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.
> 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)
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.
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?
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).
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.
"Let's remove all fire extinguishers from campus buildings!" vs "We can't appraise extinguishers as worth $50k each quarters", the reasonable PoV must be somewhere inbetween.
I work at Oxide, and support engineering is worth far more than that. It literally means the rest of us don't have to be on customer oncall all the time — I've spent long stretches of my career doing that and it's extraordinarily stressful. Do you know how valuable that can be?
We're building our product in a way that we stave that off as long as possible! In many ways the whole theory of our product is to avoid that kind of issue.
Depends on the business model, cater to high end clients and having a ~1M$/year doctor be the once answering the phone can be a major selling point.
Further you optimize around costs, when having people answer phones is expensive you try a minimize the need for someone to answer a phone. A 5 minute call with someone making 200k is like 8.50$. Empower them to figure out and fix the underlying issue thus avoiding the next 1,000 calls and that looks cheap.
I don't want to wade too deeply into the argument is a computer support engineer worth 200K USD per year, but this comment really stands out to me:
> Empower them to figure out and fix the underlying issue thus avoiding the next 1,000 calls
Some of the best software engineers that I have worked with saw every support issue as a chance to fix a bug and/or improve logging/docs. Sometimes they built little tools to do more complex support tasks (update complex config) in moments instead of hours. (Yeah, yeah, I know about this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/)
If I were to guess about Oxide's view of "support engineers": They aren't traditional L1/L2 support. They are essentially software devs who happen to excel at support. As a mentioned earlier, if they respond to a customer call (or email), they might have a quick workaround, then go and fix a bug or update logging/docs.
Moving the goalposts so that support engineers with deep technical skillsets are actually software devs is kind of a dick move.
From someone who's worked both sides of the glass -- support engineering is way harder.
You don't get to play in a nice, standardized, performant environment. You're often parachuted into a random customer issue, with little context and an unstable environment, someone nervously watching over your shoulder, and a customer director/VP demanding updates every hour.
And from watching traditional software devs be pulled into those calls and flounder past "works on my machine," live debugging is a very different skillset on top of technical expertise.
Not only do you have to thoroughly understand the happy path, but you also have to tread both known and unknown failure paths.
One of my litmus tests for product companies is how they set up their support orgs and escalation paths: as checkboxes or continuous improvement loops.
The former approach tends to produce shitty products.
I mean, if a software system is not behaving as the user expects, either the software system behavior is incorrect or the system producing the user expectations of the software is incorrect, and wherever the problem is, if it is not fixed it is likely to recur.
Loading up this thread I knew this kind of response would be here. Like, I was willing to bet money on it.
Examples of support people worth $200k+ are abundant, and the business case is the same every time. When you do the work to place a monetary value on customers and their retention your support personnel costs relative to that are easy to justify. When a support person is preventing churn of X number of customers worth $Y dollars a year the math becomes trivial.
The (American) tech industry is so accustomed to massive scale and lack of competition that the notion of giving a damn about customer retention has risen to the level of a cultural, not economic, problem.
I imagine they had to introduce variable comp for sales because they weren’t able to hire even a single good enterprise sales rep for a flat $200k. It’s not a culture thing, it’s just the market rate for the role. If they paid a flat $500k they’d stand a better chance of avoiding variable comp.
I find the whole variable comp for sales so bizarre. It’s like people trying to claim that the only way to get decent work out of programmers is by giving them comp on lines of code written.
Why can’t a salesperson be properly motivated by just, you know, doing their job?
I understand where you are coming from but it doesn't work like that. Sales people are have direct measurement where the rest of us have proxy measurement. They also typically hold pre-existing relationships with potential clients. They take on more risk than any other side of the business except for executives (who are often former sales people).
But if a sales person performs wildly above what is expected of them it can change EVERYTHING for a company. Engineers are actually similar in potential impact, but measurement is a challenge... which is why we are typically paid higher than other cost centers in a business but why we are not on variable comp.
The thing that's unusual about sales is that it's the only metric that anyone's ever found that's (mostly) an exception to Goodhart's Law. Companies would love to pay a lot more people on commission if you could find a way to calculate commissions that gave the desired incentives.
It's not really that it's an exception to Goodharts Law, it's that Goodhart's Law only applies to measured proxies. If the goal of a company is first and foremost to make money, then sales is the only organization within the company that can be measured exactly according to the primary goal of the company rather than a proxy.
Goodhart's Law still applies to the extent that companies have other goals and sales's incentives totally screw those goals up. But they are very effective incentives at increasing money earned.
> If the goal of a company is first and foremost to make money, then sales is the only organization within the company that can be measured exactly according to the primary goal of the company rather than a proxy.
This feels culturally accurate but also reductive. The best sales teams cannot sustainably sell a product that fails to have product-market fit. Likewise, the best product requiring a sales-led GTM will fail if sales teams are not able to understand and articulate the value.
A compensation imbalance between customer-facing and non-facing roles builds an imbalance of power dynamics within a company that will ultimately destabilize the culture and success of a company.
Really good sales people know the literal dollar value of their work. They often times have large networks, existing relationships, and know how to use them to make money. Every really good sales person I’ve ever known gives literally no shits about what anyone tells them because they’re closing. They know it’s their relationships more than anything pulling in the cash. When you’re closing deals for millions upon millions of dollars, if you aren’t getting paid enough there’s a competitor out there willing to do so to buy your relationships.
If engineers knew the literal dollar value they provided they, and could prove it, we’d likely be more motivated by money as well.
Addendum/Edit: I still think the best job ever is selling commercial aircraft. Close a deal on a fleet of 747s? You’d probably make a lot of CEOs blush with that pay day.
Below, we see lots of interesting replies, but none mention the fact that nearly all sales jobs have variable comp. Thus, if you do not offer variable comp, the best sales will never work for you. A good way to think about variable comp: It allows you to attract and retain superstars. In some sense, big tech already does this with their top 5-10% of technical staff by paying regular, large cash/share bonuses.
It's a few things.
1. Sales people see the exact dollar amount they are making for the company. This is different than almost any other role. Most people can't quantify how much value they generate. A lot of people here are arguing that the reason is that there is a direct quantification, but that's not it. The reason is that there is a direct quantification AND they know exactly what it is.
2. These are people that convince others of things for a living. The skills that allow them to be good at their job also allow them to negotiate for extremely favorable compensation mechanisms.
3. At this point, it's how their industry works. If you try something else, you won't be able to hire sales people. They are very competitive, and not idealistic like engineers. You're not going to convince them to take a flat comp structure that is the same as every other employee's.
They are. And they have one job. To sell. So they’re motivated by the only output that matters in their job, how much they sold.
A lot of selling is zero sum. For you to win, if usually means someone (a competitor) has to lose. So it attracts competitive people just like programming tends to attract more analytical people.
There's an underappreciated corollary to sales comp.
1. If they're variable comp.
2. And corp controls equations.
3. Then corp can drive sales outcome it wants by changing equations.
For how messy ground-level sales at scale is (read: relationships, promises, conversations), this nicely simplifies and aligns what leadership wants to happen in sales with what actually happens.
Simply by tying sales comp to whatever the specific sales plays leadership wants more or less of.
Smart sales people are excellent at self-aligning their behavior to compensation incentives.
It's just an industry standard. They are merchants, they could just buy the servers and resell them, so they negotiate a comission/a lower than listing price.
If you actually considet all of the merchants, what's actually uncommon is to be anything other than 100% commission/margin based.
I think of it as "we have a team developing this product, the product makes money, and we use that money to compensate the team". if the team as a whole needs support people in order to do its work, it seems like a great thing to consider those people full-fledged team members deserving of equal compensation.
to the point that their labour does not scale in the same way a software engineer's does - think of the fact that you need more support people to do the amount of revenue generation that fewer devs could do as part of the cost of running the business, rather than as a measure of the fraction of the rewards that should go to them.
No commentary on your latter points about Oxide's compensation structure, but I fundamentally don't share the same sentiment you have about the dynamics of cash flow for venture-backed startups.
Maybe there are still VC-backed companies having catered food, but I think they're by far the exception and not the rule. ZIRP is long over and a decent portion of this generation of startups began in COVID and subsequently don't even have an office. Maybe I'm the one that's in the bubble, but when you take VC money you're on the line to hit growth numbers in a way that you aren't when you bootstrap and can take your time to slowly grow once you've hit ramen profitability.
Having VC money doesn't mean that you can ignore finances. We are in a relatively capital-intensive business compared to a lot of the startups on HN.
> Support is typically low paid because it's a lot of effort for little reward,
Respectfully, I think this attitude is flat-out wrong. Because of this:
> there's only so much impact they can have on the bottom line.
Directly, sure. But that's the fundamental error. Good support is absolutely worth it, and do bring in value, only indirectly. That customer you kept because when they had an issue, it was resolved quickly and professionally? That's money, even if it's more difficult to quantify than sales. And it's not like support engineers aren't doing engineering as well.
> We are in a relatively capital-intensive business compared to a lot of the startups on HN.
Doesn't that just mean that employee compensation is an even smaller percentage of expenses versus other companies? So you can ignore that side of finances even more than other startups?
> Support, no matter how valued and important to the organisation it is, is never worth $200k/year on the output of 1 person.
This reads more like a reflection of how we’ve historically designed support roles than a fundamental truth about them.
Oxide’s approach seems to invert the premise: instead of paying people based on a low-leverage job description, they design roles where every team member is expected to operate at high leverage — including support engineers. That means hiring differently, scoping differently, and building a product that aligns with that structure.
It’s fair to be skeptical of anything cushioned by VC — but skepticism cuts both ways. Just because traditional comp structures haven’t empowered support doesn’t mean they can’t. We’ve seen engineering, design, and even ops roles evolve dramatically when companies raised the bar. Why not support?
> 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.
As someone who was in Support and moved to the sales (engineering) side, I'll put it this way, if we had 3-4 of me in Support, my job would be 2-3-4x as easy.
> Sales as a competitive sport is cultural, not fundamental.
Can you name a single successful business that reflects your claim? Because I don’t know of any successful sales organizations that don’t pay commission.
You hit the nail on the head re sales being the canary in the coalmine. I just read the original post which I found distasteful and on-brand with Cantrill virtue signaling. Everyone is equal but some people are more equal: some get founder equity and some measly basis points. To boot, founders already made their money from Sun Microsystems looking for retirement entertainment and more than 175 or 200k is gonna be taxes anyway. If they hit it big they’ll be billionaires and their employee number 24 will do as much as if they’d gone to FANG with much stress and liquidity concerns along the way.
Sun or otherwise it’s not the beginning of his career. I don’t mean they are billionaires but I’m willing to bet they don’t need to collect cash to pay downpayment like an average Google L4 on their first starter townhouse in Sunnyvale which will get more expensive while they receive their 200ks, so yeah I know exactly what I’m talking about. He knows very well too.
Are you... actually willing to bet? Because I would take the other side of that bet. But please, let's make it meaningful: I still have a mortgage to pay and college-aged kids!
I guess you've basically proven my point, although it appears I may have been poorly communicating it as if I meant you can afford a yacht or not, which I would certainly think would be deserved, but none of my business to comment on: you have a house/mortgage and your kids are now grown to college aged, but for someone who's not had as long of a career, the low-variance compensation means they have fewer opportunities to get ahead by trying harder and totally bound by equity performance [which actually does vary quite a lot, I'd suspect] so the risk-reward of a flat-comp startup generally favors the more established players in the labor market, unless the amount is somewhat above the range of the base salary they'd command elsewhere (which is the case with cash-rich players like OpenAI).
Frankly, when you look around and everyone around you is focused first and foremost on getting rich, that's a good indication that the rich veins have already been mined.
Wealth is built on creating something of value. There is gamesmanship played to acquire that value once it is created, but without the thing itself they are all just picking each others' pockets.
I don't work at Oxide but I have done an Emeryville <-> Sunnyvale commute, so I can confirm that Oxide employees almost certainly do not want to deal with that
To be frank, even if you had a point to make, making outlandish claims about someone else’s personal financial status when I’m willing to bet you know absolutely nothing about it, is pretty distasteful.
And frankly if you don’t like how Cantrill and company structured their compensation incentives, start your own company and do something different?
Huh, this is some Bluesky-level manufactured offended-ness.
The only comment I made about an individual in particular was related to virtue signaling. The financial commentary was about the profile of the founders, not an individual's finances in particular. If you have been a mid-level engineer at FANGs for half that long in Bay Area, riding the tech wave of 2010s alone and bought a house, I would expect they would be in low single digit millions net worth plus or minus, which is be an entirely different league today than someone who is just getting started. This is not a comment on a single person's financial status, but a much more general observation about why the everyone-is-equal model does not result in equal sacrifice by startup employees.
Of course they are more than entitled to their compensation structure for their own company. I am not even objecting to it being appropriate for their circumstances (for example, if you expect all your employees to be relatively senior that might work just fine.) However, once you proselytize a model by writing a blog post, it is fair game for me to comment on it. If you think that's not appropriate, feel free to be offended.
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.