Watching Oxide
Most who know me in person have had me try to explain to them something about “that company I like”, the Oxide Computer Company. I keep mentioning it to people because I have found, watching them these past few years, that they way they work really resonates with me.
As a company, they “work in public” to an extent that there is actually a lot to read up on (or listen to). So it is actually possible and valuable to “follow” them, even as an outsider in a very different part of the industry (and world).
Some of the reasons I keep mentioning Oxide, even to people who are not involved in software:
- They have a very literate culture, one that seems to come all the way from the top down. They write a lot, and share their writing a lot. They read a lot, and discuss books they’re read, and recommend books. They seem to have an interest in history - their own history and what they can learn from it, the history of software and tech, of places.
- They put their values first, and try to tie other practises to those values. As a literate culture, they say that writing down commitments publicly is an important part of accountability, which I heartily agree with. It’s easy to be cynical about this, and to criticise when they maybe don’t meet these values (commonly seen regarding their hiring). But I still find it so worthwhile that they can be seen trying.
- Their business is serious business at a fairly low level in the computing stack. There’s a certain amount of prestige associated with that, a certain amount of envy from me, a mere web developer. It means they have the obligation to get things right, to not accept “good enough”, to root-cause their issues instead of work around them. That rigor isn’t economically viable for all businesses, but it’s critical for Oxide. This makes their transparency all the more interesting; it feels like outsiders rarely get a glimpse into this world.
- They want to take responsibility and ownership. They often refer to being able to provide “Oxide value” by owning as much of their software and hardware as possible: instead of passing the buck to a vendor when there’s an issue, they can actually say the buck stops with them. Their product strategy is built around this.
There are specific practises I enjoy hearing about, like their use of RFDs, their writing-focused hiring process and the transparency they offer their interviewees, the way they build and contribute to open-source software, the way they record their meetings and actually seem to make use of this, their transparent/uniform salary.
Listening to all this feels like being in the room with much more senior colleagues. For most of my career I’ve been fairly independent, working in a loosely-structured research organisation or at my own startup. I haven’t always taken the few mentorship opportunities that were available on this path. Watching Oxide from the outside feels like getting just a little bit of that experience vicariously. It’s a window into a culture driven by opinionated veterans.
So much of what Oxide does wouldn’t make sense for a less well-resourced company, or in another industry, or for a team with different personalities. But it’s inspiring to see that someone is out there doing it.