the sensible choice to make among the selection given,
| but still the question might reasonably be asked: can
| there really be no third option?
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _I moved from Meta, infamous for its performance
| reviews, to Oxide. The culture difference is night and
| day. The level of self-interested behavior seen at Meta
| just doesn 't exist here._
|
| The culture difference between Meta and _any startup_
| will be night and day. People who are self interested
| min-maxxers don 't join startups. Not dealing with
| "corporate politics" has to be in the top 5 reasons
| anyone leaves FAANG to join a startup. That has nothing
| to do with Oxide's comp structure.
| throwanem wrote:
| > People who are self interested min-maxxers don't join
| startups. Not dealing with "corporate politics" has to be
| in the top 5 reasons...
|
| Oh, sure! Now tell me another one. The idea that startups
| don't have _politics_ is - well, I 'll say it is
| extremely comedic, and we'll leave it at that.
|
| Think about it for a minute. I'm not questioning the
| existence of the pipeline here described, and _no one_ is
| questioning the existence of many pressing reasons for
| anyone at the FAANG "top of funnel" to want to flow
| along that pipeline about as quickly as is achievable.
|
| But those "reasons" have effects on the people who
| experience them, because humans have emotions and
| psychologies and other such inconvenient externalities,
| and for like cause those effects are not instantly and
| perfectly ameliorated in every case by a simple change of
| environment.
|
| Can you not straightforwardly see how this might produce
| some extremely adverse results, in a social and
| sociological sense? And how overt, documented,
| attributable, and discoverable personnel processes, far
| from some unreasonable burden, might serve a broadly
| beneficial role in such circumstances?
| sunshowers wrote:
| This is a reasonable argument. But look, I have my views
| based on my experiences and things I've heard from
| colleagues and friends, and you have yours.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Bonuses are bullshit. When the first startup I worked for
| was acquired they asked everybody to basically agree they
| won't quit for a period of time - transition. Fair
| enough. However for the ordinary staff (like me) this
| agreement had no actual carrot, they're offering a so-
| called "Bonus scheme", but it's clearly designed so that
| they decide what it pays, whereas execs are getting an
| up-front specific financial inducement to stay. So I
| explain to colleagues that if you might want to quit you
| should not sign, the "bonus" is worthless but you're
| locked in by signing - however I did get some pushback
| from people who could not see this or haven't done this
| before.
|
| Sure enough when that bonus was due to pay out, I got a
| heads up from a friend (who was being compensated because
| he was like CTO or something) that it was worthless,
| because of course they get to pick the numbers so they're
| going to pick zero. I don't care, because I was on a
| different scheme and anyway I work for salary, if you
| want to pay me to do something, you can pay me, don't
| fuck about with nonsense about a "bonus", but some people
| ended up stuck for a year or two believing they're
| getting a bonus to wait.
| benreesman wrote:
| It's still a class thing. With the CoL in most SWE-heavy
| metros and the outright war on engineer pricing power
| over the last few years?
|
| Just about any engineer who isnt independently wealthy
| is:
|
| - recovering from layoffs and a period of unemployment at
| a high-COL cost structure
|
| - facing layoffs with the above salients
|
| - facing an imperative to insulate their fucking house
| with cash for their turn in the above crosshairs
|
| Competence and a willingness to work hard stopped
| equalling access to basic necessities in November of 2022
| - February of 2023, depending on how you count, and
| inflation has savaged a notional 200k.
|
| "200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy
| talk in 2025.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > With the CoL in most SWE-heavy metros
|
| They're a remote company. They're not targeting HCOL
| metros.
|
| > and inflation has savaged a notional 200k.
|
| > "200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy
| talk in 2025.
|
| Claiming that $200k _is not_ enough to live on is rich-
| guy talk. The majority of the country lives on well below
| $200K.
|
| I agree that a single person living in a HCOL metro like
| SF Bay Area would not find this compensation attractive,
| but that person also has nearly infinite other jobs to
| choose from nearby.
|
| Jobs like this (remote work for interesting startup) do
| not need to pay HCOL comp.
| benreesman wrote:
| Nothing about a remote gig in one job affects the
| imperstives I highlighted about past layoffs or future
| uncertainty: pricing relocation into or out of e.g. SFBA
| at zero is another conversational gambit popular with the
| out-of-touch. You don't teleport.
|
| It's bad generally, this is a terrible time to be a
| working person in general. How SWEs stack up against
| profession X? Depends on profession X.
|
| SWEs are in a job market where a bunch of folks who have
| been _repeatedly prosecuted_ for wage fixing (most
| successfully /recently in 2012) are taking another swing
| at it in a much more lawless regime. That's as precarious
| as it gets when this cabal monopolizes the front row at
| the Inaugeration.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > pricing relocation into or out of e.g. SFBA at zero is
| another conversational gambit popular with the out-of-
| touch. You don't teleport.
|
| I think this is missing the point.
|
| The target audience for remote jobs that pay $200K does
| not overlap with the target audience of people interested
| in working in SFBA at FAANG-level compensation.
|
| If someone is interested in relocating to SFBA, they
| should do that and get a job there.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > "200k is plenty to live on" is rich, well-connected guy
| talk in 2025.
|
| The median US income in 2023 was $39,982 for an
| individual, and $78,538 for a household.
| benreesman wrote:
| My issue isn't with Oxide's comp steucture which I
| neither understand nor care about.
|
| My issue is with made-for-life, self-appointed elder
| statesmen on HN saying anything at all about other
| people's finances and imperatives from the comfort of a
| study in whatever isyllic community they're pontificating
| from.
|
| Just, be grateful, and say nothing.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > My issue isn't with Oxide's comp steucture which I
| neither understand nor care about.
|
| This is a sub-thread about it, so that's what we're
| talking about though.
|
| > Just, be grateful, and say nothing.
|
| That's not how message boards work. If you say that it's
| ridiculous to live on such a salary, I'm going to point
| out how out of touch that is.
| benreesman wrote:
| That's not what I said, you know that's not what I said.
| I said people who talk like that on HN are doing so from
| an unrelated personal experience.
|
| This sub-thread is about the habits of speech that make a
| certain breed of armchair public policy economist jump
| out like a lump on plate glass. Get Patek in here and we
| could start a convention.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > you know that's not what I said.
|
| Okay, just so you know, I did not understand that you
| were speaking in generalities whatsoever.
| benreesman wrote:
| Fair enough, this is a topic with a high and asymmetrical
| charge quotient and misunderstandings are a fact of life
| in such.
|
| I also regret any degree to which I've singled you out
| for a generally regrettable trend among the long-time
| community members: it's very easy to see the world
| through the lens of one's own experience and I've been as
| guilty as anyone of doing just that on plenty of
| occasions.
|
| We should all strive for empathy and understanding, that
| goes double for people like you and me (and Thomas) who
| have been around forever.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I completely agree.
|
| Note that according to
| https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ 200k in 2025 is
| equivalent to about 160k in 2020 when the pandemic began,
| and 160k would've been on the low end for an experienced
| software engineer at a Series A or B startup at that
| time, in the SF Bay Area.
| rtpg wrote:
| 200k a year. In US dollars. American dollars.
|
| Now you have families, debt, etc. There are things.
| Minimum expectations for family etc. But come on! It's
| not poverty wages!
|
| "I am willing to take a pay cut for a thing that I'm
| passionate about" is such a normal thing that everyone
| serious I know in this industry says. Or like... even
| just ethical choices to leave money on the table (there's
| a reason online casinos pay their software engineers so
| much!). Not everyone makes the choice (and I get people
| saying no) and but in a sense I gotta imagine it's part
| of the calculus for making it work. "We won't have to pay
| people half a mil in total comp like meta has to, because
| the mission is more straightforward". I feel like an O&F
| ep mentioning someone from intel expecting _triple_ the
| comp. 600k!
|
| And like... people saying it's not enough and talking
| about equity. You're not paying rent with equity!
|
| Signed: a guy who was at a small startup and who would
| have been very happy with the inflation/CoL equivalent of
| 200k instead of what I had those early leaner years
|
| At one point "joining the scrappy startup" does involve
| some scrappiness. Otherwise you're just working in a
| division of Google that hasn't been integrated into the
| borg yet.
| nemothekid wrote:
| Focusing on the raw dollar amount is a red-herring that
| always comes up in these conversations. 200k is plenty!
| is a sleight of hand. If I am building something with 10s
| of millions of value and you give me 200k and expect me
| to shut up cause it's plenty, you are deceiving me, full
| stop.
|
| The "we all get paid the same" is a dishonest by
| omission. They _don 't_ all get paid the same, and while
| the peanut gallery may think so, I sure as hell don't
| think the IRS thinks the same way.
|
| I personally don't really care what they pay their
| engineers, but to pretend to have this egalitarian
| approach to compensation and then hide the equity numbers
| is dishonest.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| As long as the equity grant is the same as the founders,
| I as an independently wealthy person am happy to join the
| team that gives everyone the same salary.
|
| Because, you know, you better have the same amount of
| skin in the game as I do.
| trhway wrote:
| >It's a bit of a class thing, isn't it?
|
| reminded - the "amateur" (vs. paid "professional")
| requirement in Olympic and other sports, i.e.
| participation for the sake of only pure sport spirit,
| back then came from the aristocracy who could invest a
| lot of time in those sports without having to take care
| of making a living.
|
| And when wealthy execs and founders tell what they want
| people who is interested in the mission/vision/whatever
| other than money - well, it is the same class thing. The
| ones who need money naturally can't have the required
| purity of vision as it is clouded by that lowly need for
| money.
| mlyle wrote:
| I think we live in a better world when the _primary_
| motivator for how we spend half of most of our working day
| isn 't doing what's necessary to get strips of paper for
| survival.
|
| That is, the work itself should be interesting and
| fulfilling.
|
| Yes, we need money, but when the work relationship
| approaches being purely transactional the whole thing is
| demeaning for everyone and less effective.
|
| Boy, it takes a lot of luck and skill and privilege to be
| able to shop for (or offer) work like this, and money is
| still important.
| Keyframe wrote:
| _If I wasn 't paid, I wouldn't work for them._
|
| While this is true for most of the cases, it's not the case
| always. There are definitely jobs I'd work for less than I
| make at the job now and there are jobs which are considered
| "dream jobs", but ultimately there needs to be a solid base
| to make you and your family feel comfortable if you're
| spending at least 1/3 of your day on.
| inerte wrote:
| They know it's a lie but still need to say it.
|
| I used to have a manager that gave me this line. He left
| this company to join another one, had multiple offers, and
| told me he accepted the highest one because "it's all about
| the money".
|
| They know, we know, everybody knows, but that's not the
| playbook.
| rtpg wrote:
| Back when my salary was shitty I cared about the money a
| lot.
|
| I still like the money and the number going up. But now
| that it's above a certain multiple of what I consider a
| "comfortable" life, I'm not worrying as much.
|
| Would for change your job for an extra 500k a year? Surely
| right? An extra 50k? An extra 5k? An extra 500 dollars a
| year?
|
| Theres some mental calculus that includes everything. Some
| people will just take "offer with most money" every time.
| Hell of a lot of people don't.
|
| I do think that C suite folks might not have the right
| vision of what "normal/comfortable" is for employees
| though. So they might offer a low number thinking it's
| actually a "comfortable to live with at this stage of life"
| number and then get confused why they can't recruit good
| talent and think people are obsessed with money.
|
| First offer has gotta be within the ballpark of the right
| number if you don't want your interviewee to immediately
| come back to you with a much higher number!
| bobsomers wrote:
| > I still like the money and the number going up. But now
| that it's above a certain multiple of what I consider a
| "comfortable" life, I'm not worrying as much.
|
| I agree, but that number for most people is not the
| $207k/yr Oxide is paying.
|
| For most people that number is likely north of $500k, if
| not single digit millions.
| mbreese wrote:
| That heavily depends on where you live and your life
| situation (young kids? older kids? No kids?).
| abustamam wrote:
| I used to think (like 10 years ago) that $100k a year was
| all the money in the world and I'd be able to own a nice
| house and drive a nice car in Cali.
|
| Now my household income is double that, and I'm not a
| homeowner (I admit I do rent a nice house in a Norcal
| suburb) and because of remote work I'm not too concerned
| about the car I drive (but my wife does drive a Tesla),
| and after emergency fund savings, retirement, bills, and
| helping family out, my wife and I are still somehow still
| paycheck to paycheck.
|
| I'm not sharing this to complain, merely to just express
| that yeah, $207k in California can be comfortable, but
| it's not to the "worry not about money."
|
| $200k salary for a single person living in the Midwest?
| That person can probably retire early in a few years.
| rtpg wrote:
| Yeah my point is that it's comfortable enough.
|
| If you are growing your emergency fund then you aren't
| really living paycheck to paycheck right? You're putting
| money off to the side. Tho perhaps you're not putting
| aside much for, like, travel.
|
| Plenty of smaller startups not hitting that level,
| especially when they're lean. And I think up until this
| raise Oxide was lean!
|
| (To be honest given this finding raise I could see a
| salary increase for oxide across the board, to help with
| that)
| abustamam wrote:
| That's true, but I still consider 3-6mos emergency fund
| to be a basic necessity, since living in the startup
| world you never know when you may need to use it.
|
| A while back I interviewed for a startup that was asking
| me to work from 6am to 8pm for about 75% of what I make
| right now working regular 9-5 at a different startup. It
| was super early stage so that level of commitment was
| understandable but I can't imagine very many engineers
| with families willing to take that much of a paycut. But
| that's the name of the game, right? When you're early
| stage you can't afford to pay much but you need your
| product done yesterday. Thats probably why most startups
| fail. Cheap quality talent is hard to come by, at least
| stateside. Offshore developers can be cheap and amazing
| (someone living in India making $100k USD would probably
| be considered royalty) but if you don't have someone from
| that part of the world to vet the devs it could end up
| being more expensive in the long run.
| rtpg wrote:
| > For most people that number is likely north of $500k,
| if not single digit millions
|
| I think if your kind of comfortable is needing to clear
| 500k or million in comp a year then you aren't not in
| scrappy startup mode! This is fine but money out the door
| is money that then needs to get raised in early rounds
|
| I dunno, I do think oxide for basically everyone who
| joins is asking for them to get pay cuts but I would
| really hope that people would still at least putting some
| stuff into savings.
|
| And like ... even if the equity is variable if people are
| getting even a bit of equity, that might end up as
| something in the end.
|
| Saying this I think with the recent raise the comp could
| be made higher just to make the buffer even better.
| There's definitely an opportunity cost
| conjectures wrote:
| > There was discussion about how they thought candidates
| asking about compensation to be something of a negative
| signal
|
| It's not an unusual way of thinking, but every time I see it,
| it seems bizarre to me. If the candidate was to propose _any_
| project once hired, I 'm sure these folks would want them to
| think about costs and benefits.
|
| This policy selects either for people unable to reflect on
| their life with the same wit they apply to work; or people
| who will front about their motivations. Both seem like poor
| outcomes.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > There was discussion about how they thought candidates
| asking about compensation to be something of a negative
| signal because they wanted people who weren't in it for the
| money, basically.
|
| I think companies avoiding discussions about compensation is
| a negative signal, because they're only in it for my labor.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| At this point I've accepted most equity comp in a non public
| company is worth less than toilet paper.
|
| When it comes time to actually cash out or you notice some
| animals are more equal than others, the excuses start. The
| drama happens. No one knows what the equity is worth. If you
| try and advocate for yourself you'll be told the equity is
| actually worthless.
|
| From here the 200k salary seems fair. Just don't live in SF.
| Chicago , Philly, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, quite a few cities
| are perfectly livable on 200k.
|
| In fact, in any of the above metros you will be living nice.
| oooyay wrote:
| > The old Oxide compensation discussions were interesting.
| There was discussion about how they thought candidates asking
| about compensation to be something of a negative signal
| because they wanted people who weren't in it for the money,
| basically.
|
| I can't say anything of Oxide because I don't really know the
| people involved other than reading their writing.
|
| This is an attitude a lot of industry veterans have. Most of
| them were in software pre-2015 and have long made their money
| and paid their debts. They saw the haydays of job hopping,
| massive salaries, massive equity, and "rockstars" (that never
| were). The people I know that joined software post-2015 and
| onward are not in the same financial position.
| singron wrote:
| "total comp" (salary+equity) is really hard to quantify for a
| private company. In order to qualify as ISOs, the stock
| options need to be priced at the Fair Market Value (FMV),
| which makes them essentially worth ~$0 on paper on the day
| they are granted. In order to value them differently, you
| need to guess if/how the company will increase in value in
| the future. If the gains were guaranteed, then that should be
| factored into the current FMV, so options always have
| significant uncertainty.
|
| This is unlike an RSU from a public company, where you can
| sell the value of your shares as they vest and add that to
| your income with minor risk of price volatility.
| timerol wrote:
| > Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?
|
| > equity compensates for risk - and in a startup, risk
| reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk
| than the hundredth.
|
| I think that paragraph answers the question pretty clearly.
| As an Oxide employee you will get equity. It will generally
| be less than the people that came before you, but more than
| people that come after you. So it's obviously not the same as
| everyone else
| Aurornis wrote:
| It doesn't answer it clearly at all.
|
| Do two people hired at the same time get the same equity?
| Or is there room for one candidate to get more equity due
| to their experience or simply because they negotiated more?
|
| Obviously early employees get more equity. The question is
| whether or not there's room for negotiation. They heavily
| _imply_ that everyone is paid the same, but all of those
| claims are about base salary.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Out of curiosity, how would you imagine that working out,
| technically and specifically? You start out with founders
| having equity, and maybe some early investors. Then you employ
| some people and... what happens exactly? Are new shares
| created, is everyone who was already onboard slowly diluted,
| what happens when someone joins and leaves? Etc, I don't think
| there is an approach to this where all sides would be happy, so
| I'm interested to hear your thoughts.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Not your parent, and not suggesting in any way that Oxide is
| one, but the key term you want to search to learn more about
| that kind of arrangement is "worker owned cooperatives."
| There's a lot of variety in how it's handled.
| kortilla wrote:
| This has been the biggest red flag to me about oxide since
| these blogs came out. You don't join a startup for salary and
| every startup I've been at that emphasizes fair _salaries_ is
| doing that to intentionally discourage people from pushing on
| total compensation.
|
| Employees apart from the very early ones are likely really
| getting fucked on equity because oxide explicitly treats
| candidates asking about equity as a red flag.
|
| Companies structured like this end up turning into a
| combination of rich people who don't need money and are just
| interested in the problem space and then mediocre people who
| can't get a better offer. (If you are good, remote work with
| high TC is definitely available.)
|
| Unless Oxide is giving out huge equity bonuses for good perf
| (which would make their comp post hypocritical), it's going to
| have a continuous talent decline as it grows. There aren't
| enough independently wealthy high performers interested in what
| Oxide is doing to sustain a talent pool.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > (If you are good, remote work with high TC is definitely
| available.)
|
| But how good do you have to be at things other than the work
| itself (edit: and how lucky as well) to land one of those
| jobs with higher compensation? For someone outside of high-
| cost-of-living tech hubs, Oxide's fixed salary could be life-
| changing all by itself, even with minimal equity. The fact
| that they take that deal doesn't necessarily mean that
| they're mediocre.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > For someone outside of high-cost-of-living tech hubs,
| Oxide's fixed salary could be life-changing all by itself,
|
| I've spent a lot of time looking at compensation tables and
| reference data. $200K is definitely good salary, but I
| wouldn't call it "life changing" relative to what someone
| qualified to work at Oxide could earn in an average non-
| tech hub metro area.
|
| The type of candidate who qualifies to work at Oxide has
| numerous options for high paying remote work, and probably
| well paying local work too.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Congratulations on the achievement.
|
| It is always a pleasure to follow up with Oxide on their podcast,
| their technological decision to keep the Solaris linage alive,
| all the places across the infrastructure they have been using Go
| and Rust as well.
| ryao wrote:
| Congratulations everyone at Oxide!
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Pretty bullish, anyone who has tried to setup and manage their
| own compute knows the pain they're solving.
|
| Plus I predict more companies will exit the cloud once they
| realize how thick the margins have become or want better
| guarantees over sovereignty.
| master_crab wrote:
| I don't disagree that there are some fat margins in the cloud,
| but how is vendor lock-in any different here? Companies could
| end up paying fat margins to oxide too while still managing
| physical gear and plant.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Well, their servers are mostly hypervisors, so the interface
| is mostly any virtual machine.
|
| You can "just" migrate by exporting or importing the vms.
| yencabulator wrote:
| You're literally ignoring that the Oxide management stack
| is very much custom and effectively vendor-locking the
| purchase to be maintained by them. They are _not_ general
| purpose PC servers.
|
| You can "just" migrate away from Oxide but that would mean
| throwing away the hardware you now own. That's the
| grandparent's point; if you're migrating out of a cloud to
| avoid the margins demanded by the cloud vendor, now you're
| at the mercy of whatever Oxide thinks your support contract
| is worth.
|
| Sure, the convenience may be worth it, but watch how many
| companies are now struggling to get off of VMWare after
| Broadcom moves.
| TZubiri wrote:
| This reminds me of people complaining about github being
| closed source and moving to gitlab, or people obsessing
| over terraform to avoid cloud locking.
|
| Sure you will have vendor locking at the periferies, but
| the core is what's important, the guest vms. The
| hypervisor is whatever. If you have 100 vms running on
| ec2, you have done a great job of designing portable
| software, don't obsess over the last 1%.
| turnsout wrote:
| I've run my own servers for over 20 years now, but I guess I
| don't understand the pain point. Can you elaborate? They write:
| > Our system delivers all the hardware and software you need to
| run cloud...
|
| To "run cloud?" Does this mean treating your own servers like
| "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this
| primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs?
|
| I'm literally so old that I write programs that run on a server
| and never think about infrastructure.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _To "run cloud?" Does this mean treating your own servers
| like "serverless?" Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this
| primarily for people who want to self-host LLMs?_
|
| Machine/system/service deployment via API.
|
| See SSEssential Characteristics
|
| > _On-demand self-service; Broad network access; Resource
| pooling; Rapid elasticity; Measured service_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
|
| None are generally applicable to standalone pizza boxes as
| managed individual (as opposed to being herded by (e.g.)
| OpenStack).
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > To "run cloud?"
|
| I agree that's a bit awkwardly phrased, let me send in a
| patch for that.
|
| > Does this mean treating your own servers like "serverless?"
| Does it mean running Kubernetes? Is this primarily for people
| who want to self-host LLMs?
|
| Not exactly any of that. We let you treat an entire rack as a
| single pool of resources, spinning up virtual machines that
| our control plane manages for you. Think "VPS provider but
| you own it." There's an API, but if you want to see what our
| console looks like, you can poke around with a demo here:
| https://console-preview.oxide.computer/
| turnsout wrote:
| That's helpful, thanks!
| skybrian wrote:
| No GPU's yet, so it's not good for LLM's. But they have a lot
| of funding now, so perhaps that will change?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I actually think that having more cloud providers might deflate
| a lot of the pricing. If you think about it, companies like
| Amazon buy server hardware and then rent it out by the vcpu
| (with throttling if they can get away with it) per month. Add
| memory and IO and you are looking at bills that pay for the
| server in mere months/weeks several tenants carving up all the
| hardware and each paying tens/hundreds per month.
|
| There are of course benefits to using cloud based VMs and I use
| them as well. But you are paying a very steep premium for what
| is a pitiful amount of compute and memory. There's a lot of
| wiggle room for price decreases and the only thing preventing
| that is a lack of competition. There's a reason Amazon is so
| rich: nobody seems to challenge them on AWS pricing. There's
| value in having them do all the faffing about with hardware of
| course. That's why companies use them. I'm in GCP; but same
| principle. I don't want to have to worry about replacing hard
| disks in the middle of the night, deal with network routers
| that are misbehaving, cooling issues, etc. That's why I pay
| them the big bucks. But I'm well aware that it's not that great
| of a deal.
|
| I used Hetzner a decade ago and paid something like 50 euros
| per month for a quad core xeon with a raid 1 disks, 32 GB, etc.
| Bare metal of course. But also, 50 euro. We had five of those.
| Forget about getting anything close to that with modern cloud
| providers for anything resembling a reasonable price. Your
| first monthly bill might actually add up to enough to buy your
| own hardware. Very tempting. They have beefed up their specs
| since then. You now get more for less. And they also do VMs
| now.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I knew it was bad but I didn't realize just how bad the
| pricing spread can be until I started dealing with the GPU
| instances (8x A100 or H100 pods). Last I checked the on-
| demand pricing was $40/hr and the 1-year reserved instances
| were $25/hr. That's over $200k/yr for the reserved instances
| so within two years I'd spend enough to buy my own 8x H100
| pod (based on LambdaLabs pricing) _plus_ enough to pay an
| engineer to babysit five pods at a time. It's insane.
|
| With on-demand pricing the pod would pay for itself (and the
| cost to manage it) within a year.
| wordpad wrote:
| That's just hardware. If you need to build and maintain
| your own devops tooling it can balloon in complexity and
| cost real quick.
|
| It would still likely be much cheaper to do everything in
| house, but you would be assuming a lot of risks and locking
| yourself in losing flexibility.
|
| There is a reason people go with AWS over many competing
| cheaper cloud providers.
| time0ut wrote:
| In my experience, companies seem to want to pay the cloud
| provider tax in order to avoid capacity planning. Sometimes
| it makes sense because it is hard to predict when something
| is going to take off. I have also worked at companies with
| very predictable growth paying insane amounts. I didn't
| understand the logic, but they still were profitable and paid
| well so whatever.
| geodel wrote:
| Agree. But those fat margins can get starting to be shared with
| CIOs, CTOs and other managers with purchasing power. IMO the
| constant hectoring at workplace about migration to cloud or
| cloud native crap is not coming from some deep technical
| principles. It is more of _Do it before you get fired for non-
| compliance_
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Having done web applications for oh...30 years now the key pain
| is network routing
|
| That's the only thing I can tell is useful about "the cloud"
|
| I can build racks and servers easily, but the challenge is
| availability and getting past everyone's firewalls
|
| So the real win is any service that allows for instant DNS
| table updates and availability of DNS whitelisting.
|
| This is why Google, Msft etc win in email because they have
| trusted endpoints
|
| Alternative routes with self signed DKIM etc is more or less
| blocked by default forcing you onto a provider
|
| We need more cloud flare tunnel and local hosting via
| commercial ISP routes and less new centralized data centers
| chrisweekly wrote:
| +1 Insightful.
|
| I've also been doing web-related work for a living for over
| 25y and yours is the most spot-on take I've seen in this
| discussion.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Thank you :)
| bambax wrote:
| At the (very) low end it's pretty easy to build your own
| "cloud" with a NAS, containers, and reverse proxies and tunnels
| to the outside world. And this will get you suprisingly far.
|
| But at the high end, I think the market is litterally infinite.
| Every large company should want this, and want it now. Cloud
| providers are extremely expensive and, outside of the 1-tier
| where prices are really outrageous, they perform poorly and
| often offer little support.
|
| This really feels like the future.
| naikrovek wrote:
| like us old assholes were saying when the cloud really
| started to take off: "this is nuts, it's just someone else's
| computer! and they're making a profit off of this service,
| meaning it's more expensive than what we were doing!"
|
| Now a lot of the things that were done pre-cloud were done in
| bad ways, and I'm not saying that we were right about those
| things. Having APIs for provisioning and monitoring are _far_
| better than submitting a request to some queue and having
| your VM provisioned manually 1 week later by someone who gets
| a key detail wrong. APIs and granular permissions are how
| this should be done, and "the cloud" taught everyone that
| very early. But a lot of companies are really stuck in the
| cloud mindset now, and won't let go of it.
|
| I think companies like Oxide and product lines like theirs
| are going to start becoming common. Microsoft, of course,
| completely fumbled the ball with Azure Stack, and I've never
| even heard of anyone deploying AWS Outpost, both for the same
| reason: the costs for these are absolutely insane for what
| they provide.
|
| What most folks really want is their own infrastructure
| running their own stuff using APIs that are either written
| in-house or provided by some vendor. Oxide is betting that
| they can sell you a working scalable system for less money
| than it would take to hire a team to write the APIs that
| would allow a company to do the same with off-the-shelf
| hardware. I think that they're probably right about that.
| jeffbee wrote:
| > they're making a profit off of this service, meaning it's
| more expensive than what we were doing!
|
| I hope you can see that this is a logical fallacy known as
| "zero-sum thinking". It is not only possible for a business
| to profit while lowering prices, it is universal throughout
| the economy. Tomato farmers make a profit selling tomatoes
| at a price much lower than the cost to grow tomatoes at
| home. Bakeries radically undercut the cost of home baking.
| It is obviously cheaper to buy motor fuel at the gas
| station than it would be to buy crude and refine it
| yourself.
|
| The main reason people think their on-prem is cheaper than
| cloud is that they are bad at accounting.
| transpute wrote:
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2024/10/basec...
|
| _> [2023] 37Signals expected to save $7 million over
| five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell
| server gear and hosting its own apps.. [2024] update: it
| 's more like $10 million (and, he told the BBC, more like
| $800,000 in gear). By squeezing more hardware into
| existing racks and power allowances.. transferring its 10
| petabytes of S3 storage into a dual-DC Pure Storage flash
| array, 37Signals expects to save money, run faster, and
| have more storage available._
| steveklabnik wrote:
| So, to dig into (and maybe stretch) one of your analogies
| a little bit:
|
| > Tomato farmers make a profit selling tomatoes at a
| price much lower than the cost to grow tomatoes at home.
|
| This is because at home, you have an elastic need for
| tomatoes. One week you need a few, the next week you need
| none, the next week you need a lot. In that case, yes,
| growing your own tomatoes would be very silly. (This part
| of the analogy works with on-demand instances.)
|
| However, if you aren't a home, but you're a busy
| restaurant, you're not buying tomatoes from the grocery
| store. You have a regular, fairly fixed capacity, and so
| you go with a produce vendor who's able to serve that
| need at a decent price. Part of the reason you're able to
| get a cheaper price is through volume and due to the
| regular-ness of the business. (this part of the analogy
| works with reserved instances.)
|
| Okay, so let's move from tomatoes to the actual building
| of a restaurant itself. Similar to a reserved instance,
| renting a building is a decent way to get started with
| less capital, and you have fairly consistent capacity
| requirements. But at some point, you realize what
| McDonalds did: owning the building and land beneath it
| ends up being a great deal at certain scale. Because that
| ends up being cheaper still, in the long run. This is
| closer to on-prem. (Okay at this point this analogy is
| getting pretty silly but it was fun to try and work
| through it...)
|
| So, the trick is, for a lot of organizations, they could
| realize the benefits of owning their own hardware, but to
| get back to your original analogy, running your own
| hardware comes with its own set of costs that may make it
| not worth it. You have to have staff to operate
| everything, you have to manage all of the various
| supplier relationships, keep track of software licensing
| fees, etc etc etc. Even with all of this, as my sibling
| comment shows, often this can be cheaper than using the
| cloud.
|
| But one way of looking at Oxide is, we are making it so
| that it's simpler to own your own hardware, thanks to all
| of the integration work we do. You don't have to manage a
| ton of vendor relationships, you have "one throat to
| choke," as they say. You don't have to keep track of
| software licensing fees, there are none. You don't need
| to build out your own software to put the whole thing
| together, we give it to you. Etc.
|
| So yes, just like a household is best served by going to
| the supermarket, individuals aren't ever going to buy
| Oxide. But there's a lot more out there than just
| households. And larger organizations have fundamentally
| different needs than they do.
|
| > The main reason people think their on-prem is cheaper
| than cloud is that they are bad at accounting.
|
| I mean, there's also base accounting stuff that differs
| significantly between the two, like opex vs capex spend.
| Not that I'm an expert in that, mind you.
| jeffbee wrote:
| My comment wasn't really about Oxide, it's about the
| fallacy. A person can't succeed in life thinking they can
| do something cheaper on the sole basis that the other guy
| makes a profit. The much more likely explanation is that
| the other guy makes their profit by being _much, much_
| better than you.
|
| To stretch the metaphor to a grotesque extent, I think
| Oxide stands in the middle between the home-grown and the
| industrial tomato. Your average corporate IT installation
| has the same economics as home-grown. Even if they have
| 1000 potted plants, they are still potted plants, and
| they are still $100 tomatoes. EC2 is a 5000-acre
| California tomato grower where the fields have been
| leveled using lasers and the fruits are harvested by
| robots driving themselves using on-board GPUs. Their
| tomatoes cost 5C/. An Oxide computer is like having a
| 1-acre kitchen garden where the tomatoes are in rows.
| These are more like $1 each. The economics are
| undoubtedly better.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > A person can't succeed in life thinking they can do
| something cheaper on the sole basis that the other guy
| makes a profit.
|
| That's fair! Just like, pointing out that on-prem can
| make financial sense.
|
| > To stretch the metaphor to a grotesque extent,
|
| I like it, haha.
| boricj wrote:
| > At the (very) low end it's pretty easy to build your own
| "cloud" with a NAS, containers, and reverse proxies and
| tunnels to the outside world. And this will get you
| suprisingly far.
|
| Anyone can throw together a bunch of parts and software to
| run Internet-facing services from a closet. That doesn't mean
| that you're safe from issues that Oxide aims to solve,
| especially at that small scale.
|
| My homelab (which hosts my blog and a couple of other things)
| runs off a Topton N17 micro-ATX motherboard ordered on
| AliExpress, featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS. Yes, that's a
| mobile CPU shoehorned onto a desktop platform with a funky
| mounting bracket to take AM4/AM5 coolers.
|
| Anyways, I wanted to run SmartOS on it, but this system is so
| janky that the Illumos kernel couldn't find any PCIe devices
| at all. After spending an afternoon reconfiguring PCIe
| bridges by hand with the kernel debugger in an attempt to
| troubleshoot PCIe initialization, I gave up and installed
| Proxmox.
|
| Admittedly, as far as janky hardware this takes the cake, but
| the point stands. To paraphrase Bryan, buggy firmware is the
| sysadmin's worst enemy.
| Rafuino wrote:
| Great news for Oxide. I followed their podcasts for a while but
| they petered out and I haven't heard much about their
| products/growth for a while. Sounds like it's still viable.
|
| USIT... what a cryptic website! Is it government-related (like
| In-Q-Tel) or private? Have no idea...
| neilv wrote:
| https://oodaloop.com/analysis/archive/thomas-tull-chairs-the...
| colesantiago wrote:
| Lots of praise not much skepticism, so what is the exit here?
|
| $100M is a lot of money investors want to see returned of the
| total amount raised of almost $200M?
|
| Remember Oxide is VC backed so there must be some strings
| attached here, is it an IPO or an acquisition for an exit or just
| staying private?
| cpach wrote:
| AFAIK staying private is nearly impossible after taking VC
| funding...?
|
| Also, what they do is very capital-intensive, so I'm not
| surprised that they're raising more money.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I don't get it. They're a hardware integrator with a secret
| sauce management layer on top. I like anything on-prem but this
| seems a bit hyped. Slick website and appears to have a very
| good team though.
| cpach wrote:
| These days there are very few companies innovating in this
| space. Oxide is the only one I can think of. (No, HPE and
| Dell doesn't count, not in my book at least.)
|
| There used to be lots of them, but they all had a very rough
| time after the 90s when cheap x86 boxes started to become
| ubiquitous.
|
| I have no idea if Oxide will succeed or not, but I sure hope
| so. If it goes well they might become the Sun of the 20s.
| dvtkrlbs wrote:
| They created a lot of hardware and low level work. (The
| bullet point on the blog post)
| mkeeter wrote:
| The server and switch hardware is designed in-house (from the
| PCBs on up), though we do source DRAM / SSDs / CPUs / ASICs
| from the usual vendors.
|
| The "secret sauce management layer" is available at
| https://github.com/oxidecomputer/omicron, released under the
| MPLv2 license.
|
| (I work at Oxide)
| cestith wrote:
| Do hardware integrators usually build their own BMC, their
| own power supply, their own backplane, their own firmware,
| their own motherboards, their own switches, their own SDN,
| their own hypervisor, their own OS, their own rack design,
| their own blade / sled design, their own management API, and
| build it all in coordination with each other to produce a
| comprehensively new computing platform?
|
| In my mind they're much more like an SGI, Sun, IBM, DEC, or
| Apple type of play than merely an integrator.
| bananapub wrote:
| what a weird take.
|
| they produce a private cloud in the form of racks you can buy
| then just plug in to power and ethernet and run. also, they
| did a bunch of work so the OOB management isn't fucking
| terrible, and it uses way less power per FLOP because they
| bothered to, for example, "make the fans work properly".
|
| Dell will sell you a thousand servers you can then buy racks
| for, then rack yourself, then buy switches from Aruba, then
| plug all the switches in to all the computers, then pay
| VMWare for an vm-cluster-OS, then you can install that, then
| when something goes wrong you get to call up Dell, Aruba and
| VMWare and have them all tell you it's someone else's fault.
|
| you...don't get the difference between these two situations?
| simonw wrote:
| From the article:
|
| "Our thesis is [...] and that a large, durable, public company
| could be built by whomever pulled it off."
|
| So the goal is an IPO.
| heeton wrote:
| I'd assume eventual IPO. And/or specific lucrative contracts
| within US Govt/Military/Tech.
| kayson wrote:
| What do they need so much capital for?
| dcminter wrote:
| I think the downvoting on you is a little harsh. TFA does
| allude to it, but doesn't _explicitly_ answer your question. I
| presume the implicit answer is here:
|
| > With growing customer enthusiasm, we were increasingly
| getting questions about what it would look like to buy a large
| number of Oxide racks. Could we manufacture them? Could we
| support them? Could we make them easy to operate together?
|
| i.e. they need the capital in order to be able to satisfy large
| orders on sane timeframes - but that's very expensive when
| you're a hardware business.
| kayson wrote:
| Thanks. It was a genuine question but I guess I can see how
| it might be taken otherwise.
| simonw wrote:
| My guess is scaling up their ability to manufacture hardware.
| devmor wrote:
| They are a hardware company. Hardware costs a lot of money to
| innovate and build on.
| tosh wrote:
| Kudos & godspeed!
|
| (random superficial comment: the ascii art + high fidelity ui
| combination on the oxide landing page is chef's kiss)
| raphman wrote:
| Gergely Orosz' newsletter contained some background on Oxide in
| 2024:
|
| https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/oxide
| dcminter wrote:
| Oxide, at least for an outsider, looks like a company that
| channels some of the spirit of early Sun Microsystems (I'm aware
| of the connections of course). I'm quite envious of those who
| work there - I hope the demands of big money don't crush any of
| that spirit.
|
| Sadly when I look at their jobs posted I don't see much that
| would line up with my skillset, but I keep an eye on them just on
| the offchance.
| Quarrel wrote:
| Right?
|
| And such a clear value statement.
|
| If I could, I'd invest. Sure, they might fail, but they're
| shooting their shot, and to me it has a clear differentiator
| that would improve the market for most of their users (if not
| the incumbents).
| criddell wrote:
| I wish there was a way for small investors ($25-50k) to get
| in. AFAIK, the only thing we can do is wait for an IPO and
| hope we can get in at a reasonable price.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Isn't it sad we're not able to invest into most new tech
| companies these days, with private equity taking the lead. I
| don't blame the companies after seeing what going public entails,
| but still unfortunate.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| some aspect of that picture are nanny-state sorts of laws like
| Accreditation which have a bias that says if you're "poor" then
| you're not intelligent enough or qualified enough to make your
| own best choices of investment.
|
| I was happy to learn about Sweater Ventures
| https://www.sweaterventures.com/our-story (and their kind)
| which are opening up access to investments, and also helping
| ensure the entry price is quite low (for example I invest $50 a
| month with them) .
|
| It is my hope that in the future you will be able to order a
| micro fraction of any company as easily as you could a
| starbucks.
|
| And IMO part of that equation might be to have the state start
| to work against contracts which restrict your rights on your
| own property (essentially contracts restrict when you can sell
| your shares, usually not until IPO or a company organized
| liquidity event)
| Aurornis wrote:
| There are actually a lot of ways to invest in smaller startups
| now, but the catch is that the best startups don't want your
| money.
|
| Even if all of the laws lined up just right, it's unlikely that
| a company like Oxide would be interested in collecting a lot of
| little investors and then maintaining all of the obligations
| that go along with serving those investors.
| drdrek wrote:
| God why do startup sites suck so much? Why do I need ChatGPT to
| cut through the marketing speak to understand what they are
| actually selling? I literally spent 5 minutes in the site trying
| to understand before giving up and asking GPT...
|
| Cool 1999 aesthetics though
| devmor wrote:
| If you scroll past the marketing blurb, I think the rest of the
| main page explains in pretty clear and simple terms what their
| product is. What did you find confusing about it?
| mlnj wrote:
| Reading the first 20 lines of text that they have broken down
| in to:
|
| Company Name Single line Headline
|
| Problem Our Solution
|
| Gives you the entire company premise and product description.
| qualeed wrote:
| They explain what they do pretty much immediately on the home
| page, I'm not too sure where the confusion comes from.
| diggan wrote:
| Maybe I'm old-school, but I clicked on the logo in the top
| left, then read the first sentence which reads "On-demand
| elastic resources", which gives me some idea about what it is,
| and then later it says "A rack-scale system, built true to
| cloud architecture, that you can own and operate in your data
| center." which makes me 100% understand what the product is.
|
| Do new internet users not know that the landing page usually
| contains information about the product they're talking about in
| their blog posts? 99% of the cases you can find what you're
| looking for on the landing page, and it took me a whole of 30
| seconds to get here, writing this comment took longer time.
| sofixa wrote:
| > On-demand elastic resources
|
| Which is kind of wrong, because there is nothing elastic nor
| "on demand" about metal you buy.
| diggan wrote:
| The hardware isn't elastic, obviously. But if a IT
| department sets up a Oxide rack, then the software
| development department can get the same sort of "on-demand
| 'elastic' resources" provisioned in that rack. I think
| that's what they're getting at. But yeah, obviously
| hardware itself can't be on-demand.
| ironhaven wrote:
| Elastic as in AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (ec2). Flexible
| virtual machines provisioned with a web API not rubbery
| stretchy servers
| sofixa wrote:
| By that metric even VMware's vSphere with its abominable
| excuses for APIs also count as elastic.
|
| If you have to manage the hardware yourself, have to plan
| and pay for upfront for the maximum capacity you would
| need, and there are fixed limits you can hit and have to
| plan around yourself, it's not elastic.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Frontpage: "A rack-scale system, built true to cloud
| architecture, that you can own and operate in your data
| center."
|
| Seems pretty clear to me.
| voganmother42 wrote:
| The usage/meaning of "private cloud" has gotten weird
| subarctic wrote:
| They make giant rack scale computers for data centers, i think
| that's the best way to explain it quickly to someone with my
| background who's never been in a data center but has an
| imaginary idea of what they look like.
|
| And then as a follow up you have to explain that
|
| - they sell an entire rack full of servers
|
| - they're the only ones that do this. Normally you have to buy
| all the pieces and put it together yourself, or pay someone to
| put it together for you but all the parts are kind of designed
| on their own by different companies so it's kind of a mess.
| Oxide makes one big rack with like 16-32 servers and it's all
| designed by them and just works, so you just plug it in and you
| have servers you can put a bunch of vms on. Oh and they're
| huge, each one literally costs like a million dollars
| throw0101c wrote:
| Meta: Oxide has talked about the designs of their cooling
| [1][2][3], so I'm curious to know if they ever start offering
| GPUs how they'd handle that.
|
| Folks seem to be moving toward liquid cooling[4] either to the
| rack/chassis[5] or even to the chip[6].
|
| [1] https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-
| power...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vVXClXVuzE
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hTJYY_Y1H9Q
|
| [4] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/blackwell-platform-water-
| effic...
|
| [5] https://datacentremagazine.com/data-centres/top-10-liquid-
| co...
|
| [6] https://zutacore.com
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Oxide's blogs talk about cooling _a lot_, apparently their
| stack runs very cool b/c they've reorganized the whole thing
| around efficiency, and written all the firmware to support that
| goal.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Skeptical of that. There's only so much you can do against
| the physics of moving electrons around at high speeds...
| "Bigger Fans" and "compute density" doesn't change that
| capital_guy wrote:
| I believe the fans are actually smaller. The rack is
| definitely quieter than other racks, but he says in the
| rear rack tour that it's quite hot. Check out these videos
| of it
|
| [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHbgjB0RQ1s [1] -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJmw9OICH-4
| steveklabnik wrote:
| The fans are 80mm, traditionally 1U is roughly half that
| size.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Commodity hardware doesn't quite tend to operate at a
| compute vs efficiency Pareto frontier -- there's a lot of
| wasted energy that we've been able to optimize with our
| vertical integration. (I work at Oxide.)
| pmichaud wrote:
| I don't have any particular knowledge about oxide's
| cooling, but think about how bloated and inefficient
| literally every part of the compute stack is from metal to
| seeing these words on a screen. If you imagine fixing every
| part of it to be efficient top to bottom, I think you'll
| agree that we're not even in the same galaxy as the
| physical limitations of moving electrons around at high
| speeds.
| kortilla wrote:
| But the majority of heat is going to come from the CPU
| and this is a product to run arbitrary customer
| workloads.
|
| If the customers leave these things idle, then oxide is
| going to shine. But a busy rack is going to be dominated
| by CPU heat.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Their rack scale from-scratch redesign includes fans big
| enough that they've reportedly managed to cool CPU
| hardware that was actually designed for water-cooling,
| with no expectation for air cooling (though admittedly,
| they say they only achieved this just barely, and with a
| LOT of noise). That seems like something that's going to
| be objectively verifiable as a step up in efficiency.
| throw0101c wrote:
| According to Oxide Computer, they found that going from
| 20mm to 80mm fans dropped their chassis power usage
| (efficiency is to the cube of the radius): a rack full of
| 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans, and
| they were able to get down to 1.2%:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJYY_Y1H9Q
|
| From their weblog post:
|
| > _Compared to a popular rackmount server vendor, Oxide
| is able to fill our specialized racks with 32 AMD Milan
| sleds and highly-available network switches using less
| than 15kW per rack, doubling the compute density in a
| typical data center. With just 16 of the alternative 1U
| servers and equivalent network switches, over 16kW of
| power is required per rack, leading to only 1,024 CPU
| cores vs Oxide's 2,048._
|
| * https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-
| power...
| yencabulator wrote:
| This is not any different than the "blade" form factor
| that was popular in the 90s. Shared power and cooling
| that was not constrained by the height of a 1U rack
| chassis, with larger fans. Hell, even Supermicro has
| blade-style chassis with 80mm fans. This is not novel.
|
| It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole
| racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled
| with opinions about low-level firmware etc, with a
| bespoke OS and management stack.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _It 's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell
| whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units,
| sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware etc,
| with a bespoke OS and management stack._
|
| Yes, "just".
| sunshowers wrote:
| Yes, we're primarily an engineering company, not a
| research organization.
|
| It's also about what we don't have. We don't have a UEFI,
| for example, which means we don't have UEFI
| vulnerabilities.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Yeah and you're doing good work there. It just kinda
| annoys me when people go from "oh that's a cool company"
| into idolatry. 1U servers were always a poor form factor
| for modern day hot chips & drives. Breaking that mold has
| been done over and over and isn't something that should
| be treated as new.
|
| Scaling from the 8U (that blades could already do in the
| 90s) to full rack as the unit of "slide unit in to
| connect" DC power and networking is way cooler than using
| 80mm fans.
|
| Re UEFI: I feel like that part is less about UEFI itself
| and more about how you have very minimal third party
| firmware.
|
| I'm pretty excited about openSIL and such in general. If
| only AMD could execute well in the world of software.
| sunshowers wrote:
| I can't speak to others' views, but having worked with
| large-scale bare-metal deployments at Meta, I personally
| admired Oxide for its clear product vision and rigorous
| first-principles approach (Rust is a real game-changer!),
| and applied to work here for that reason.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| An F1 car is also just plain old engineering, optimized
| to get around the track quickly, sprinkled with opinions
| and with a niche bespoke drivetrain. Nothing to see here.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 20mm fans aren't used in server cooling applications. You
| must be thinking of 40mm fans.
|
| Going from 40mm fans to 80mm fans will not take energy
| usage from 25% to 1-2%. They must have taken an extreme
| example to compare against. What they're doing is cool,
| but this is a marketing exaggeration targeted at people
| who aren't familiar with the space.
|
| Oxide also isn't the only vendor using form factors other
| than 1U or focusing on high density configurations. Using
| DC power distribution is also an increasingly common
| technique.
|
| To be honest, a lot of this feels like Apple-esque
| marketing where they show incredible performance
| improvements, but the baseline used is something
| arbitrary.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Our claim is not that just switching fans drops from 25%
| to 1-2%. We are claiming that the rack has very low
| energy usage, and we like to talk about the fans as one
| part of that reason because it's very visceral and easy
| to understand.
| newsclues wrote:
| I think 1U was poorly optimized for scale, and thus
| bigger chassis in a rack could use bigger heatsinks and
| fans at lower speeds instead of small screamers.
| naikrovek wrote:
| maybe you're not familiar with just how stupidly written
| most code is.
|
| you're right that there are efficiency limits, but not once
| in my career have I ever seen anyone even _attempt_ to
| write their code so that it is efficient to run, outside of
| gaming.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Oxide is doing some great things, but there's only so much
| you can do with firmware tweaks. A CPU running any load at
| all is going to completely eclipse the power usage of
| everything else in the system.
|
| Incremental improvements from things like more efficient fans
| and reducing the number of power conversions is great, but
| the power drawn by the CPUs or GPUs is on another level.
| Rendello wrote:
| If after that you're not satiated with data center cooling
| talk, Jane Street's _Signals and Threads_ just did an episode
| about their cooling infrastructure a few days ago:
|
| https://signalsandthreads.com/the-thermodynamics-of-trading/
| jvanderbot wrote:
| There is something so calming and pleasant about a well-
| structured thesis statement:
|
| > Our thesis was that cloud computing was the future of all
| computing; that running on-premises would remain (or become!)
| strategically important for many; that the entire stack --
| hardware and software -- needed to be rethought from first
| principles to serve this market; and that a large, durable,
| public company could be built by whomever pulled it off.
|
| Very clear and logical, stating from their first principle world
| view what the result could be if they succeed.
| chubot wrote:
| I would say it's very clear and logical ... but is it really
| "from first principles"?
|
| I thought that Oxide was based on OpenCompute, which is
| basically the rack designs that Facebook open sourced, after
| hiring some Google employees to build their custom data
| centers. This project started in 2011:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Compute_Project
|
| https://github.com/opencomputeproject
|
| Google definitely rebuilt the stack from first principles --
| the data center was basically a huge embedded system, from
| power to racks to CPUs/memory/disk/network to kernel to user
| space to cluster software. (And no, they did not use
| Kubernetes.)
|
| I have no idea how active the OpenCompute project is -- is
| Facebook still the main contributor, and are they still
| releasing their new rack designs?
|
| And I also wonder how much Oxide has diverged from it? At least
| on the hardware side. On the software side, I guess the
| Illumos-derived parts and Rust parts are completely different.
|
| Well, when they say they did their own: -
| board designs - microcontroller OS - platform
| enablement software - host hypervisor - switch
| - integrated storage service - control plane
|
| Then yeah it seems like maybe only board designs and the switch
| COULD have either come from or been influenced by OpenCompute,
| but maybe those didn't either. (I have no idea tbh)
|
| Maybe they only got the mechanical and power stuff from
| OpenCompute? i.e. the parts that change more slowly
| steveklabnik wrote:
| We initially talked about OpenCompute, yeah, but as far as I
| know we ended up moving away from that years ago.
| bcantrill wrote:
| We didn't use anything from OCP. When we first started the
| company, we thought we might use the enclosure (and
| considered ourselves "OCP inspired"), but there ended up
| being little value in doing so (and there was a clear cost).
| And on the stuff that we really cared about (e.g., getting
| rid of the traditional BMC), we were completely at odds with
| OCP (where ASPEED BMCs abound!).
|
| So in the end, even the mechanical and power didn't come from
| OCP. We clearly build on other components (we didn't build
| own rectifiers!), but we absolutely built the machine from
| first principles.
| chubot wrote:
| Ah OK, thanks for clarifying! I'm glad to see these kinds
| of machines being built, especially with so much open
| source software
| jeffbee wrote:
| How does the Oxide 48V architecture compare to what is
| known about the Google/OCP architecture? Does Oxide use
| single stage conversion, intermediate 12V buses, or ??
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I'm not someone who works on this part of the product,
| but we talk a little about this stuff here:
|
| * https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-
| power...
|
| * https://docs.oxide.computer/guides/introduction
|
| I feel like we had a good Oxide and Friends on this
| too... https://oxide-and-
| friends.transistor.fm/episodes/bringing-up... has some
| info about our power setup.
|
| Anyway, I barely know anything about this topic, but I
| think this answers your immediate question: we convert AC
| -> DC once at the rack level, and then use a bus bar to
| distribute that to each sled. Each sled also has a
| converter to convert that 54V down to 12V for its own bus
| within each sled.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Probably the sweet spot, since you can get to market fast
| with known 12V designs, but still enjoy the possibility
| of later announcing you've made the sled even more
| efficient by getting rid of the intermediate voltage!
| syntheticgate wrote:
| At a certain point in EE power design you don't really
| want to go from 54V -> point of load for every rail
| (1.8V, 1.1V, 0.9V, SVI3 rails etc), so sticking with an
| intermediate voltage makes sense often even when viewing
| this from an efficiency perspective. Voltages such as 54V
| require different creepage and clearance requirements, so
| saddling every point of load regulator (of which we have
| many many!) with those requirements is often detrimental
| to an already complex board layout. Picking something
| like 12V or 24V as an intermediate voltage helps balance
| those requirements with the amount of copper you need for
| power delivery since the parts use low voltages but are
| extremely power hungry so your current at the point of
| load rail is a lot. This also means that your point of
| load regulators _have_ to be distributed around the board
| near their loads otherwise the copper losses and noise
| would become problematic.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's certainly the current mainstream style to have an
| intermediate voltage rail of 12V or more. But this OCP
| talk from a few years ago was interesting, showing a
| prototype direct 48V-1V conversion with high efficiency.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQHiKIfrwI0
| hinkley wrote:
| The thermal dissipation is a function of the current
| squared. The heat in the conductor is a function of the
| size of the conductor and the surface area for heat
| dissipation. So these high current common rail systems
| you can sometimes see in youtube videos for power
| distribution, have great honking bars of copper in them.
| And in most of the videos I've seen, the video is about
| someone screwing one of these up, damaging the bar, and
| now the electrician has to wait for a new one to arrive,
| because they are shipped from far away and they are
| expensive per pound, and the dumb things weigh many
| pounds.
|
| So you don't actually want the power to be at 12V for
| very long in a power dense rack. Their spec sheet says
| that each rack can pull 15KW. And that's wired for 208 or
| 3-phase power. That's 10 hair dryers of power per rack,
| so yeah maybe you shouldn't step it down until the last
| responsible moment.
|
| Do any parts of the rack run at the full 54V? That would
| make for some very nice cooling fans.
| hinkley wrote:
| My read on the situation is that you copied OCP only
| inasmuch as OCP made some observations about physics and
| you made the same observations.
|
| The most obvious change is that you guys use half-width,
| full length enclosures.
|
| But I'm realizing now that I haven't looked at the OCP
| specs in a long, long time. I recall the common DC rail
| from some early Facebook papers on this topic, and I
| thought they were pretty similar to how you plug into
| power.
|
| I just looked at the OCP power connector, and I would have
| lost any bet anyone was willing to make me about what they
| looked like. That's not at all where I thought we were. I
| think I understand now why you guys went to such pains
| getting the keyed connectors to work exactly right. Their
| power connectors look like something from a scifi movie,
| and not in a good way.
| krelian wrote:
| >public company
|
| Why does it have to be a public company though?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| It is either that or acquisition, and we would prefer an IPO.
| GoatInGrey wrote:
| Speaking from the experience of 8 acquisitions/IPOs, your
| compensation structure will not survive public ownership.
| It could survive a PE acquisition, but definitely not
| public ownership (in my experience). I would recommend
| petitioning for a dual-class share structure to protect
| founding leadership.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| We agree that we don't know what the future holds, and
| what makes sense for early stage companies may not make
| sense for later ones. When anything stops working, we'll
| make changes. You can see this already with the secondary
| structure for sales. We have a while before we need to
| worry about that, though :)
| bcantrill wrote:
| Because VCs need to have a way to sell their shares within
| the (limited) lifetime of their fund.
| neom wrote:
| I'm a Bryan Cantrill fan so I'm glad this is working out, I was
| extremely skeptical of them at the beginning(on HN too), I think
| because I've built DCs for many years and was stuck in a mindset
| that served my use case, I've come around to Oxide. My main
| concerns originally were 2 fold: "this seems bougie", is there
| actually a market for this, and, is there a good interoperability
| story with mix and match. From what I could tell the answers were
| "yes" and "don't care" - I had thought this wasn't a great answer
| but it seems I'm wrong. I was chatting with Boris Mann just last
| week about them and he said "actually John that isn't correct,
| think of how much quick compute needs to come online and how much
| discreet compute is going to be required with low management
| overhead, they're doing just fine and that market will grow" -
| After that I did some research and pondered on it for a day - I
| think my friend is right and I am wrong, I think at this point
| Oxide is going to be a really strong name and I wish them the
| best of luck.
| sethops1 wrote:
| I was skeptical as well, if only because just being a better
| product isn't enough to win the market. Everything we hear
| about Oxide sounds like an impressive green field
| implementation of a data center, but is that enough? Do the
| people making buying decisions at this scale care if their
| sysadmins have better tools?
| 9dev wrote:
| If it translates to improved efficiency, sure. And this big
| of a round seems to indicate that idea has some merit
| transpute wrote:
| What percentage of enterprise IT compute has not moved to a
| public cloud?
| dmoy wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone really knows
|
| uptime institute publishes some good numbers from survey,
| which puts on prem + colo still at >50% last I checked.
|
| And still some additional 5% in like... on prem in closets.
|
| Last year Amazon said it was 85% on prem. I dunno who has
| the right numbers.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I know I have been involved in multiple efforts to move the
| same workloads into and then out of the cloud, as corporate
| budgeting requirements prioritized either capex or opex at
| different times.
| chadk wrote:
| Only 30% have moved to the public cloud
|
| https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/cloud-
| revenue...
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > Do the people making buying decisions at this scale care if
| their sysadmins have better tools?
|
| Look at who oxide is selling to and for what reasons.
|
| It's about compute + software at rack scales. It does not
| matter if it is good it matters that it's integrated. Gear at
| this level is getting sold with a service contract and "good"
| means you dont have to field as many calls (keeping the
| margins up).
|
| > Everything we hear about Oxide sounds like an impressive
| green field implementation of a data center, but is that
| enough?
|
| Look at their CPU density and do the math on power. It's
| fairly low density. Look at the interconnects (100gb per
| system). Also fairly conservative. It's the perfect product
| to replace hardware that is aging out, as you wont have to
| re-plumb for more power/bandwidth, and you still get a
| massive upgrade.
| keeda wrote:
| As someone only tangentially familiar with this domain, I
| have questions about this:
|
| _> Look at their CPU density and do the math on power. It
| 's fairly low density. Look at the interconnects (100gb per
| system). Also fairly conservative. It's the perfect product
| to replace hardware that is aging out, as you wont have to
| re-plumb for more power/bandwidth, and you still get a
| massive upgrade._
|
| It sounds like the CPU density and network bandwidth are
| not great. If it's only suitable to replace aging systems,
| does that not limit their TAM? Or is that going to be their
| beachhead for grabbing further market share.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I am not saying that I fully endorse the characterization
| of the parent, but it is true that we started selling
| these systems two years ago, and new hardware comes out
| with better stats all the time.
|
| Given how small we are, new designs and refreshes take a
| while. Part of growing as a company is being able to do
| this more often. We'll get there :)
| throwpup666 wrote:
| I still dont get it. If someone else's software is running the
| hardware, what difference does it make if its on-prem or
| offsite?
| transpute wrote:
| Is the software open-source with reproducible builds of any
| runtime binaries?
|
| Oxide has been remarkably transparent about the development
| and architecture of critical system components. We can only
| hope they succeed and inspire others to follow their
| transparency lead.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Open source is a requirement but not the only one. There
| are countless examples of companies building integrated
| solutions based off of open source projects that, when they
| went bankrupt, there was nobody to pick up the available
| pieces and continue moving the stack forward. Just pointing
| out that open source is not this magical escape hatch that
| some people think (at least not in corporate environments).
| yencabulator wrote:
| _Especially_ so for Oxide 's decidedly non-Linux setup.
| They are in a niche software ecosystem with practically
| no one else. Apparently mostly because they're
| practically all ex-Solaris staff.
|
| https://www.illumos.org/docs/about/who/
|
| (Listing all projects using ZFS or DTrace as "who uses
| Illumos" is cheating.)
| sunshowers wrote:
| > Apparently mostly because they're practically all ex-
| Solaris staff.
|
| I absolutely do not have a Solaris/illumos background!
| The first time I ever sshed into an illumos machine was
| my first day on the job.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| The exception proves the rule. You can't deny the deep
| Solaris heritage.
| sunshowers wrote:
| I wouldn't deny that, no.
| ryao wrote:
| I remember many Linux fans saying that monocultures were
| bad until Linux became so popular that Linux was the one
| benefiting from a monoculture. Despite that, the
| rationale against monocultures still applies.
|
| That said, Illumos is influential as an organ donor to
| many others. There are a number of awesome technologies
| in it.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Oh I would love to have some healthy competition to
| Linux, but I am _not_ rooting for Solaris to do that, I
| 'd rather have one of the Rust-based microkernel actually
| git gud. Time to shake the foundations of the age-old
| security and isolation models, not resuscitate a dusty
| old thing built on piles of C and shell on top of a large
| monolithic kernel and pretend everything's fine.
| bcantrill wrote:
| Well, good news: we have one of those too![0]
|
| [0] https://oxide.computer/blog/hubris-and-humility
| yencabulator wrote:
| Oh I am _well_ aware. But I am hoping to run dynamic
| workloads, including virtual Linux machines, on a PC. It
| 's a bit of a different world.
|
| Latest one still in my to-read pile:
| https://lwn.net/Articles/1022920/
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > If someone else's software is running the hardware
|
| Our stack is open source.
|
| > what difference does it make if its on-prem or offsite?
|
| The difference is not where it runs, it's that you own our
| racks, rather than rent them. In the traditional cloud,
| you're renting. Other vendors who sell you hardware will
| still have you paying software licensing fees, so it never
| feels like you truly own it. We don't have any licensing
| fees.
| stavros wrote:
| I like you. Are you guys hiring?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| We are! https://oxide.computer/careers
| stavros wrote:
| Thanks! Not much for my skillset, but I'll keep an eye
| out!
| archon810 wrote:
| I just have to say this is an incredible page. Everything
| is well thought out and there's no BS. The salary is
| upfront too and everything is remote. A gold standard for
| hiring pages?
| mbjorling wrote:
| Are there any storage-related roles? Will Oxide redefine
| storage as well?
| steveklabnik wrote:
| We don't have any storage specific positions to my
| knowledge, but that falls under the control plane job,
| they're the ones working on Crucible.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| First let me say I really like this part of your guys
| narrative: you have really strong opinions about how
| infrastructure and IT should work at many levels, like
| technically and aesthetically, that seems real and nice and
| likable.
|
| Focusing on just this financial narrative you're weaving,
| what stops a bank from selling "virtual racks" that work
| financially the same as owning an Oxide rack, but it's just
| AWS?
|
| $1m buys you 42U of, whatever. You're handed an AWS account
| you do not pay for, but it has the $1m worth of, whatever
| in it, in perpetuity. Maybe the bank even throws in some
| fakey market you can "part out" and "sell" your rack to,
| years later, at some "market price."
|
| It seems like, the product - and maybe the _experience_ of
| buying the product - is what is most important to Oxide. It
| 's really interesting to me, because I cannot wrap my head
| around what this narrative is:
|
| You guys are Apple of Racks. But minus the iPhone, because
| there is no monopoly here. So, Apple (Minus iPhone) of
| Racks. Is that it? It's the rest of their offerings, which
| without the iPhone monopoly effects, are Buying
| Experiences. It's like when people buy $10,000 Mac Studios
| to "run LLMs", which of course they are going to do like,
| zero to one times, because they are excited about the idea
| of the product. For the audience that needs to "run LLMs"
| they buy, whatever, or rent. But they don't buy Mac
| Studios. Just because people _do something_ doesn 't mean
| it _makes sense_.
|
| Is the narrative, AWS Doesn't Make Sense? AWS makes a ton
| of sense, for basically everyone. Everybody uses it and
| pays up the wazoo for it. And there are good objective
| reasons AWS makes sense, at basically all levels. Who is
| fooled by, "AWS doesn't make sense?"
|
| The problem with AWS isn't even that they are expensive.
| It's that Amazon is greedy. It could be cheaper, which is a
| different thing than being expensive. It matters because
| "AWS stays greedy longer than the average Y Combinator
| company stays private" is an interesting bet for an
| investor to take. They could decide to be less greedy at
| any time, and indeed, it did not take long after offerings
| of S3-like storage from others led them to simply reduce
| prices.
|
| What that is telling me is, I could take $100m in funding,
| sell $1m "racks" of equivalent compute on the Rolls Royce
| of cloud infrastructure, making everything financially and
| legally and imaginarily the same as ownership, and then
| take a $300k loss, right? On each "rack", same as your
| loss? It's a money losing business, but here I am making
| the money losing very pure, very arby. Is this what you are
| saying customers want?
|
| Clearly they want a physical rack. By all means, I can send
| them a big steel box that provides them that aesthetic
| experience. Cloudflare, Google, they do the physical
| version of this all the time: dumb, empty appliances that
| are totally redundant, because people ask for them.
| RudderStack, Weights & Biases, a bunch of companies come to
| mind doing the same thing in software, like so called
| Kubernetes Operators that literally just provision API keys
| but pretend to be running on your infrastructure. People
| ask for Kubernetes operators, they made them, but of
| course, they don't do anything. They are imaginarily
| Kubernetes operators.
|
| The reason there are licensing fees and rentals and
| whatever is the enterprise sales pipeline, right?
| Enterprise sales is, give people want they ask for. People
| ask for a price that's below $X up front, so that's what IT
| vendors do, and then it turns out people are okay with some
| ongoing licensing fees, so there. That's what they do.
|
| So what IS it?
| everfrustrated wrote:
| I wish them all the best but yeah I can't see any reason
| why someone would pay oxide over aws onprem rack
| solution.
|
| I'm sure they'll find _some_ customers but they're going
| to be few and far between.
| aeyes wrote:
| I have to agree with much of this, if you need something
| that feels like "the cloud" but on-premise then you could
| have used OpenStack for the last 10 years.
|
| The only reasons to use Oxide racks are that you get an
| all-in-one solution and they don't charge you a
| subscription fee, you only pay upfront for the hardware
| once. But if this company goes public one day
| shareholders will surely push for a subscription based
| licensing model.
|
| I have yet to see the benefit of "custom software" for
| "custom hardware". To me it looks like a liability, if
| Oxide stops to exist tomorrow you'll be left with a hunk
| of metal which is a dead end. The software being open
| source doesn't change that, if you have enough manpower
| to support such software on your own then you can surely
| support any other more flexible solution.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > what stops a bank from selling "virtual racks" that
| work financially the same as owning an Oxide rack, but
| it's just AWS?
|
| I'm struggling to understand what you're suggesting here,
| to be honest. First of all, banks don't sell cloud
| compute, so no bank is going to do that. Secondly, what
| does "work financially the same" mean? These are
| fundamentally different products, AWS is a service, Oxide
| is purchasing hardware that you then own.
|
| > $1m buys you 42U of, whatever. You're handed an AWS
| account you do not pay for, but it has the $1m worth of,
| whatever in it, in perpetuity. Maybe the bank even throws
| in some fakey market you can "part out" and "sell" your
| rack to, years later, at some "market price."
|
| What would be the advantage to anyone in this
| arrangement? Why not just have an AWS account in this
| case?
|
| > "AWS stays greedy longer than the average Y Combinator
| company stays private"
|
| Just to be clear, we are not a yc company. But beyond
| that:
|
| > The problem with AWS isn't even that they are
| expensive. It's that Amazon is greedy. It could be
| cheaper, which is a different thing than being expensive.
|
| It is true that if Amazon dropped prices, then the "rent
| vs buy" equation changes for some customers. But there
| always will be some people for whom it makes sense to
| own, and some people for whom it makes sense to buy.
|
| > RudderStack, Weights & Biases
|
| Neither of these companies seem to sell general cloud
| computing? They also don't sell hardware? These seem like
| completely different businesses.
|
| > So what IS it?
|
| We sell servers. Customers buy those servers, put them in
| a data center, and get a private cloud. That's the
| business. Other folks are doing similar sorts of things,
| but they all tend to be integrating parts from various
| vendors. We believe that our product is of a higher
| quality, because we built the whole thing, from the
| ground up. Hardware and software, working together. There
| are other things that matter as well, but that's the big
| picture.
| bpt3 wrote:
| Cloud computing is significantly more expensive than self-
| hosting for most large organizations. People are slowly
| figuring that out, and Oxide was a bet on the timing of that
| realization.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Even if it makes no sense as a technical thing, businesses will
| buy it. Look at all the huge companies that keep spending
| millions trying to DIY their own datacenter for the 3rd time.
| Enterprise loves to buy big iron and self-hosting crap, so I'm
| sure they will be successful selling this. However, I think
| they're going to need to branch out to more services in order
| to continue increasing their revenue every year (after 5+ years
| lets say).
| mike_d wrote:
| > Look at all the huge companies that keep spending millions
| trying to DIY their own datacenter for the 3rd time
|
| You mean all the huge companies that ran multiple datacenters
| before the cloud was even a thing?
| unicornhose wrote:
| I must admit that I am much more unsophisticated than this, and
| yet I "invested" in Oxide (by running my own projects off Oxide
| servers), and it is gratifying to see them continue to grow. My
| (naive) assessment: (a) agreed with Cantrill's opinions on
| software, (b) liked his willingness to put himself out there,
| and (c) felt the eng blogs showed a high level of
| (socio-)technical ability.
|
| I think for the internet to break out of walled gardens, high-
| quality independent datacenters need to exist -- nobody wants
| to manage their own datacenters, and nobody wants to rely on
| Google/Amazon/Microsoft's platforms or (even worse) business
| products. I hope this continues.
| skeptrune wrote:
| Huge congrats to everyone at oxide! I could not be happier to see
| such a cool company trying to create a real alternative to
| renting from the hyperscalers.
| bix6 wrote:
| What is the initial cost to setup their smallest system on prem?
| diggan wrote:
| Not finding a ton of information about it, was curious about it
| too. But the "smallest system" seems huge, like 16 sleds and a
| HN comment from 2023
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38498840) says:
|
| > An oxide rack has a minimum cost of something like 600k not
| including all the infra you need to run a rack, maintenance,
| and then needing to upgrade
|
| So maybe not super useful for people who are looking to do some
| home-lab stuff or even setups for SMBs.
|
| Edit: Another thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552556
|
| > My guess is that a base config would be somewhere between
| $400K to $500K but could very definitely go up from there for a
| completely "loaded" config.
| bix6 wrote:
| Wow so really for F500 and such
| sailfast wrote:
| Government.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| It's much broader than that, but you're right that we make
| sense for larger organizations, not smaller ones.
| axus wrote:
| Meanwhile in VMWare-land, you might pay that much in
| subscription fees with no hardware. https://www.reddit.com/r/
| vmware/comments/1h8brs2/i_literally...
| vhodges wrote:
| If you have to ask.... :)
|
| (other people's) previous guesstimates were 500k - 1M. It does
| look like you can order it partially provisioned (compute wise
| I'm guessing) and expand later.
| mijoharas wrote:
| I googled this out of curiousity a little while ago, it seemed
| to be 600k or so. (possibly dubious source so ymmv) [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38498840
| lostmsu wrote:
| Amazing, considering they don't seem to have GPU offerings.
| cpach wrote:
| There are very many workloads that do not benefit from a GPU.
| esafak wrote:
| I see no mention of GPUs in their platform?
| cpach wrote:
| Earlier answer from Oxide employee:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39182660
| yencabulator wrote:
| My personal predictions:
|
| #1: Don't expect to see it until after AMD or someone else
| makes a product that actually manages to compete against
| Nvidia. Nvidia is pretty hostile to not running their low-level
| software stack, and Oxide is all about the legacy of Solaris.
|
| #2: AMD MI400 or relative will be an extra chipset on future
| server motherboards (not a separate PCI card). Simultaneously,
| the boundary between "CPU vector processing" and "GPU used for
| transformers" will blur, and the chipsets will slowly merge
| into chiplets in one package.
|
| #3: AMD MI400 and such AI accelerators will be primarily sold
| as full racks with its own custom "networking" (UALink switch),
| and the actual host CPU on those devices will be lower specs
| and mostly relegated to setup and metrics of the AI work, much
| like storage and networking appliances are built, AI workload
| will not even pass through the host CPU. I'm not sure Oxide can
| compete in that world. The "business logic CPUs" will reside in
| a different rack.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > AMD MI400 or relative will be an extra chipset on future
| server motherboards (not a separate PCI card).
| Simultaneously, the boundary between "CPU vector processing"
| and "GPU used for transformers" will blur, and the chipsets
| will slowly merge into chiplets in one package.
|
| Isn't this just an iGPU? They generally have much lower
| performance than GPU's sitting on a dedicated card.
| yencabulator wrote:
| It's built to be deployed in units of racks, so that "i" is
| a little funny. It's not a little wart on the side of a
| general-purpose CPU.
|
| 432 GB memory at 19.6 TB/s are the claimed specs. For one
| package. Now fill a rack with 72 of those.
|
| (If only AMD could execute on the software side...)
| mystraline wrote:
| I applied here. Basically anti-llm long form one-sided interview
| writeup.
|
| Took them 3 months before a "we're not interested" email was
| sent. No reasons, either.
|
| I probably should have just used an LLM to generate good sounding
| garbage. Probably the same chance to get even a stage 1
| interview.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| We do take a long time due to needing to read all of those
| applications, but three months is longer than we'd like, so I
| apologize about that.
|
| We don't do "stage 1 interviews", we only do interviews as the
| very final step in the process, when we've narrowed things down
| to a handful of people. That initial packet is like 85% of the
| process.
| kierangill wrote:
| I applied in early 2021. Getting rejected from any company
| carries a sting, but I was grateful to have gone through the
| process.
|
| I didn't realize at the time, but Oxide's application process
| was the best form of interview prep I've done. The process
| forced me to thoroughly document my values and career
| accomplishments. In later non-Oxide interviews, I effectively
| recited what I had written my materials. In that way, it has
| felt less one-sided than every other company application
| process I've gone through. I was able to take away an artifact
| from the experience, versus being filtered out via a coding
| challenge. It's also been rewarding to reflect on my submission
| from years ago to see how my mindset and skills have evolved.
|
| If you have any interest in working in the pediatric
| telemedicine space, I encourage you to email me your
| application. We accept Oxide materials. I'm happy to provide
| feedback as a hiring manager. My email and our company website
| are in my bio.
| sudomateo wrote:
| Loved reading your experience here. Thank you for posting it.
| I've written about the value of an artifact in the past when
| people pushed back against the Oxide materials saying they
| are a lot of work for no guarantee. When I first applied to
| Oxide I was also rejected and the materials process taught me
| a ton about myself and changed the way I viewed job searching
| and my work. I shifted course and increased my skills and
| next time I applied I got an offer. There's power in the
| critical thinking and writing the materials force out of us.
| mystraline wrote:
| > they are a lot of work for no guarantee.
|
| Well, its the assymetry of wanting a 10 year long
| documented CV with various orthogonal points in your
| career, versus actually having a 30 minute call.
|
| Unlike an actual interview, which is equal time investment,
| this 20 page paper gets the commentary and result of "no".
| "No" what? You can ask an interviewer about concerns, and
| discussion points. This email from no-mail@ is just
| nothing.
|
| And its not the sting of rejection. I've been turned down,
| and I too have turned down. But its the mechanistic,
| dispassionate, legalistic response after months of a "No".
| And not even a 'What we're looking for is.... '
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| That's very interesting because in their episode on hiring
| practices they said that they hoped the materials would be a
| valuable exercise for anyone deeply engaged in a job search.
| Hearing that same feedback from the other side of the process
| really closes that feedback loop!
| guywithahat wrote:
| The company leadership of oxide concerns me. My biggest mistakes
| in my (not successful) startup were when I got distracted and
| chased politics or some corporate goal instead of solving my
| customers real problems. Giving all employees the same pay or
| advertising social media links to small, political sites makes me
| worried they've taken the 100 million and are about to crowd the
| market with a product that's not focused on solving customer
| problems
| cdaringe wrote:
| What observations have you made that they are not or would not
| be focused on solving customer problems?
| guywithahat wrote:
| That they're instead focused on standardizing employee
| salary, or promoting their company through niche political
| websites.
|
| These are decisions that the CEO is making, which means
| they're distracted. This is fine when you've received nearly
| 200 million in total funding, but won't work once you're
| expected to add the same level of value while being
| profitable.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > promoting their company through niche political websites.
|
| Just to be clear, you mean that we have a BlueSky account,
| in addition to X? I struggle to think of what you mean.
|
| Generally speaking, advertising on a wide array of
| platforms is considered a good thing, as you reach
| different audiences.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Only your bluesky is listed on your website, which is
| what people see when they go to your site.
|
| This feels the same as past startups where I thought I
| hit a pmf because of how excited "potential" customers
| got when I mentioned politics. We built out "political"
| features, came back, and none of them converted but the
| excitement grew stronger. Politics is a trap because it
| adds no value, drives away potential real customer bases,
| but you will get enormous positive reinforcement because
| people are excited you're pushing their brand of
| politics. In my mind, there's a risk you start creating
| teams to manage "corporate culture" and brand outreach,
| and if politics sneaks into management they'll actively
| steer the company in the wrong direction.
|
| Also I'm sorry, if you're actually an executive at oxide
| I don't mean to be harsh, I thought I was speaking into
| the void. I've witnessed this destroy companies I've
| worked on and been involved with, and doing something
| like only listing a bluesky account is exactly the kind
| of thing that's a distraction which costs potential real
| customers.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I am not an executive, I just work here.
|
| I agree that it's difficult to balance features customers
| say they want vs the ones they'll actually convert over
| in an early stage company.
|
| I just don't think "has a BlueSky" means that that is
| what happens.
| sunshowers wrote:
| A consequence of us all making the same amount of money is that
| we don't waste time on performance reviews!
| jhickok wrote:
| Huh, what I read and hear leads me to believe that they will
| succeed _because_ of their leadership.
| cestith wrote:
| Does it follow that because you lost focus that someone else
| will?
| guywithahat wrote:
| In theory yes, but in practice only so many companies receive
| nearly 200 million in funding, and they'll be able to buy out
| competitors and consolidate the market for years to come.
| Oxide will likely be with us for a while, and in 5-10 years I
| wouldn't be surprised if people start to hate them while
| their exec team hangs out with Tom Brady
| whalesalad wrote:
| I would really love to run their control plane in my homelab.
| mkeeter wrote:
| I'm not aware of folks outside the company running the whole
| control plane, but people have definitely gotten parts of the
| system running at home:
|
| https://artemis.sh/2022/03/14/propolis-oxide-at-home-pt1.htm...
|
| (The author of this blog post now works for Oxide!)
| jefurii wrote:
| How much of the software stack is even possible to run
| without the specialized hardware? I'd also really like to try
| that control plane..
| yankcrime wrote:
| Congrats to the Oxide folks, like a lot of others I'm rooting for
| you.
| lawik wrote:
| I love following their adventures. Glad to see that it continues.
| piker wrote:
| Aside from the actual product, On the Metal / Oxide and Friends
| are really great podcasts that manage to make programming topics
| entertaining and educational. Bryan Cantrill is wildly
| entertaining and knowledgeable at the same time. His co-hosts and
| guests are great, too, and I attribute a lot of that to feeding
| off of his energy and storytelling. Highly recommend, especially
| for Rust folks.
| louwrentius wrote:
| They got $100M from USIT, which seems to be owned by Thomas Tull
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Tull
| azemetre wrote:
| Always happy to see Oxide Computer succeeding. As others have
| mention their podcast is truly great and their productive is
| quite innovative in the space.
|
| With this news I hope they plan on expanding hiring for frontend
| devs soon, would love to work with such leadership once in my
| life.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Congrats to Oxide on this milestone! I've been following their
| progress since discovering them in COVID, and would love to see
| them shake up what's presently a stagnant marketplace with their
| product line. The idea of deploying a rack of kit on-prem that's
| tightly integrated instead of wrangling multiple vendors of
| discrete components has a strong appeal, and while the
| proprietary hardware stuff did initially give me pause, their
| commitment to building atop Open Source quelled any lingering
| doubts I had.
|
| Would love to see their growth result in more versatile options,
| like quarter-rack or industrial deployments someday. In the
| meantime, congrats on the successful fundraising!
| brianzelip wrote:
| Love the blog post with a one-off art direction!
|
| Also love the Oxide and Friends podcast! What strikes me most
| lately about Oxide since falling into their hefty episode
| backlog, is their book club culture. I really appreciate the
| ability to get a fly on the wall experience of it, I learn a lot!
|
| https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/
| renewiltord wrote:
| They're a cool team and I like the idea so I hope it works. In
| our case, for the few million, we could get a hell of a lot more
| hardware (Epyc 9654 based machines to start with - much better
| operating cost / compute) so the magic must be in the software.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| There is so much more than just slapping servers in racks when
| you reach the hundreds of thousands or millions in server
| hardware. Good control plane software makes a night and day
| difference.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Admittedly this would have been an exotic for the Bay Area
| but mundane for elsewhere use-case since we just needed
| really fast disk and fast compute because we just ran model
| tuning and backtesting on the machines. 90% utilization, 100G
| network, 4xNVMe. We only had an 8-member team so much of the
| management/IT-layer replacement stuff that Oxide enables
| wouldn't have been as high leverage across the tens of
| thousands of cores. We almost certainly left a lot of stuff
| on the table, though.
|
| Also, is your username something interesting? It feels
| familiar but a quick `echo -n '' | md5sum` didn't yield
| anything.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| It's a random sequence.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I suppose I must just have seen you post here before and
| that's why it's familiar. Funny, felt so familiar.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| It is true that because we're a young company, we currently
| have the initial SKU that we started selling two years ago.
| Like every hardware company, we'll be releasing new products
| with new hardware every so often. Totally hear you if the
| current product doesn't fit your needs though, that's just
| going to be the case when we're so young, but as we grow and
| scale, we'll be able to release more variations that could make
| sense for more people.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Good luck! Eager to see your later SKUs.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Good for them! I used to walk my dog past their (office?
| warehouse?) in Emeryville, and when the weather was warm they'd
| have the doors open and the giant server stacks just sitting
| there, looking awesome. I guess it's not really a concern that
| someone will steal something that looks like it'd take a forklift
| to move.
|
| The ultimate aspirational homelab setup, ngl.
| manquer wrote:
| Vandalism / sabotage would still be a concern even if theft
| isn't ?
| 7e wrote:
| Investors are likely betting there is an AI play buried deeply in
| here somewhere.
|
| The founders are uber geeks but have never done anything
| successful on their own. I predict this company will be another
| zombie.
| checker659 wrote:
| I predict not. There.
| revskill wrote:
| I don't understand what this is after reading the homepage.
| cestith wrote:
| A few years ago The Register described it as a rack-sized blade
| chassis with hardware, firmware, and software designed in-house
| together.
|
| It's a 7-foot tall rack with compute sleds, storage sleds, and
| network sleds. It has its own BMC design, its own power design,
| its own physical connectivity design, its own virtual
| networking design, its own hypervisor (although it's based on
| Bhyve), its own OS (although it's based on Illumos), and its
| own API to spin things up and configure them.
|
| As I think of it, it's basically a private cloud in a box and
| The Register wasn't far off.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| You buy a rack of servers from us. You wheel it into a data
| center, plug in power and internet, turn it on. You now have a
| cloud in a box that you can spin up virtual machines in.
|
| That's the high level, happy to elaborate if you have more
| questions.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Our thesis was that cloud computing was the future of all
| computing_
|
| just want to give a shout out to my old boss from the mid 80's
| who had researched it (mgt consultant) and told me at that time
| that cloud computing was the future of all computing because the
| economics were inescapable.
|
| RIP.
| breatheoften wrote:
| I predict that if they take this same philosophy and use this
| money to add some new pieces on top where those new pieces are
| 'open' in the same way as their current hardware stack but which
| allows them to also run 'gpu bound' workloads well -- then I
| suspect they will make a ton of money.
| anomaloustho wrote:
| If I was interested in getting started with Oxide, could I even
| do so? It seems like this is only tailored to large enterprise
| sales. The only other option is just using them as your AWS
| replacement.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > If I was interested in getting started with Oxide, could I
| even do so?
|
| https://oxide.computer/remote-access
|
| > It seems like this is only tailored to large enterprise
| sales.
|
| Since we sell half or full racks at a time, it's true that
| we're geared towards larger companies, as small shops just
| don't need that much computer.
|
| > The only other option is just using them as your AWS
| replacement.
|
| That's the use case, yep!
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I know that this isn't their mission so I'm not really
| complaining, but man, if they ever start to offer smaller
| homelab-scale stuff, they can have all my money.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| One POV is their model doesn't work for small purchases period.
| It's not so much a hardware or software vendor so much as an IT
| agency. Which can be good venture businesses! Of course,
| everyone looking at this problem thinks, to make a small cost
| offering: that's what a cloud is. Oxide's problem statement
| says something like AWS doesn't "make sense." It makes way more
| sense than Oxide. The problem with AWS isn't that it is bad,
| it's that Amazon is greedy.
| kortilla wrote:
| Oxide is a fully closed ecosystem. The product seems cool but it
| sucks from an open computing perspective.
|
| The "iPhone" of the data center.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| What would you like to see open that isn't? The major thing I
| can think of is not opening up like, our CAD files for the
| hardware. But that's pretty far away from your
| characterization.
| wmf wrote:
| It's open source (that effectively requires the rack as a
| dongle) but not flexible or modular in any way. There's not
| even a single PCIe slot AFAIK.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I see. I wouldn't describe that as "fully closed" but I
| appreciate the perspective!
| wetwater wrote:
| If only they bring back their "On the metal" podcast. That
| podcast scratched an itch I didnt knew I had .
| bcantrill wrote:
| Check out Oxide and Friends[0]! We've been doing it for several
| years now, and it's a much more flexible format that allows the
| team to be heard in its own voice -- and allows us to weigh in
| on whatever's on our collective mind.
|
| [0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/
| derangedHorse wrote:
| After scrolling the site for 5 minutes, I still don't understand
| what they do. Do they offer on-prem servers? Then how does it
| bring cloud scalability? Is their selling point modular computer
| components so that you can order things online to achieve cloud
| scalability? Whatever it is, I expect it to have a poor user
| experience if I can't find a simple 'about' page.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > Do they offer on-prem servers?
|
| Yes.
|
| > Then how does it bring cloud scalability?
|
| You buy an entire (or half) rack at a time, and then can treat
| the entire thing as one elastic pool of resources, you do not
| need to manage the individual sleds within the server yourself.
| Your interface to the rack is similar to a VPS provider, it's
| "give me a new vm with these specs."
|
| Happy to elaborate if you have more questions.
| ksec wrote:
| I am wondering what they have on Roadmap and if Zen 6 will come.
| Their AMD EPYC(tm) 7713P is 4+ years old already. Or is Hardware
| performance not a main focus for Oxide but Software that came
| with it?
|
| In 2027 - 2030, We will have 256 Core Zen 7 CPU with PCIe 6.0 or
| 7.0 SSD and Network. If Liquid Cooling ever come to Oxide we are
| looking at 5 - 10x the compute power of its current hardware.
|
| Somewhere along the line a Single Oxide Rack would offer enough
| Compute and Storage for 95% of customers. And whenever I think
| about having Solaris in every rack just put a smile on my face.
| wmf wrote:
| They've been working on Zen 5 Turin for a while so hopefully
| soon they'll only be 1 year behind.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| > Or is Hardware performance not a main focus for Oxide but
| Software that came with it?
|
| It's more of that we're a young company, so we can only do so
| much, so quickly. Plus, because we do so much custom work, that
| all takes time. As we grow and scale up, we'll be able to move
| forward more quickly on updates on the hardware front.
| jeron wrote:
| at any rate, I'm looking forward to decommissioned Oxide racks
| making it into my homelab for pennies on the dollar
| sailfast wrote:
| Is this a government run VC firm? Next gen In-Q-Tel? Makes sense
| for highly classified workloads on-prem and there's a lot of
| demand for that.
|
| Could be a need for unclassified workloads also... but curious if
| this is a defense and Intel community venture fund backing this
| next round with my tax dollars.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Likely government-adjacent and with high portfolio use case
| match. These orgs are less and less keen on shifting sensitive
| workloads to public clouds - even "gov clouds". Let's not
| forget that the best access control is to have no access, and
| that obscurity is actually a form of security especially in a
| world where effort put on vulnerability searching is
| proportionate to popularity. The odds of someone discovering
| and exploiting your obscurely coded and privately hosted oxide
| stack are orders of magnitude smaller than someone compromising
| your public cloud.
|
| USIT > U.S. Innovative Technology ("USIT") is an investment
| firm that backs growth-stage commercial companies with critical
| technologies relevant to the national interest, including,
| artificial intelligence, future of compute, new industry, space
| & communications, bio & healthcare, and defense tech. USIT was
| founded by American technologist and visionary investor Thomas
| Tull.
|
| joined by: Riot Ventures, Eclipse, Jane Street
| tgtweak wrote:
| I can tell Bryan wrote this by the vocabulary... Congrats on the
| traction - haven't had a use case for rack-scale infra yet but
| hopefully soon!
| uberdru wrote:
| I always believed in Bryan, but the day i heard the buzzword
| "cloud repatriation", I know there was a market.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > We did our own host hypervisor, assuring an integrated and
| seamless user experience -- and eliminating the need for a third-
| party hypervisor and its concomitant rapacious software
| licensing.
|
| In exchange for your own hardware purchase cost, in practical
| terms also a license.
|
| > We did our own integrated storage service, allowing the rack-
| scale system to have reliable, available, durable, elastic
| instance storage without necessitating a dependency on a third
| party.
|
| In exchange for an unbreakable dependency on the first-party
| solution.
|
| I'm being overly aggressive because I do lurve your product and
| the Sun/Apple way of vertical integration is especially valuable
| for security ... things break at the interfaces and since you
| have absolute control over that, you can be actually good. Then
| there's the improved UX that comes with an integrated product.
| The root of trust work you've done is especially noteworthy, in a
| sea of also especially noteworthy efforts across the entire
| vertical product.
|
| But I'm leery that with the absolute lock-in, and VC pressure,
| you might succumb to squeezing your customers a la AVGO.
| macgillicu wrote:
| This is great. I hope they stay committed to the open source side
| of things, but all evidence seems to suggest they're serious
| about it. Generally, it's great to see a good idea getting
| executed well and arguably improving the state of affairs in
| computing, and making it, as it were.
|
| The flat salary structure at a generous level (from my
| perspective, anyway) is a breath of fresh air. Everyone getting
| caught up on the equity is a bit hard to understand, given the
| clarity of the message from the company.
|
| I will be applying for one of the open positions. Kudos to this
| company for their approach to business, and congrats on the
| success.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| In the end, the mainframe wins
| hinkley wrote:
| Big bump up in open positions now. Unfortunately none I'm
| particularly attuned for.
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