He mentioned that Oxide has an interview process that takes 20 hours realistically between coming up with work samples, answering 8 questions before hand and 9 hours of in person interviews.
For their “senior” engineers it’s in the range of offers for I’ve seen for new grads at most of the tech companies and around the range of generic enterprise CRUD developers.
No offense to “enterprise developers”. I spent 25 years as one. But why would I jump through hoops for a job that pays about the same as I could hypothetically get based on interviewing for a few hours and asking generic behavioral questions and maybe some techno trivia about whatever language the company uses.
I find it fascinating that companies want rockstar ninja developers but then offer meh compensation for the positions.
So (foolishly?) I had never bothered to check Glassdoor, because we have been so upfront about our compensation.[0] But apparently that was a mistake! If it needs to be said, the Glassdoor numbers are comically wrong -- and in fact the high number in the "Engineer" range was quite a bit less than what we payed everyone six years ago!
First I’m going to make an argument and then immediately refute it before someone else makes the argument. That $235K is still lower than what mid level developers make at any of the BigTech companies.
Yes, that’s true. But they are all toxic hellholes where everyone is jockeying for position, making sure they show “impact” that looks good on promo docs and they all have RTO mandates even for positions that were formally “field by design”.
$235K and the ability to work remotely is something I would definitely think is fair (and a little more than I make now that I’m outside of Bigtech working remotely) as long as you give cost of living increases and is more than most developers will ever make inflation adjusted.
The other point you make is that performance is just a form of stack ranking and even hard work is usually just awarded with a 1-2% raise more than someone else gets. Why not separate it from comp?
I also like sales having variable compensation that is based on performance. I work somewhat as a post sales architect and I have an appreciation for the sales side more than most engineers.
Big tech companies have mostly figured out some kind of infinite money glitch. I don't think comparing compensation at them to startups makes a huge amount of sense. (It makes some sense from the perspective of how much money's coming into your bank account—just not a huge amount.)
Being a prominent face at a startup can also set you up for greater success in your career than being one of a hundred thousand at a bigco.
And as you touched on already, the environment at Oxide is a million times better than the toxicity and empire building that happens at bigcos.
I was curious about the pay.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Oxide-Computer-Salaries-E54...
For their “senior” engineers it’s in the range of offers for I’ve seen for new grads at most of the tech companies and around the range of generic enterprise CRUD developers.
No offense to “enterprise developers”. I spent 25 years as one. But why would I jump through hoops for a job that pays about the same as I could hypothetically get based on interviewing for a few hours and asking generic behavioral questions and maybe some techno trivia about whatever language the company uses.
I find it fascinating that companies want rockstar ninja developers but then offer meh compensation for the positions.