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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

What was the Oxide process like? What did they have you write? What was the role? Thanks!

> What was the Oxide process like?

Can't speak to the complete process, first step was fill out a google doc just to submit an application, and was ghosted from there.

> What did they have you write?

Work Samples, Writing Samples, Analysis Samples, Presentations Samples, Psychological Questionnaire

> What was the role?

Rust Embedded Systems Engineer or some such. Which given that I was previously the lead for a high availability modern C++ RTOS, had programmed in Rust professionally since 2017, and would regularly give talks on the state of embedded systems work in Rust (using slides running as a bare metal application on an Nintendo 64 written in Rust to put my money where my mouth was), I figured I should at least get to talk to someone there.

Starting with a giant doc you have to fill out just to apply should have been a sign to just not even bother, but I had a lot of respect for bcantrill. Some of which has now eroded.

I'm surprised by the Psych Questionairre. Can you say more about it?

Questions like when have you been happiest in your career? Unhappiest? A bunch of stuff about their core values and examples of how you or previous organizations have reflected those, have not reflected those, when two came into tension, etc.

Oh, those are pretty standard job interview questions; I wouldn't call that a psych questionnaire, but that's just me.

I mean, those are ultimately psych questions. It's common for those to come up in an interview, but very non-standard to ask someone to write about those topics before you've talked to anyone at the company.

And at the end of the day it's the asymmetry of their process that I have an issue with.

Here's the application doc for the Product Marketing role (the only role that's currently hiring):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y3L6dXqkK3c5IN2j73HuZkda...

This is slightly specialized for the Product Marketing role; for engineering roles, the Market Analysis section is replaced with a similar section for engineering / system analysis.

(I work at Oxide, but this link is publicly available, albeit hard to find on the website)

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