If folks are interested (and in the spirit of keeping things positive), I'm happy to answer any questions here about our comp philosophy or about Oxide more generally.
My 2-cents, I think you should always pay well, but differentiation needs to occur somehow. Perhaps it’s more vacation (because good workers get their work done faster), a bonus at the end of the year, something.
I say this because it’s difficult to keep good workers. I work very hard, I work with people who work half as hard, and produce a fourth as much. While some are okay making the same wages, I personally only work places where I make significantly more.
It’s important to me to teach this to my children (harder work = more benefits). It’s important to provide more to my family. It’s important others understand they can also earn more by working harder.
I understand you may have a different philosophy and I am curious how it works out... but I suspect this will lead to (as through all history) resentment, anger, and eventually significant harm.
This suggests (a) rewards for better outcomes can lie in the space of the team asking that out-performer to take on more accountability, so the individual can be on a personal growth, leadership, responsibility path, while the rising tide of performance lifts all boats. And at the same time, that seems to need to be accompanied by (b) fairness, a recognition the team is not a charity and nobody can be slacking and remain part of the effort, such that intrinsic rewards are not undermined.
There’s an opt-in aspect to make this work — not everyone wants to be on the starship Enterprise exploring new worlds without getting paper tokens to count their score “against” peers by. Even if the crew agrees Picard should be captain and have the quarters closest to the bridge, for some folks that’s not enough, they need to “beat” other humans instead of enjoying making the Enterprise better.
FWIW, I categorically disagree on sales commissions. Sales commission culture seems generally toxic to founder values. I’ve never seen a commission structure that doesn’t get gamed in ways beneficial to sales people at either customers’ or the firm’s expense and to its cultural or mission detriment, once the commission plan begins to scale.
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All that said, if there are graduated pay scales, instead of a communal collective at utopian parity, it seems these should be less graduated by org chart level, and more by “toil vs. automation”. How to turn individual or collective labor into individual or collective annuity?
We (tech industry labor) haven’t really grappled with this yet, though you see it upstream of us, in valuations multiples differing between service where an hour of work is needed for a dollar of income versus “-as-a-service” where some code can be run as a utility.
This is what’s behind “do things that don’t scale”: figuring out how to scale these things, how to take the 1:1 toil part out of the equation, replace it with a multiplier or better zero it out.
The craftspeople able to figure these scaling problems out, automate them, are able to generate disproportionate future value per hour, and arguably should be compensated accordingly (think NPV), else in today’s typical system that value accrues to the company management where, frankly, most “management” is probably glorified toil.
I can tell you from a year of observing Oxide: team members inspire one another. Someone sees someone else demo'ing something exciting, and they are inspired to themselves drive to an exciting demo -- not to compete with them, but out of their own sense of teamwork and mission. And to the degree that we're seeking extrinsic rewards beyond satisfied customers, frankly nothing feels better than to hear a colleague say: "Wow, that's really neat!"
Sprinting to a coworker's desk (or chat thread in COVID times) and helping them out on whatever roadblocks they run into is pure fentanyl, straight to the jugular. Even if it's just providing moral support by looking over their shoulder, indeed nothing feels more rewarding than hearing a colleague say: "wow, thanks wonderingse!"
Oxide's mission, principles, and values mirror my own, almost comically so. It seems a bit early to ask but:
When will Oxide start hiring pre-sales solution engineers?
Once you have an employee and a history of experiencing their work within the company you have the basis for deciding where pay diverges and what career ladder they wish to follow. The fundamental question you should always ask yourself regarding compensation for an existing employee is "what would it cost me to replace the value they deliver to the company?" That isn't based on title or prior work experience, it should be based on a real understanding of their work, initiative, and the other aspects of their involvement with the company that delivers value (along with a balance of possible deficiencies that reduce that value).
Does that tend to produce valuations for existing personnel that may be higher than possible new hires? Sure, but then bringing on a new hire has its own costs regarding training, accumulation of institutional knowledge, etc but those are real costs that must enter the compensation equation.
If an employee wishes to gain more compensation, their career ladder is to find ways to deliver more value. That isn't dependent on titles or checklists of certifications, it's based on what directly contributes to the success of the company.
Can’t say I disagree, if so!
On that note, how involved will Oxide be in the rust foundation?
Love the podcast, by the way! Off-topic, but on the note of retrocomputing and Sun appreciation: Would you consider putting that copy of Spring you have on the Internet Archive? It would be a wonderful act of preserving the history of computing: there isn't a single copy on the Internet.
For the parts of Sun that we want to take after: the good bits, of course! ;) There were things that have influenced us with respect to mission, and then also with respect to hardware/software co-design (we are, contrary to the impression you might have, doing a lot of hardware[1]). Lest I sound too rosy about Sun, it had a lot of problems too[2] -- so we're trying not to recreate those! ;)
Thank you for the kind words on the podcast -- very much looking forward to getting back in the garage and recording some new episodes!
Finally, on Spring: yes, I need to find it (we just moved) and then find a CD-ROM drive (feels easier) and then I'll get it uploaded!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc
[1] https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/1342294298692206593
I love Sun! You can never get rosy enough, unless you're talking about many of its executives in the last twenty years of its life...
I'm glad you guys are taking after Sun on the hardware part (and hopefully avoiding replicating its actions in driving SPARC to the ground with RISC-V)! It will be extremely welcome to have another contender in the hardware space!
Can't wait to listen to new podcast episodes!
And thank you so much on Spring! Any bit of computing history that can be preserved is a win for our field!
To answer your question: I don't have a long list, though companies like Stripe certainly come to mind. I'm sure there are others out there. Perhaps others can point to companies that are models in this regard?
Is "commitment to excellence" not a value? If one were to join Oxide but was mediocre, they would surely get fired. But on flip side, if they use their unique combination of skills & discipline, potentially at the expense of some personal sacrifice to bring a ton of value to the company, while still being full of honesty, integrity and decency, then no upside? Or is variable equity refresh the answer to this scenario?
Otherwise "Measuring people impact is hard, so nobody gets paid more" seems a bit crab mentality.
As for potential upside: yes, everyone has an equity component; if we succeed together, there is more than enough upside for everyone.
Edit: grammar.
> This leads to a deeply intrinsically motivated team
If you managed to achieve that, then hats off!
> if we succeed together
Hope you all do! :)
And indeed, we had no intention of writing about this at all, but when asking for how we could improve our hiring process, one of the consistent pieces of feedback was that we didn't specify the pay -- and that we were unclear about our policies with respect to remote work. This was kind of a "well, should we tell 'em?" moment inside of Oxide -- and there was a broadly shared belief within the company that this was something we needed to be talking about. And here we are! ;)
Post Covid is going to be a huge gold rush for remote talent, as some big players start playing games with CoL and lose some of their core contributors over it.
Does Oxide face a challenge of feeling the need to creatively compensate especially motivated team members, or do the company values and hiring process promote a general and widespread highly motivated and quality team, with maybe a more consistent level of contributions from each individual than a traditional org structure? Or a different alternative entirely?
Love to hear your thoughts on this as you said you hire people 'if we saw them contributing to the company as much as anyone else', but what if some people just don't contribute as clearly/observably?
Also are we going to get more On the Metal episodes?
Our hiring process more or less selects for intrinsic motivation at every stage -- that's very important to us. As for "judging" the output of folks: I would say Oxide is just a more extreme example of something that one sees in lots of places, where it is exceedingly difficult (and dangerous!) to make those kinds of comparisons. Not only because the work is highly varied (though certainly that) and not only because it is deeply technical (though that too!), but also because we rely so much on helping one another out. How does one evaluate that? And perhaps a blunter question: what would be the purpose of that evaluation?
When I talk about "seeing someone contribute to the company as much as anyone else", I very much mean in the future tense -- namely, during the hiring process. I think it's not an unfair characterization to say that we would much rather take the energy typically wasted on comp, and spend that energy on careful hiring.
As for more On the Metal, yes definitely: Steve, Jess, and I very much look forward to being vaccinated and back in the garage!
Please keep these blog posts coming. Really shows people Oxide stands for something and what your values look like in practice.
Makes up and coming engineers happy when they feel like some tech companies will actually care about them as a human.