Engineering a culture

Oxide describes its engineering culture as deliberate and says it shows in how the team handles problems, using a recent regression fix and two colleagues' blog posts as examples. Matt Keeter's work on a bug fix was demonstrated at Demo Friday, an unstructured weekly hour in which anyone at the company can demo anything, which began company-wide in fall 2021 after Sean Klein started demos for his own area. Cliff Biffle's account of the debugging says the team has essentially no internal silos and that Oxide's culture rewards openness, curiosity, and communication. The article says the company pairs its values with implementation choices such as uniform compensation, no formal performance reviews, and recording every meeting, and it describes the only drawback as the difficulty of cultivating culture.