I like it a lot and their thoughtfulness about it but it's a little hollow when they're spending investor money. I'd like to see how this model evolves once they're off the vc teat: when there's a bottom line to answer to, does the dynamic shift? Everyone has an on-site chef when the money vc hose is on. Valve's flat structure was exciting because it wasn't 3 vc's in a coat larping as a business, it was an actual profitable business.

Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward, no matter how much you pay someone in support, there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line. The organization as an organism where every organ is as equally important as the other is a beautiful sentiment but the appendix is getting jettisoned at the first sign of trouble. Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person.

The exception to the rule for sales is the canary in the coal mine: sales measures itself, but every role can (and will) be measured when the pressure is on, there will be competition for budget, and the support team will get squeezed until they're empty while the engineers coast. I would be more convinced that this model could survive outside of the vc bubble if sales had bought in to too. Sales as a competitive sport is cultural, not fundamental.

Anyway, not criticism, just musing, love that they're trying it, even if this doesn't work out, everyone had a few good years, it's worth a shot.

> One of the more incredible (and disturbingly frequent) objections I have heard is: "But is that what you’ll pay support folks?" I continue to find this question offensive, but I no longer find it surprising: the specific dismissal of support roles reveals a widespread and corrosive devaluation of those closest to customers.

The easy way to "pay everyone the same amount" when you sorta don't want to is to outsource everything you don't want to pay the same amount for.

Don't want to pay $200k to your receptionists and cleaners? Rent a serviced office and you get their services without them appearing on your payroll.

Gonna take a positive sentiment on this one - godspeed, oxide! Middle management can often be such a drain on the effectiveness of an organization, that for that reason alone I readily applaud any effort which eliminates at least some layers of it.

Will there be challenges - of course!! What growing business doesn't face challenges? Lots of commenters will argue that your structure won't work for this reason or that... but, what are we comparing to? Most corporate structures don't work either, and are full of crippling amounts of waste. People have just convinced themselves that the usual way of doing things is the only way of doing things.

This seems like the sort of thing that’s only going to work if you have great leadership. Which oxide has, no doubt. It takes a truly unusual leader to channel the ego into making something great for humanity. A lot of executives pay lip service to this, but are actually petty kings who just want to be in charge.

Apparently, I'm one of the people that would have given feedback on the original proposal :).

> Some will say that we should be talking about equity, not cash compensation.

I think of compensation as total compensation. It would be fine to say this is Oxide's salary model. And I think it's a fine choice.

It sounds like the equity grants are naturally variable, though I doubt it's just newer vs older employees:

> As for how equity is determined, it really deserves its own in-depth treatment, but in short, equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.

Edit to add: I assume there aren't cash bonuses for salaried employees. (I've always found it a bit weird anyway, but it's not mentioned explicitly, and would seem against the ethos, too)

Variable pay for sales roles is the driver of vast amounts of broken behaviour. You've seen it it your own companies, but also in the various financial crashes. It immediately sets everyone's goals in non-coherent directions. Wonder why your favourite software is getting so crap? Pressure from "sales execs" cos they are getting a bonus for the poorly thought out, inconsistent crappy feature they sold to some enterprise.

Regardless of the content of the article, I was very impressed with the design of this company's website. Very neat.

For a startup Oxide's compensation model is fine. Eventually it won't be, and that's fine too. Eventually Oxide will get past the early startup phase and mature as a business, and then it will need a much more traditional compensation model in order to acquire and retain talent because new-hires then will not have gotten on at the ground floor. Compensation is a business tool.

> And, importantly: if/when those folks are making more than the rest of us, it’s because they’re selling a lot — a result that can be celebrated by everyone!

This is such a toxic mentality. Yes sales always sits at the end of the value stream, but they aren’t selling thin air. Everyone in the company contributes to making that sale possible. The waiter gets a tip because “everything tasted amazing” but the chef gets stiffed because “he just made it”

As always, they have equality but some are more equal than others. And they are transparent, but obviously not on the parts where transparency would expose the inequality because that wouldn’t be popular.

Wish they would've gone into more detail about the sales exemption - it seems to undermine many of the other points on the page...

I have personally followed the same strategy, but at the expense of my ‘career development’. Trying to perform well or getting a promotion can be a lot of unproductive effort.

I think the only downside of 100% uniformity is that you don’t hire and train junior engineers, which should also be like a duty. While you could pay juniors the exact same salary, this might give that person a lot of stress (“ concerned that they aren’t doing enough“). One solution could be to offer traineeships, where the you offer actual coaching for a fixed duration. While clear goals like: finishing first small task, first doc, led first initiative. Then automatically completing after one or two years.

Always one for transparency in salary (given I share my own, publicly at https://www.jvt.me/salary/) and applaud the model y'all are following!

I understand that currently (and maybe because you are "only" 75 employees) it feels fair for everyone, or people are even feeling bad about it. Also it sets the bar high when hiring someone, I get that.

But what if in a year or two a person is not so great anymore? Just by my own past work experience at 2-3 companies, there were always some colleagues that were definitely not good at their job (and this was pretty much common knowledge, multiple people had the same opinion). Maybe they were good at the beginning, or not even then. I would have felt it to be super unfair for them to get the same money, or the same salary bump as me.

I really hope the best for Oxide and applaud their compensation model.

I applied to one of their roles which required me to write about 10 pages of text to answer all their questions... which I think is a big ask but I did it because "why not".

They took over 3 months to get back to me, but at least they got back to me (with an apology and a polite "no").

As someone who is unfamiliar with your product could you maybe explain to me what your company sells? I looked for a while at your website, and it seems like you sell server hardware, however, when I go to the products section, it talks of demos etc, which sounds more like you sell cloud hosted systems. I don't see any way to find the prices or order the hardware itself. Very confusing website.

You can get most of the benefits of this without the downsides with profit-sharing

The downside is 200k is not enough to compete with the silicon valley for top engineers, but enough to compete with everyone for support, designers etc

The upsides are the ones they listed: getting rid of the bad incentives that yearly reviews bring, focusing people on what really matters (success of the company)

With profit sharing you design per role how much of a share of the profits one should get and everyone in the same role is paid the same. It's not tied to your output, your yearly review, nor your experience and the only way to make it go up is switch roles or make the company grow

If you free up the peer/employee/worker from thinking about the constraints of scarcity of money, doesn't the next resource of scarcity become time (or perhaps, intellectual property)? Which can still lead to a straying from the candor and other ideals this compensation system hopes to promote. The corporation still owns all your time, and all your production during that time.

I just can't help but think this scarcity of resources still causes poor incentives that lead to not as good human/team outcomes. Maybe better than in a "normal" compensation structure though?

OT: how does anyone buy their cloud? Is it only available as a public alpha/beta with remote control? I might have a client interested into this, but needs to have some guarantees that their data remains on-premise.

The post I want to see is: "Oxide's revenue model: how is it going?"

Looking on the website, I just see "try a vm and play with us", I'm super curious how this translates to sales.

Updated: s/rent/try/

I looked at the careers page and could not see any administrative roles - I wonder it they pay the same for these (very impressive if so) or outsource those roles to staffing agencies.

Is there a 1 sentence description of the model? It wasn't apparent in a minute of scrolling down the long winded blog post.

I'm more curious how the business is going? Have they got a Fortune 1000 on board yet?

While there are a few things highlighted in the post that are unique to this flat comp structure (e.g. no middle managers worrying about comp and leveling), for things like “we hold a high hiring bar”, it isn't at all clear that paying everyone the same has has anything to do with where the bar is set.

I wonder why not just make it an employee-owned cooperative at that point?

I understand there are funding considerations, and founders won't get the lion share, but it fits the stated values better.

Very interesting to see Valve's famous org structure and handbook referenced here. Equal salary was a bold move from the start, but that's exactly what a successful company needs to avoid dropping into commodity terrain. This is especially relevant to the Operating System space, I think there's a lot of creativity here and Oxide's approach embraces that.

One thing I've been listening for in the podcasts is a discussion of equity. I'd love to get the company's perspective on equity, options, liquidity, etc. The Silicon Valley Way (tm) of using stock options to "juice" compensation while injecting large amounts of risk and drama into the employee's tax returns is certainly something I'd like to hear Bryan's (and Oxide's) take on.

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