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Comment by jmwilson | Hacker News Reader

The amount of written material (work samples, writing samples, free-form essay responses) they request is staggering. There is no guarantee they will read your responses with the same care you put into writing them - almost certainly they won't, since they have actual work to do and an honest reading of over a dozen responses, on technical subjects, is easily a huge chunk of a day. At least with a real-time interview, if you're wasting my time, I'm wasting an equal amount of yours. There is an incentive for the interviewer to get the signal they need to make a decision and respect the candidate's time, since it's their time too. This hiring approach won't scale, for them, or the people they need to hire, if they expand, so at some point they will be forced to change it. Until then, I think the better approach if you're interested in a place like this is to be so awesome they have to call you first.

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The time investment specific to this one employer seems to be a big weeder for interest and time availability, which is partly a problem.

One anecdatum, but which might not be that unusual:

When I applied (while working a very time-consuming and stressful key role), I had a small amount of time to catch my breath and context switch, that I could passably focus on thinking about other companies or interviewing.

So I decided that I had to choose between applying to Oxide and spending the same time prepping for a certain FAANG's Stanford fratbro shibboleth hazing rituals. I decided to go with my heart, and with the opportunity that seemed more inspiring, rather than a bit jerky.

After suffering through the "tenure packet" assembly headache, I waited, and waited, and then got a rejection email, without even a screening call. And a key sentence in the rejection email actually came across as snide, given that the writer seemed strong verbal. Which made me doubly regret not spending the same time practicing the FAANG's Leetcode whiteboard performance art.

(I ended up taking a comparable principal engineer job at an even more exotic hardware&software company, where they could hire people just by having very experienced other engineers, managers, and execs talk with them, no nonsense.)

The bad experience with the bespoke tenure packet also biased my decisions on my current search. One very interesting place I looked at, the extensive screening with a very knowledgeable person went exceedingly well, but when they presented me with the hiring group's systems programming take-home (huge time investment, with a dozen cleverly-spec'ed hard problems to nail, basically solving most of their hard software systems problems), and I didn't have time for that, I demurred.

I also now have even less tolerance for the Leetcode cargo-culting, and any other obnoxiousness, while having more appreciation for wise and intuitive hiring teams.

One factor, put loosely and jokingly, but there's a lot of truth to it: "If you like me, you must be good people."

> spending the same time prepping for a certain FAANG's Stanford fratbro shibboleth hazing rituals... Which made me doubly regret not spending the same time practicing the FAANG's Leetcode whiteboard performance art.

Lol, Do you have a blog? I would subscribe to your substack.

Nice of you to say, but I just lazily reused those derisive words from several of my past HN comments on the topic. :)

It is true that we ask a lot upfront. But just to be clear about a few things:

> There is no guarantee they will read your responses with the same care you put into writing them

Multiple people review every single submission.

> almost certainly they won't, since they have actual work to do an honest reading

This is why there is such lag time in even getting a response; you are correct that it takes a tremendous amount of work, but also that there's a tremendous amount of non-hiring work to do. We are not always perfect at balancing these things, and the queue can grow.

> so at some point they will be forced to change it.

I am in full agreement that as companies grow and change, their processes must also grow and change. That doesn't mean that the initial processes are inappropriate. That's the nature of building something new.

We will see at what point changing this process makes sense. It's worked decently well from the first founders (who themselves underwent this process, with each other) up to our current size of about sixty. And speaking purely for myself, the problem as I see it is that we have to say "no" to some wonderful folks, not that we struggle to find people to apply.

With the large up front ask, do you put an equal amount of time and effort into explaining why you pass on a candidate? My biggest issue with tech hiring is the complete and utter lack of feedback of any sort.

I am not personally involved in rejecting candidates, but I have heard anecdotally that people have found what gets sent out to be nicer than what they've heard from others.

Have you gotten more feedback in other industries? To be honest, I thought that general standard is essentially silence. But it's been many years since I've worked in not-tech.

Most companies are totally silent on what went wrong for legal reasons, although many will give you the courtesy of saying "no" instead of ghosting you once you have had an interview.

It does seem a little bit suboptimal to ask so much upfront from people who you would never hire. A company with a similarly large early screening form, Reservoir Labs, does a first resume screen before sending an invitation to respond to their screening questions. I would suggest that you do the same out of politeness to candidates.

We're not going to do a resume screen, because too often we have found that a resume does not accurately predict the quality of the materials (in both directions!). People are certainly welcome to not apply to Oxide; the world is large, and this company emphatically isn't the right fit for everyone! Indeed, part of the reason that we chose to make this process public is to allow people to better decide if it's worth the investment of time and energy -- or not!

I would advise caution at hiring someone who is excessively willing to go through an immense set of hoops just to get hired, as this might indicate a disproportionate willingness to work for you.

Honestly, it feels suspicious.

It’d probably be better to invest the (substantial) work done in reviewing the submission in a more structured interview process where the traits can be better assessed.

We do not evaluate people on “how much they want to work here” but instead on relevant skills. As mentioned in this thread (and on our jobs page) we get enough applicants that it takes 4-6 weeks to even read materials, on average, and so have to necessarily reject a large number of people. Simply wanting to work at Oxide is not a differentiator. Everyone who applies does!

> We do not evaluate people on “how much they want to work here”

Yes you do, implicitly.

Every workplace that has open job postings does, on some level. We do not particularly use “seems like they really want to” as a criteria.

If the hiring process is a significant burden to the candidate when compared to your competitors, it might become, even if not formally recognised.

This is why I asked if you can detect any interesting signals in your candidate’s profiles that diverge from the overall candidate pool (hard to get stats on the people who don’t apply, but I think you understand where I’m going).

For the record, I’d LOVE to see that kind of data.

You're conflating a couple of things here -- while we don't select for enthusiasm as such, we very much do select (both implicitly and explicitly) for intrinsic motivation. (So the signal of candidates that choose not to apply is not only hard to get, it's also not necessarily interesting.) In terms of where that intrinsic motivation comes from (which is perhaps what you're asking?), we have found that it can be found in a wide variety of places and backgrounds. And indeed, such as there's a common theme at all, it's that it doesn't necessarily follow from a resume.

You touched a very good point - in order to apply, the candidate must be very motivated to apply. Unlike, say, the hundreds of random resumes we (present employer) get every day (feels like a DDoS attack sometimes) - those candidates are motivated enough to fill out a form, but not enough to read the job posting.

> We do not evaluate people on “how much they want to work here”

If you make the candidacy process a significant burden to the candidate, I’m weary you might make it a similarly significant part of the selection criteria, just because otherwise good candidates who are less eager to work for the company might not have the time to apply to it. That the process rejects a large number of promising candidates is already predicted in the article.

Can you observe any signal on the candidate background that’d indicate they could be consistently eager to leave their present companies?

For sure making the _process_ public is a big plus!

(All companies should make their hiring process transparent and public).

If someone demands hours of free labour for "code exercises" or whatever, the absolute bare minimum is that you put some portion of that back into meaningful code review.

So you should probably be spending _more_ time on the feedback for rejected candidates. Be specific, tie it back to your evaluation criteria that you wrote down before asking for the exercises to be completed.

We at Oxide don't ask for code exercises, but perhaps you're making a more general comment?

I read the parent as metaphorical; if we did code samples, code review would be expected, so since we do not, an equivalent review would be nice.

I get the sentiment but it’s very tricky; most places do a screen and then an interview and so review takes place during said interview, we are heavier allocated on “the screen” in a sense. It would be even more work in our circumstances to do so, since we have more people in that stage of the process than others.

Yes, I was making a more general comment (I think it does still apply whether there's actual code-exercises or not though).

If it's "too much work" for you, might be time to re-examine how much work you're asking for.

I also think these sorts of things select for candidates that have lots of time for "applying to places" (which will naturally select against people already in jobs, or who already value work/life balance).

Your process doesn't look as onerous as some I've seen for sure -- but perhaps you _should_ add a "screen" portion and thereby not ask for the "long form" work from candidates you'd reject anyway (also buying more time for meaningful feedback to those you do ask the work of).

More feedback? No. Less time demanded? Yes. And your company's application process is more demanding and more personal than most in your industry. Does a generic response show Oxide's values of candor, courage, empathy, and transparency?

We don't provide feedback on folks that we don't interview -- for reasons not dissimilar to Y Combinator's logic for the same policy.[0] I wouldn't phrase it quite the same way, but we are grossly oversubscribed as a company, and we as a result end up rejecting people who would probably succeed here.

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/whynot

> Multiple people review every single submission.

This puts you in a vulnerable position to attacks with generative AI. Assume a person using such a tool could generate a relatively large number of credible submissions in addition to their own as a way to limit your ability to assess possibly real competition.

I’m not sure if they read the responses I wrote with any care at all (in 2021); I never heard anything back beyond the “we got your submission!” auto-reply.

I am still kinda salty about it; I was proud of the writing and presentation samples I sent in, and was hopeful I was a good fit.

I am sorry we failed you. As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, we are not perfect. There have been some times where some things have slipped through the cracks, and speaking for myself (and a few others), I have not been happy when that has happened. I am not sure what was in your specific case, but that doesn't change the fact that that is us not living up to what we set out to do.

> There is no guarantee they will read your responses with the same care you put into writing them - almost certainly they won't,

Nothing is guaranteed in hiring. Demanding that another person “waste time” sitting in front of you before you’ll answer questions is strange. Wouldn’t you rather answer the questions on your own time without someone else putting you on the spot?

It’s not very rational to avoid applying to a company just because you think they might not read what you wrote.

> Until then, I think the better approach if you're interested in a place like this is to be so awesome they have to call you first.

So answering a few questions is too much work, but becoming so “awesome” that you’re top 0.01% of industry talent who maintains a public profile so prevalent that they seek you out is the better way to apply?

Applying to a company and investing a few hours interviewing is accessible to everyone. Becoming a high-visibility, industry leader with active public profiles that attract companies is very, very hard.

> Nothing is guaranteed in hiring. Demanding that another person “waste time” sitting in front of you before you’ll answer questions is strange. Wouldn’t you rather answer the questions on your own time without someone else putting you on the spot?

No, because if that's the process, for all you know they're requesting answers from 1000 people for one position. With synchronous interviews, you have reasonable confidence that there's a limited number of people they're going through this process with, that you have a decent chance at the position.

> No, because if that's the process, for all you know they're requesting answers from 1000 people for one position.

Why would any company engage with 1000 candidates and request these samples from them with no expectation of reading them?

I don’t understand this desire to assume the absolute worst, even when it’s illogical for the company to do so.

> Why would any company engage with 1000 candidates and request these samples from them with no expectation of reading them?

Because there's little downside to do doing so. And of course they would read some of them, they do need to hire someone, but they might not read all.

> I don’t understand this desire to assume the absolute worst, even when it’s illogical for the company to do so.

It's not necessarily illogical. They can just blast out "give us samples" to a large number of people, and then filter out most of them based on whatever they feel like later on.

It also means that later on they can brag about they're so elite that "they only hire 0.1% of the people they interview", if the company culture bends that way.

The company culture does not bend that way at all. To the contrary, as I have said repeatedly (and other Oxide folks have said), it has been really difficult to turn away folks who could plausibly succeed at Oxide.

They're not really engaging if they're asking you to asynchronously do paperwork. The effort asymmetry makes it a bad bargain for those who do put in the work as there's no way to know that it'll even be looked at.

> Wouldn’t you rather answer the questions on your own time without someone else putting you on the spot?

Honestly no, as you might spend loads of time crafting the perfect response, only to find that they hadn't really worded the question in a way that meant your answered what they were really thinking. This happens often enough in in-person interviews as it is, but atleast you can hope to course-correct by looking at how they respond. The lack of time-bounding is a real problem for those who have genuine time-commitments outside of work

Yes, 100%

Also, if "everyone" has a 1 hour interview (or whatever) then you're more-or-less comparing equal things. If some people use a week to craft their "asynchronous" responses while some have an hour to do so (because they're already employed, say, or have a family) then you're not comparing apples to apples.

Similar for "take home code exercises": it's impossible to compare them meaningfully because you have no idea if the better-looking one took the candidate an hour or several days (and yes, I've been on both sides of this).

>So answering a few questions is too much work, but becoming so “awesome” that you’re top 0.01% of industry talent who maintains a public profile so prevalent that they seek you out is the better way to apply?

That's definitely the better strategy. Or networking can replace having the public profile. That being said if you haven't gotten there yet, it might make sense to do all this work anyway because that puts you in the 5% of candidates willing to jump through all these hoops to apply, but you'll definitely have a lower chance of getting in as just some rando applying on the internet than someone they already know.

> a public profile so prevalent that they seek you out is the better way to apply?

I wouldn’t consider myself anything near a high-profile candidate for anything, but I routinely turn down tempting offers from interesting companies.

The positive side is that I have lunch with a lot of cool people and, sometimes, even get the chance to show them my current city a little bit.

There is that and the other side as well. There are so many open positions even if I like where Oxide is going I might not apply because there are so many things that can go wrong with such hiring process.

I liked the Amazon, Google hiring process circa 2015. Come in for a day after passing some basic loops and see if we can work with each other.

I continue to feel that the best interview material is to simply do good work, in public, as much as possible, and let the network effects eventually tilt in your favor.

So just have infinite free time and spend it all working on open source and hope that somebody you want to work for will notice and reach out?

Seems like a lot of work relative to just applying to jobs.

You could also spend infinity squared free time reaching out to each possible employer.

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