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BC Bryan Cantrill Bryan Cantrill Systems engineer who spent fourteen years at Sun Microsystems, where he helped create DTrace and co-founded the Fishworks storage project, then served as VP of...

“Everyone is trying to make the best possible decision, both candidate and company, I think. And it feels like more signal is better there. I also feel like we're… kind of committing to a long-term relationship together. Like, are we, how dare us go out on nine dates before a proposal?”

Oxide and Friends · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · October 2026

“Everyone is trying to make the best possible decision, both candidate and company, I think. And it feels like more signal is better there. I also feel like we're… kind of committing to a long-term relationship together. Like, are we, how dare us go out on nine dates before a proposal?” — Bryan Cantrill, Oxide and Friends

Hacker News commenters objected to the company's interview process, which includes nine conversations with a candidate. The co-founder defends it: concerns that one interviewer raises often turn out to have been seen by others, and that pattern disappears if you cut the process short.

Transcript

Oxide and Friends Around 39:38 into the episode
Bryan Cantrill

…six. And it's like, I don't know, maybe it's nothing. So I, that was, that was a really, that was a weird one for me. But that's interesting to know that they, that Slack thought it was bizarre that you wanted. I think for any senior role, like, I want to talk to as many people as I possibly can.

Adam Leventhal

…me from interviewer to interviewer. So like not only were they just waiting, they weren't waiting to the end to discuss it. They were, you know, whatever pros and cons they saw along the way, they were passing off to the next person to either, you know, poke at or not worry about or whatever. So

Bryan Cantrill

…to be absolutely outraged when you look at our materials process. Or across those conversations, I think it is very useful when someone's, and we've used this a lot where it's like, hey, I think I saw this, or we even like, I think I saw this thing. I actually need this kind of person to talk to them. Let's add to the interview schedule to go because you're trying to make the best possible. Everyone is trying to make the best possible decision, both candidate and company, I think. And it feels like more signal is better there. I also feel like we're going to be, we're kind of committing to a long-term relationship together. Like, are we, how dare us go out on nine dates before a proposal? I mean,

Adam Leventhal

you want to drop this into the comments, but there, I mean, there are people who spend 10, 20, 30 hours on their written materials. So, I mean, that'll just let me more. But, you know, the nine hours, nine hours basically of discussion of the things you wrote, like more or less, you know, that…

Bryan Cantrill

It doesn't feel, yeah, it doesn't. Anyway, so that was, I did not think, I did not see that one coming. So we had our, so we, I'm not even, I guess we, we need actually, we've got five wise, we've got five sons because we've got spin the wheel. We've got like the joker in the deck. And I felt like…

Adam Leventhal

Yeah. I don't know. It's like, I mean, it's a classic bike shed, right? It's like, I mean, people abstractly, I think, are very positive about Oxide and technology. And, you know, there'll be comments like, oh, it's all open source, which is like, you know, I mean, that is true and it's great, but…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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