btw congrats on the company. i was skeptical at the time but it was never because you wouldn't attract awesome talent and make great hires. your process looks great to me.

Thanks! And don't worry -- there were PLENTY of reasons for skepticism in 2019! We got lucky many times over, hitting on stuff that turned out to be really important in ways that we couldn't know at the time.

The hiring process is a very concrete example of that. What still blows my mind (at least a little) is that our process came directly out of one of the worst moments in my career: making an absolutely terrible hire about two years before we started Oxide. For a while after that, I wished I could go back and warn my previous self to not make the hire that would be so destructive to the organization -- but in the years at Oxide I have come to realize that that terrible hire was in fact essential for the future Oxide: it was the impetus for putting together a writing-intensive process, and there is no doubt in my mind that I had I not made this atrocious hire, I would have continued to hire the (broken) way that I had been hiring. (I described this a bit in my conversation with Gergely Orosz on hiring.[0])

Anyway: don't get me near the time machine -- I'll only screw things up.

[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/hiring-proc...