I applied in early 2021. Getting rejected from any company carries a sting, but I was grateful to have gone through the process.
I didn’t realize at the time, but Oxide’s application process was the best form of interview prep I’ve done. The process forced me to thoroughly document my values and career accomplishments. In later non-Oxide interviews, I effectively recited what I had written my materials. In that way, it has felt less one-sided than every other company application process I’ve gone through. I was able to take away an artifact from the experience, versus being filtered out via a coding challenge. It’s also been rewarding to reflect on my submission from years ago to see how my mindset and skills have evolved.
If you have any interest in working in the pediatric telemedicine space, I encourage you to email me your application. We accept Oxide materials. I’m happy to provide feedback as a hiring manager. My email and our company website are in my bio.
Loved reading your experience here. Thank you for posting it. I've written about the value of an artifact in the past when people pushed back against the Oxide materials saying they are a lot of work for no guarantee. When I first applied to Oxide I was also rejected and the materials process taught me a ton about myself and changed the way I viewed job searching and my work. I shifted course and increased my skills and next time I applied I got an offer. There's power in the critical thinking and writing the materials force out of us.
Well, its the assymetry of wanting a 10 year long documented CV with various orthogonal points in your career, versus actually having a 30 minute call.
Unlike an actual interview, which is equal time investment, this 20 page paper gets the commentary and result of "no". "No" what? You can ask an interviewer about concerns, and discussion points. This email from no-mail@ is just nothing.
And its not the sting of rejection. I've been turned down, and I too have turned down. But its the mechanistic, dispassionate, legalistic response after months of a "No". And not even a 'What we're looking for is.... '
It's tough on both sides. I understand the disdain of receiving a "no" after putting in hours or days of effort on the materials. Candidates are welcome to ask for feedback on their application but must understand that Oxide is limited in what we can say due to legalities. Hiring is a tricky balance on the legal front. I also understand that it's impractical to give every candidate a synchronous screening call just to confirm whether they should continue applying. Not only for time's sake but also bias. Is it enough for 1 person to do a screening call and decide someone's fate?
No hiring process will ever be perfect but at least, as the experience mentioned previously touched on, the candidate is left with an artifact that they can then use in future applications. Candidates walk away having learned something about themselves. Open roles are also limited, applying for such roles is also optional, and it's up to each candidate to decide how much time and effort they wish to put into the materials.
We're humans here at Oxide too, and we're doing the best we can to ensure the hiring process is fair and humane as well.
That's very interesting because in their episode on hiring practices they said that they hoped the materials would be a valuable exercise for anyone deeply engaged in a job search. Hearing that same feedback from the other side of the process really closes that feedback loop!
This is buried in a footnote, but worth clarifying: "How Life Works" offers much more than just the history of our understanding of biology. Oxide and Friends has good coverage on the book here https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/bookclub-ho...
American healthcare is seldom affordable, accessible, or high-quality. We are fixing this for pediatrics. Blueberry is the most affordable option amongst our competitors. We practice the highest quality pediatric telemedicine, as evidenced by our exclusive hiring of board-certified pediatricians and the usage of at-home medical kits. And, we’re accessible 24 hours a day.
Our success is shown in the lives we save, the costs we save our insurers, and our exploding B2B and D2C business.
As you can imagine, pulling off affordable high-quality healthcare is a challenge. It requires a lot of engineering ingenuity, a C-suite aligned with positive patient outcomes above short-term profits, and a great product team.
We use Django, Hotwire Turbo (an HTMX-like framework), Pytorch, Sklearn, and Flutter. Experience in these technologies helps, but what’s more important is general full-stack knowledge, curiosity, and a strong work ethic.
American healthcare is seldom affordable, accessible, or high-quality. We are fixing this for pediatrics. Blueberry is the most affordable option amongst our competitors. We practice the highest quality pediatric telemedicine, as evidenced by our exclusive hiring of board-certified pediatricians and the usage of at-home medical kits. And, we’re accessible 24 hours a day.
Our success is shown in the lives we save, the costs we save our insurers, and our exploding B2B and D2C business.
As you can imagine, pulling off affordable high-quality healthcare is a challenge. It requires a lot of engineering ingenuity, a C-suite aligned with positive patient outcomes above short-term profits, and a great product team.
We use Django, Hotwire Turbo (an HTMX-like framework), Pytorch, Sklearn, and Flutter. Experience in these technologies helps, but what’s more important is general full-stack knowledge, curiosity, and a strong work ethic.
Love the Candidate Evaluation Framework and the mission, though as someone who's been doing pretty similar work for 3-4 years it seems intimidating. Is it worthwhile to send in a related-resume, or is your hiring group just drowning in them?
I’m a sucker for when the form serves as an example for the author’s idea.
> If it were, it wouldn't be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have all kinds of different shapes. Sometimes they're simple and you just state them. But other times they're more subtle, and you need longer, more complicated sentences to tease out all the implications.
From William Zinsser’s On Writing Well:
> The growing acceptance of the split in-finitive, or of the preposition at the end of a sentence, proves that formal syntax can't hold the fort forever against a speaker's more comfortable way of getting the same thing said—and it shouldn't. I think a sentence is a fine thing to put a preposition at the end of.
Another from the same book:
> CREEPING NOUNISM. This is a new American disease that strings two or three nouns together where one noun—or, better yet, one verb-will do. Nobody goes broke now; we have money problem areas. It no longer rains; we have precipitation activity or a thunderstorm probability situation. Please, let it rain.
> Today as many as four or five concept nouns will attach themselves to each other, like a molecule chain. Here's a brilliant specimen I recently found: "Communication facilitation skills development intervention." Not a person in sight, or a working verb. I think it's a program to help students write better.
> the rhythm of writing has to match the ideas in it
It's hard for me to tell what the point of the author was from just the part you quoted, but why does this have to be the case? I don't have trouble believing that many complex ideas require complex language to describe them, but the idea that it's literally a requirement in order for the writing to be "good" rather than just a usual circumstance isn't obvious to me. If anything, the complexity of this quote just seems to hide the dubious premise.
From the essay’s context, I take it to mean “is benefitted by” rather than “must absolutely”. Maybe my world view is distorted by Zinsser but I see this as an authorism.
A writer can choose to trade off vigor for nuance by hedging. They can preempt arguments with “it is my opinion that” and “one ought to”. But, it is my opinion that, exhaustive disclaimers are not fun to read. I know it’s his opinion — this is posted to his Internet Blog, not a textbook.
Love this post. Writing on programming languages has changed how I think about _programming_ in general.
I often think about this quote from TAPL. This framing of “safety” changed how I design systems.
> Informally, though, safe languages can be defined as ones that make it impossible to shoot yourself in the foot while programming.
> Refining this intuition a little, we could say that a safe language _is one that protects its own abstractions_.
> Safety refers to the language's ability to guarantee the integrity of these abstractions and of higher-level abstractions introduced by the programmer using the definitional facilities of the language. For example, a language may provide arrays, with access and update operations, as an abstraction of the underlying memory. A programmer using this language then expects that an array can be changed only by using the update operation on it explicitly—and not, for example, by writing past the end of some other data structure.
American healthcare is seldom affordable, accessible, or high-quality. We are fixing this for pediatrics. Blueberry is the most affordable option amongst our competitors. We practice the highest quality pediatric telemedicine, as evidenced by our exclusive hiring of board-certified pediatricians and the usage of at-home medical kits. And, we’re accessible 24 hours a day.
Our success is shown in the lives we save, the costs we save our insurers, and our exploding B2B and D2C business.
As you can imagine, pulling off affordable high-quality healthcare is a challenge. It requires a lot of engineering ingenuity, a C-suite aligned with positive patient outcomes above short-term profits, and a great product team.
We use Django, Hotwire Turbo (an HTMX-like framework), Pytorch, Sklearn, and Flutter. Experience in these technologies helps, but what’s more important is general full-stack knowledge, curiosity, and a strong work ethic.
Also, if you haven’t read the linked Oxide RFD#3 [1], I recommend doing so. It has shaped much of our hiring process.
> But how does one assess candidates for such positions? This is an age-old question without a formulaic answer: designing, building, selling, and supporting computing systems is itself too varied to admit a single archetype.
> In terms of evaluation mechanism: using in-person interviewing alone can be highly unreliable and can select predominantly for surface aspects of a candidate’s personality. While we advocate (and indeed, insist upon) interviews, they should come relatively late in the process; as much assessment as possible should be done by allowing the candidate to show themselves as they truly work: on their own, via their creations.
This is awesome -- and terrific to see that our process served as an inspiration! Really love what you've done here in that you've clearly incorporated some of our own lessons but also made it very much your own. All very heartwarming to see; good luck to you and Blueberry on your laudable mission!
I’ve seen a lot of positivity surrounding login.gov on HackerNews. I’ve never used the service and am unfamiliar with the quality of its implementation. Many commenters here point to login.gov as an example of the US government shipping good software. [1]
1. From the end-user’s perspective, what makes this a quality service? Is it simply better than other government alternatives, or does it compete with equivalent modern services from the private sector?
2. From the technologist's perspective, why is this considered quality software? I see it's an open-source Ruby on Rails app[2] with basic documentation, tests, and monitoring. As a non-RoR developer, I'm curious where this project falls on the spectrum from merely adequate to exceptional, and why.
[1] e.g., in this comment section: “login.gov is one of the few government services that as a private sector techie I'm in awe of”
> 1. From the end-user’s perspective, what makes this a quality service? Is it simply better than other government alternatives, or does it compete with equivalent modern services from the private sector?
I couldn't even login to ssa.gov before it was integrated with login.gov. Every year or two I'd give it a shot, it told me my account was locked, I had to visit a Social Security office to get it unlocked. I tried that once; the local office wasn't able to help. Fast forward a few years and the login process has been delegated to login.gov. I was able to prove my identity in the normal way (asked a bunch of questions from my credit report) and finally login.
So let's start with: it works.
But it's at least as good as any SSO that I use elsewhere (Okta, Apple, Google). It supports multiple factors (security key, passkey, TOTP, etc), something that, e.g., Fidelity only barely offers.
Besides that, it's visually appealing, having a nice modern look.
I'm happy that it sounds like Login.gov is better than the broken solution we had before. At the same time, I do not think a basic functional login system is something that should be celebrated as a success.
Why would this not be a success? The previous system didn’t work, the govt created a specialized team that built a great functional product, and now it works... they fixed a problem? Many would consider that a success.
Maybe don’t look at this through the lens of a tech company or normal business (bc it’s not), but look at I from the perspective of how shite govt tech is. Not sure if you live in the states but you should try apply to unemployment in somewhere like Florida and then report back to me how having a functional login page isn’t a success.
It's funny you say that. The NC DMV used to have a decent site for renewing registration. It was basic but functional. No bling. Took me like 2 minutes to use.
A few years ago they replaced it with a vendor solution (PayIt[1]). It's terrible. The renewal process easily takes 5x as long. The old site was two steps and a couple forms. The new site is this stupid chat bot interface that pretends like it's thinking between the half dozen or so steps it now is. On top of that, I get to pay $3 or something for the privilege of using it.
Annoys me just thinking about it.
I have a whole rant about our local private toll road's web site too. Easily in the bottom 5 sites I have to deal with. I may switch back to MA's EZ Pass just out of spite.
As a Canadian end user with a nexus card, it just works, and it works with less errors and issues than my revenue canada login which has poor UI and steers me towards sign in partners with by making that the natural login with dark patterns. Come to think of it, I'm surprised the nexus program hasn't been cancelled yet.
I didn’t realize at the time, but Oxide’s application process was the best form of interview prep I’ve done. The process forced me to thoroughly document my values and career accomplishments. In later non-Oxide interviews, I effectively recited what I had written my materials. In that way, it has felt less one-sided than every other company application process I’ve gone through. I was able to take away an artifact from the experience, versus being filtered out via a coding challenge. It’s also been rewarding to reflect on my submission from years ago to see how my mindset and skills have evolved.
If you have any interest in working in the pediatric telemedicine space, I encourage you to email me your application. We accept Oxide materials. I’m happy to provide feedback as a hiring manager. My email and our company website are in my bio.
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