Watching Oxide
I am forever trying to explain, to people I know who aren’t in tech, why I am such a big fan of the Oxide Computer Company. I keep talking about Oxide because the way they work, and the way they present their work, really resonates with me. This post is meant to summarise those ways.
What Oxide does:
- Oxide sells computers for use in data centres. These are large, powerful, expensive machines used by organisations that have a serious need to process data, and do it on infrastructure they control.
- They design and produce a huge vertical slice of the whole computer stack in-house. If you’re familiar with traditional desktop computers, you might say they design the motherboard and case, among other bits. They don’t make CPUs or memory chips, but they design all the parts that connect the CPU to storage, memory, power, networking etc.
- Their philosophy is to provide value through this vertical integration: to get more efficiency from parts and systems designed to work together, to better support their customers because most problems can be solved in-house rather than waiting on vendors, to offer an Apple-like experience to everyone from the data centre operator all the way up to the software developers.
Working in public:
- Oxide produces a lot of material that they share publicly, to such a great extent that it’s actually possible and valuable to learn a lot from following them.
- They podcast regularly with the core team and other employees, friends and acquaintances, and tech industry figures. This ranges from deep dives into their own tech, bugs they’ve fixed, to tech current affairs, to just having fun and talking about baseball.
- They make some of their internal documents public, especially when they’re of interest to the broader tech world, or when they want to talk about something on a podcast and provide some internal material as supplemental reading.
- They open-source a large amount of the software that runs their stack, and consequently end up having issue tracker and pull request discussions in public also.
Commitment to open-source:
- Oxide publishes a lot of their work under permissive licenses. This ranges from helper libraries and experimental side-projects to the core services that run their entire stack, to contributing to their dependencies like IllumOS. They can do this because they’re not selling you just the software, they’re selling you an extremely valuable and powerful box full of CPUs that is animated by the software.
- Open source is a classic way to “work in public”, and being able to see issue and pull request discussions from the team is interesting in its own right, and supports other things they publish. Being able to link to issues from a podcast or blog post makes the entire body of work richer.
- Their commitment to making the software available to their customers is another way they live out their values. They’re saying that, as an Oxide customer, you get to know exactly what’s running in your own data centre.
A writing and reading culture:
- Oxide talk proudly about writing a lot. They also publish a small but significant portion of what they write. Their public RFDs are really interesting to read, whether they’re generally applicable, or deeply specific to their own work.
- They have a very literate attitude, one that seems to come all the way from the top down. 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.
- Their hiring process reflects this, by asking for long-form written answers as well as real work samples. This is an occasion where you can observe them living their culture out into all their practises in a way that’s unusual and refreshing.
A serious approach to work:
- Oxide’s work is serious business, at a fairly low level in the computing stack. There’s some amount of prestige associated with that, some 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.
- They put their values first, and try to tie other practises to those values. 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.
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 usually taken the few mentorship opportunities that were available to me. Being able to listen to, read and appreciate all Oxide’s output feels like a window into a culture driven by opinionated veterans. A little bit of what I’ve missed out on, taking the path that I have.
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.