Yeah, it's more expensive - in this case because of the changes and separate operators on every part of the journey.
I could potentially swap one train for a bus and then take different train and skip one of the buses saving some £5 but extending trip by about a hour at least.
I'm the undergrad who commented earlier. I’ve been poking around the Hubris source code and it’s exactly the kind of stack I want to work on. I'm actually doing the Redox Summer of Code this year, focused on implementing an EEVDF scheduler and a performance testing harness for the kernel.
From the inside, is Oxide a place where a fresh grad can actually be useful? Or is the "complexity floor" of hardware/software co-design so high that you really just need a few decades of experience to be effective? I'd love a reality check on whether I should keep Oxide as a long-term 10-year goal or if there’s a path for people starting out.
Hey! It's nice to see others excited about Oxide. Hubris is an area of the stack I'm not intimately familiar with, but I'll do my best to answer your questions from my perspective.
> From the inside, is Oxide a place where a fresh grad can actually be useful? Or is the "complexity floor" of hardware/software co-design so high that you really just need a few decades of experience to be effective?
I believe Bryan spoke about this publicly on podcast episodes in the past but the answer really is no and yes. Generally, the things we're working on at Oxide require a both depth and breadth of knowledge in various areas of the stack that early career folks don't yet possess. We also have limited bandwidth to assist early career folks because of our small company size. I know this sounds like gate keeping, but mostly everyone at Oxide wants to support early career folks. Unfortunately, the general consensus has been that we just don't have the bandwidth for it and it would be a disservice to a candidate to hire them and not support them the way they would need to be supported. That being said, we're getting bigger and will likely have more bandwidth to change this stance as time passes. If you see a role you'd be a good fit for I do recommend applying. The application process itself is valuable for the applicant.
I just came to know about Oxide the other day, and god damn if it is not a dream workplace! High salary, flat structure, a large open-source presence, and maybe much more! Their blogs are really good too.
I am an undergraduate right now and looking at the people working there, it doesn't seem likely they would hire a fresh grad, I think I have found the yardstick I am going to measure myself by going forward, "Am I skilled enough that I could work at Oxide?". Hope more companies follow suit in putting the people forward!!
After a recent experience with flat structures, i tend to be really suspicious. My experience was a total mess of organization, with slack bipping all the time, and nobody "in charge" of maintaining common sense in the architecture, with a long term vision.
I think flat structures aren't always bad - if the organization is geared towards maintenance and care work, it's essential to be as flat as possible. Another good example would be research labs, where experimentation cannot happen in hierarchical envrionments.
For an organization that has definite goals and have to ship a product by a deadline, a flat structure can surely be detrimental to any progress. In an environment of competition (from outsiders) and scarcity, a flat structure will only create either chaos or an implicit form of hierarchy that is even more cruel than what should have been.
My experience with flat structure is the most stubborn opinionated people end up making all the decisions because they dont budge and get to escape all responsibility for bad calls. Better to have a designated lead.
>Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Yeah there's a famous essay "The tyranny of structurelessness" or something like that. The TL;DR is that there is always a power hierarchy. If there isn't a formal one that just means there's an informal one which is usually much worse.
Good recollection of the title! Looks like it's from 1970 and written by Jo Freeman[0]. This subthread is also reminding me of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1], which I didn't realize had expanded beyond the original essay into a book.
This tends to come up every time flat structures are discussed and it seems like such a failure of imagination that anything other than strict hierarchies could work, despite plenty of counter-examples like Valve. Yes, some people do badly in an environment where you have to have convince people rather than use power to get things done. However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known people assume them to be innate. I'm tired of it being normal to have an incompetent boss.
That's because flat structures are often, or often turn into, "flat-in-name-only" structures.
I don't think the Tyranny of Structurelessness is arguing in favour of hierarchy, or against other forms of organization than hierarchy.
I don't think it's arguing against "flat" or "anarchy" style organizations either.
In essence, I think it's asking us to do whatever we're doing better, more honestly, more effectively, and less stressfully. By acknowledging, clarifying, communicating, and seeking to understand the real operating structures, what's really going on. And then to improve them, using that understanding.
An actually flat organization might be good, I don't know. I've never seen one. I've been in some that claimed to be flat, and became stressful places to work, for the same usual reasons hierarchies can be unpleasant, including incompetent bosses (not called bosses). But I've also had some pleasant experiences in flat organizations, and I prefer it that way, if it's designed and run well.
You don't need strict hierarchies, necessarily (in fact I don't believe 'traditional' hierarchies are in practice ever actually ironclad: the org chart is only ever an approximation of the real power structure). It's more that you should plan your power structure carefully (many forms are possible!), and ideally make it as transparent as possible, as pretending that you won't have one at all is merely an illusion (you will never completely succeed! Firstly because power structures are, in their full glory, ludicrously complex and ever-shifting, but also because hidden information is itself a form of power)
the argument isn't that flat organizations don't work, but that they're even more insidious than actual hierarchies. Zizek gives two great examples of the startup and the modern family. In the startup your boss is still your boss, except officially he's your friend, so you can't even hold him accountable, because there are no bosses. (political analog, traditional socialist parties, we're all comrades so better don't think anything wrong)
In the non-hierarchical family you aren't just ordered to dress up and go see grandma, you're guilt tripped into feeling bad about not seeing grandma, until you do it out of "your own volition". In the non-hierarchy you're not just supposed to be outwardly obedient but free on the inside, you're supposed to be obedient on the inside too. They work well, really well. Unlike the traditional hierarchy the tyranny is absolute because it has no borders and doesn't have to acknowledge itself.
>However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known
exactly, because they're visible. Valve, despite its utopian conditions, is weirdly enough, very secretive
This is my first time hearing of Oxide, but I had the same initial thought after reading this blog post then poking through their site. The degree of careful thought put into their policies and culture is really impressive, at least from the outside. Good for them, I hope they continue to be in a position to have that luxury (genuinely).
The difference in performance in the kind of compute workloads I'm interested in are so improved by SIMD/Vector that there isn't even any point evaluating non-RVV hardware.
Not really, most multilinguals switch between languages so seamlessly that you wouldn't even notice it! It even has given birth to new "languages", take for example Hinglish!!
https://himwant.org - I created this website as a learning log to write blogs about whatever I am currently learning! Just started in the last week of December!
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