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Comment by lbotos | Hacker News Reader

> Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person.

I... think you are thinking more "Customer Support Representative" (how to reset a password) and not Support Engineering.

An engineer that can talk to customers, find bugs, and fix them, is not worth $200k?

One of the Oxide Support engineers was (still is) an INSANELY strong performance engineer who helped solved performance bugs when he was on my team. We were actively using strace weekly to troubleshoot deep process internals to optimize perf.

(Hi Will, I miss you, and you are definitely worth $200k don't listen to this guy. <3)

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This is a very interesting point.

I wonder how many roles there are like this: low valued because they are low valued, in a vicious cycle. We hire people to fill a prescribed low-value role and don't expect much of them so we don't pay them much and so we don't get much out of them, because we designed the role to be low impact.

If we treat every role as a $200k/yr role, it makes sense that the first thing that would happen is that we find a way to give people leverage to make >$200k of difference in each role! And that's a really exciting proposition from both the employee and customer perspective.

So much this. We also underestimate how motivated people can be in these roles when they make an atypical comp; my experience has been that people push themselves hard to prove they’re worth that rather than coast.

To add: I saw job listings recently posted on bsky and was enjoying how well written they were. The support engineer role description asked that they be able to fly to a customers site at short notice. That’s a whole other level of on-call right there.

> The support engineer role description asked that they be able to fly to a customers site at short notice.

Kinda makes sense if you sell physical hardware?

Also some of their customers are airgapped so if they’ll let you touch the machine that’ll make debugging a lot easier.

So this surprised me. If their customers are the kind that have airgapped servers, I’m surprised to see roles that all accept worldwide applicants.

You don't need to be in business of security clearances to require air-gapping.

I wasn’t aware of that. Any particular examples?

Everything that can be airgapped probably should be. Healthcare, education, public safety, social services, public administration. Anything that touches massive troves of sensitive data for an entire country or continent.

Non trivial amounts of industrial and civil infrastructure, sometimes the air gapping is also because there's no viable connectivity more so than security reasons (or you have to assume flaky network so the system is designed to operate as separated island 99% of time - for unlikely example Chick-Fil-A has such requirements for their k8s clusters running individual restaurants.

Sometimes it's also simpler to physically air gap a system than to deal with more complex security.

    > some of their customers are airgapped

I'm not doubting you, but where did you hear that? Wow, what kind of data center installation is air-gapped in 2025, except for ... maybe military industrial complex (maunuf + military) and spy agencies?

well those are pretty big customers…

Maybe not all the datacenter, but why wouldn't you airgap backup and long term cold storage?

They mention it a few times on the podcast

Certain production studios (Commercial / Feature Entertainment) may have air-gapped datacenters. I'd expect anyone making an Apple commercial is doing that on air-gapped infrastructure.

Defense contractors, Pharma companies, basically anyone who has IP that they want to tightly control access to.

I don't have any details, but on their public website, they highlight LLNL (ELI5: US nuclear weapons research lab founded by Edward Teller) as a customer. I am not 100% certain they require airgapping, but it is totally conceivable that them or similar customers in that vein do. Oxide business probably selects for a biased sample of such customers (the customers that don't have esoteric requirements also have public cloud options AWS/GCP/Azure to choose from).

Curious, why did you pose this statement as a question?

> An engineer that can talk to customers, find bugs, and fix them, is not worth $200k?

I always watch these kinds of discussions on HN with interest, because depending on what is being discussed, one of two viewpoints dominates:

* If we are discussing salaries, of course people deserve compensation, and good work is worth a good salary.

* If we are discussing software cost, HOW DARE THE DEVELOPER ask for subscription pricing, and everything should really be a $5 one-time purchase.

BTW, a very good point in the thread above is that the company is spending VC money.

"Let's remove all fire extinguishers from campus buildings!" vs "We can't appraise extinguishers as worth $50k each quarters", the reasonable PoV must be somewhere inbetween.

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