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How it started Four years ago, we were struggling to hire. Our team was small (~23 employees), and we knew that we needed many more people to execute on our audacious vision. While we had had success hiring in our personal networks, those networks now felt tapped; we needed to get further afield. As is our wont, we got together as a team and brainstormed: how could we get a bigger and broader applicant pool? One of our engineers, Sean, shared some personal experience: that Oxide’s principles and values were very personally important to him — but that when he explained them to people unfamiliar with the company, they were (understandably?) dismissed as corporate claptrap. Sean had found, however, that there was one surefire way to cut through the skepticism: to explain our approach to compensation. Maybe, Sean wondered, we should talk about it publicly? "I could certainly write a blog entry explaining it," I offered. At this suggestion, the team practically lunged with enthusiasm: the reaction was so uniformly positive that I have to assume that everyone was sick of explaining this most idiosyncratic aspect of Oxide to friends and family. So what was the big deal about our compensation? Well, as a I wrote in the resulting piece, Compensation as a Reflection of Values, our compensation is not merely transparent, but uniform. The piece — unsurprisingly, given the evergreen hot topic that is compensation — got a ton of attention. While some of that attention was negative (despite the piece trying to frontrun every HN hater!), much of it was positive — and everyone seemed to be at least intrigued. And in terms of its initial purpose, the piece succeeded beyond our wildest imagination: it brought a surge of new folks interested in the company. Best of all, the people new to Oxide were interested for all of the right reasons: not the compensation per se, but for the values that the compensation represents. The deeper they dug, the more they found to like — and many who learned about Oxide for the first time through that blog entry we now count as long-time, cherished colleagues. That blog entry was a long time ago now, and today we have ~75 employees (and a shipping product!); how is our compensation model working out for us? How it’s going Before we get into our deeper findings, two updates that are so important that we have updated the blog entry itself. First, the dollar figure itself continues to increase over time (as of this writing in 2025, $207,264); things definitely haven’t gotten (and aren’t getting!) any cheaper. And second, we did introduce variable compensation for some sales roles. Yes, those roles can make more than the rest of us — but they can also make less, too. 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! Those critical updates out of the way, how is it working? There have been a lot of surprises along the way, mostly (all?) of the positive variety. A couple of things that we have learned: People take their own performance really seriously. When some outsiders hear about our compensation model, they insist that it can’t possibly work because "everyone will slack off." I have come to find this concern to be more revealing of the person making the objection than of our model, as our experience has been in fact the opposite: in my one-on-one conversations with team members, a frequent subject of conversation is people who are concerned that they aren’t doing enough (or that they aren’t doing the right thing, or that their work is progressing slower than they would like). I find my job is often to help quiet this inner critic while at the same time stoking what I feel is a healthy urge: when one holds one’s colleagues in high regard, there is an especially strong desire to help contribute — to prove oneself worthy of a superlative team. Our model allows people to focus on their own contribution (whatever it might be). People take hiring really seriously. When evaluating a peer (rather than a subordinate), one naturally has high expectations — and because (in the sense of our wages, anyway) everyone at Oxide is a peer, it shouldn’t be surprising that folks have very high expectations for potential future colleagues. And because the Oxide hiring process is writing intensive, it allows for candidates to be thoroughly reviewed by Oxide employees — who are tough graders! It is, bluntly, really hard to get a job at Oxide. It allows us to internalize the importance of different roles. 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. My rejoinder is simple: think of the best support engineers you’ve worked with; what were they worth? Anyone who has shipped complex systems knows these extraordinary people — calm under fire, deeply technical, brilliantly resourceful, profoundly empathetic — are invaluable to the business. So what if you built a team entirely of folks like that? The response has usually been: well, sure, if you’re going to only hire those folks. Yeah, we are — and we have! It allows for fearless versatility. A bit of a corollary to the above, but subtly different: even though we (certainly!) hire and select for certain roles, our uniform compensation means we can in fact think primarily in terms of people unconfined by those roles. That is, we can be very fluid about what we’re working on, without fear of how it will affect a perceived career trajectory. As a concrete example: we had a large customer that wanted to put in place a program for some of the additional work they wanted to see in the product. The complexity of their needs required dedicated program management resources that we couldn’t spare, and in another more static company we would have perhaps looked to hire. But in our case, two folks came together — CJ from operations, and Izzy from support — and did something together that was in some regards new to both of them (and was neither of their putative full-time jobs!) The result was indisputably successful: the customer loved the results, and two terrific people got a chance to work closely together without worrying about who was dotted-lined to whom. It has allowed us to organizationally scale. Many organizations describe themselves as flat, and a reasonable rebuttal to this are the "shadow hierarchies" created by the tyranny of structurelessness. And indeed, if one were to read (say) Valve’s (in)famous handbook, the autonomy seems great — but the stack ranking decidedly less so, especially because the handbook is conspicuously silent on the subject of compensation. (Unsurprisingly, compensation was weaponized at Valve, which descended into toxic cliquishness.) While we believe that autonomy is important to do one’s best work, we also have a clear structure at Oxide in that Steve Tuck (Oxide co-founder and CEO) is in charge. He has to be: he is held accountable to our investors — and he must have the latitude to make decisions. Under Steve, it is true that we don’t have layers of middle management. Might we need some in the future? Perhaps, but what fraction of middle management in a company is dedicated to — at some level — determining who gets what in terms of compensation? What happens when you eliminate that burden completely? It frees us to both lead and follow. We expect that every Oxide employee has the capacity to lead others — and we tap this capacity frequently. Of course, a company in which everyone is trying to direct all traffic all the time would be a madhouse, so we also very much rely on following one another too! Just as our compensation model allows us to internalize the values of different roles, it allows us to appreciate the value of both leading and following, and empowers us each with the judgement to know when to do which. This isn’t always easy or free of ambiguity, but this particular dimension of our versatility has been essential — and our compensation model serves to encourage it. It causes us to hire carefully and deliberately. Of course, one should always hire carefully and deliberately, but this often isn’t the case — and many a startup has been ruined by reckless expansion of headcount. One of the roots of this can be found in a dirty open secret of Silicon Valley middle management: its ranks are taught to grade their career by the number of reports in their organization. Just as if you were to compensate software engineers based on the number of lines of code they wrote, this results in perverse incentives and predictable disasters — and any Silicon Valley vet will have plenty of horror stories of middle management jockeying for reqs or reorgs when they should have been focusing on product and customers. When you can eliminate middle management, you eliminate this incentive. We grow the team not because of someone’s animal urges to have the largest possible organization, but rather because we are at a point where adding people will allow us to better serve our market and customers. It liberates feedback from compensation. Feedback is, of course, very important: we all want to know when and where we’re doing the right thing! And of course, we want to know too where there is opportunity for improvement. However, Silicon Valley has historically tied feedback so tightly to compensation that it has ceased to even pretend to be constructive: if it needs to be said, performance review processes aren’t, in fact, about improving the performance of the team, but rather quantifying and stack-ranking that performance for purposes of compensation. When compensation is moved aside, there is a kind of liberation for feedback itself: because feedback is now entirely earnest, it can be expressed and received thoughtfully. It allows people to focus on doing the right thing. In a world of traditional, compensation-tied performance review, the organizational priority is around those things that affect compensation — even at the expense of activity that clearly benefits the company. This leads to all sorts of wild phenomena, and most technology workers will be able to tell stories of doing things that were clearly right for the company, but having to hide it from management that thought only narrowly in terms of their own stated KPIs and MBOs. By contrast, over and over (and over!) again, we have found that people do the right thing at Oxide — even if (especially if?) no one is looking. The beneficiary of that right thing? More often than not, it’s our customers, who have uniformly praised the team for going above and beyond. It allows us to focus on the work that matters. Relatedly, when compensation is non-uniform, the process to figure out (and maintain) that non-uniformity is laborious. All of that work — of line workers assembling packets explaining themselves, of managers arming themselves with those packets to fight in the arena of organizational combat, and then of those same packets ultimately being regurgitated back onto something called a review — is work. Assuming such a process is executed perfectly (something which I suppose is possible in the abstract, even though I personally have never seen it), this is work that does not in fact advance the mission of the company. Not having variable compensation gives us all of that time and energy back to do the actual work — the stuff that matters. It has stoked an extraordinary sense of teamwork. For me personally — and as I relayed on an episode of Software Misadventures — the highlights of my career have been being a part of an extraordinary team. The currency of a team is mutual trust, and while uniform compensation certainly isn’t the only way to achieve that trust, boy does it ever help! As Steve and I have told one another more times that we can count: we are so lucky to work on this team, with its extraordinary depth and breadth. While our findings have been very positive, I would still reiterate what we said four years ago: we don’t know what the future holds, and it’s easier to make an unwavering commitment to the transparency rather than the uniformity. That said, the uniformity has had so many positive ramifications that the model feels more important than ever. We are beyond the point of this being a curiosity; it’s been essential for building a mission-focused team taking on a problem larger than ourselves. So it’s not a fit for everyone — but if you are seeking an extraordinary team solving hard problems in service to customers, consider Oxide!
Sometime in late 2007, we had the idea of a DTrace conference. Or really, more of a meetup; from the primordial e-mail I sent: The goal here, by the way, is not a DTrace user group, but more of a face-to-face meeting with people actively involved in DTrace — either by porting it to another system, by integrating probes into higher level environments, by building higher-level tools on top of DTrace or by using it heavily and/or in a critical role. That said, we also don’t want to be exclusionary, so our thinking is that the only true requirement for attending is that everyone must be prepared to speak informally for 15 mins or so on what they are doing with DTrace, any limitations that they have encountered, and some ideas for the future. We’re thinking that this is going to be on the order of 15-30 people (though more would be a good problem to have — we’ll track it if necessary), that it will be one full day (breakfast in the morning through drinks into the evening), and that we’re going to host it here at our offices in San Francisco sometime in March 2008. This same note also included some suggested names for the gathering, including what in hindsight seems a clear winner: DTrace Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con. As if knowing that I should leave an explanatory note to my future self as to why this name was not selected, my past self fortunately clarified: "before everyone clamors for the obvious Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con, you should know that most Millennials don’t (sadly) get the reference." (While I disagree with the judgement of my past self, it at least indicates that at some point I cared if anyone got the reference.) We settled on a much more obscure reference, and had the first dtrace.conf in March 2008. Befitting the style of the time, it was an unconference (a term that may well have hit its apogee in 2008) that you signed up to attend by editing a wiki. More surprising given the year (and thanks entirely to attendee Ben Rockwood), it was recorded — though this is so long ago that I referred to it as video taping (and with none of the participants mic’d, I’m afraid the quality isn’t very good). The conference, however, was terrific, viz. the reports of Adam, Keith and Stephen (all somehow still online nearly two decades later). If anything, it was a little too good: we realized that we couldn’t recreate the magic, and we demurred on making it an annual event. Years passed, and memories faded. By 2012, it felt like we wanted to get folks together again, now under a post-lawnmower corporate aegis in Joyent. The resulting dtrace.conf(12) was a success, and the Olympiad cadence felt like the right one; we did it again four years later at dtrace.conf(16). In 2020, we came back together for a new adventure — and the DTrace Olympiad was not lost on Adam. Alas, dtrace.conf(20) — like the Olympics themselves — was cancelled, if implicitly. Unlike the Olympics, however, it was not to be rescheduled. More years passed and DTrace continued to prove its utility at Oxide; last year when Adam and I did our "DTrace at 20" episode of Oxide and Friends, we vowed to hold dtrace.conf(24) — and a few months ago, we set our date to be December 11th. At first we assumed we would do something similar to our earlier conferences: a one-day participant-run conference, at the Oxide office in Emeryville. But times have changed: thanks to the rise of remote work, technologists are much more dispersed — and many more people would need to travel for dtrace.conf(24) than in previous DTrace Olympiads. Travel hasn’t become any cheaper since 2008, and the cost (and inconvenience) was clearly going to limit attendance. The dilemma for our small meetup highlights the changing dynamics in tech conferences in general: with talks all recorded and made publicly available after the conference, how does one justify attending a conference in person? There can be reasonable answers to that question, of course: it may be the hallway track, or the expo hall, or the after-hours socializing, or perhaps some other special conference experience. But it’s also not surprising that some conferences — especially ones really focused on technical content — have decided that they are better off doing as conference giant O’Reilly Media did, and going exclusively online. And without the need to feed and shelter participants, the logistics for running a conference become much more tenable — and the price point can be lowered to the point that even highly produced conferences like P99 CONF can be made freely available. This, in turn, leads to much greater attendance — and a network effect that can get back some of what one might lose going online. In particular, using chat as the hallway track can be more much effective (and is certainly more scalable!) than the actual physical hallways at a conference. For conferences in general, there is a conversation to be had here (and as a teaser, Adam and I are going to talk about it with Stephen O’Grady and Theo Schlossnagle on Oxide and Friends next week, but for our quirky, one-day, Olympiad-cadence dtrace.conf, the decision was pretty easy: there was much more to be gained than lost by going exclusively on-line. So dtrace.conf(24) is coming up next week, and it’s available to everyone. In terms of platform, we’re going to try to keep that pretty simple: we’re going to use Google Meet for the actual presenters, which we will stream in real-time to YouTube — and we’ll use the Oxide Discord for all chat. We’re hoping you’ll join us on December 11th — and if you want to talk about DTrace or a DTrace-adjacent topic, we’d love for you to present! Keeping to the unconference style, if you would like to present, please indicate your topic in the #session-topics Discord channel so we can get the agenda fleshed out. While we’re excited to be online, there are some historical accoutrements of conferences that we didn’t want to give up. First, we have a tradition of t-shirts with dtrace.conf. Thanks to our designer Ben Leonard, we have a banger of a t-shirt, capturing the spirit of our original dtrace.conf(08) shirt but with an Oxide twist. It’s (obviously) harder to make those free but we have tried to price them reasonably. You can get your t-shirt by adding it to your (free) dtrace.conf ticket. (And for those who present at dtrace.conf, your shirt is on us — we’ll send you a coupon code!) Second, for those who can make their way to the East Bay and want some hangout time, we are going to have an après conference social event at the Oxide office starting at 5p. We’re charging something nominal for that too (and like the t-shirt, you pay for that via your dtrace.conf ticket); we’ll have some food and drinks and an Oxide hardware tour for the curious — and (of course?) there will be Fishpong. Much has changed since I sent that e-mail 17 years ago — but the shared values and disposition that brought together our small community continue to endure; we look forward to seeing everyone (virtually) at dtrace.conf(24)!
Oxide Computer Company and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Work Together to Advance Cloud and HPC Convergence Oxide Computer Company and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) today announced a plan to bring on-premises cloud computing capabilities to the Livermore Computing (LC) high-performance computing (HPC) center. The rack-scale Oxide Cloud Computer allows LLNL to improve the efficiency of operational workloads and will provide users in the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) with new capabilities for provisioning secure, virtualized services alongside HPC workloads. HPC centers have traditionally run batch workloads for large-scale scientific simulations and other compute-heavy applications. HPC workloads do not exist in isolation—there are a multitude of persistent, operational services that keep the HPC center running. Meanwhile, HPC users also want to deploy cloud-like persistent services—databases, Jupyter notebooks, orchestration tools, Kubernetes clusters. Clouds have developed extensive APIs, security layers, and automation to enable these capabilities, but few options exist to deploy fully virtualized, automated cloud environments on-premises. The Oxide Cloud Computer allows organizations to deliver secure cloud computing capabilities within an on-premises environment. On-premises environments are the next frontier for cloud computing. LLNL is tackling some of the hardest and most important problems in science and technology, requiring advanced hardware, software, and cloud capabilities. We are thrilled to be working with their exceptional team to help advance those efforts, delivering an integrated system that meets their rigorous requirements for performance, efficiency, and security. — Steve TuckCEO at Oxide Computer Company Leveraging the new Oxide Cloud Computer, LLNL will enable staff to provision virtual machines (VMs) and services via self-service APIs, improving operations and modernizing aspects of system management. In addition, LLNL will use the Oxide rack as a proving ground for secure multi-tenancy and for smooth integration with the LLNL-developed Flux resource manager. LLNL plans to bring its users cloud-like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities that work seamlessly with their HPC jobs, while maintaining security and isolation from other users. Beyond LLNL personnel, researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories will also partner in many of the activities on the Oxide Cloud Computer. We look forward to working with Oxide to integrate this machine within our HPC center. Oxide’s Cloud Computer will allow us to securely support new types of workloads for users, and it will be a proving ground for introducing cloud-like features to operational processes and user workflows. We expect Oxide’s open-source software stack and their transparent and open approach to development to help us work closely together. — Todd GamblinDistinguished Member of Technical Staff at LLNL Sandia is excited to explore the Oxide platform as we work to integrate on-premise cloud technologies into our HPC environment. This advancement has the potential to enable new classes of interactive and on-demand modeling and simulation capabilities. — Kevin PedrettiDistinguished Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories LLNL plans to work with Oxide on additional capabilities, including the deployment of additional Cloud Computers in its environment. Of particular interest are scale-out capabilities and disaster recovery. The latest installation underscores Oxide Computer’s momentum in the federal technology ecosystem, providing reliable, state-of-the-art Cloud Computers to support critical IT infrastructure. To learn more about Oxide Computer, visit https://oxide.computer. About Oxide Computer Oxide Computer Company is the creator of the world’s first commercial Cloud Computer, a true rack-scale system with fully unified hardware and software, purpose-built to deliver hyperscale cloud computing to on-premises data centers. With Oxide, organizations can fully realize the economic and operational benefits of cloud ownership, with access to the same self-service development experience of public cloud, without the public cloud cost. Oxide empowers developers to build, run, and operate any application with enhanced security, latency, and control, and frees organizations to elevate IT operations to accelerate strategic initiatives. To learn more about Oxide’s Cloud Computer, visit oxide.computer. About LLNL Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides solutions to our nation’s most important national security challenges through innovative science, engineering, and technology. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Media Contact LaunchSquad for Oxide Computer oxide@launchsquad.com
We are heartbroken to relay that Charles Beeler, a friend and early investor in Oxide, passed away in September after a battle with cancer. We lost Charles far too soon; he had a tremendous influence on the careers of us both. Our relationship with Charles dates back nearly two decades, to his involvement with the ACM Queue board where he met Bryan. It was unprecedented to have a venture capitalist serve in this capacity with ACM, and Charles brought an entirely different perspective on the practitioner content. A computer science pioneer who also served on the board took Bryan aside at one point: "Charles is one of the good ones, you know." When Bryan joined Joyent a few years later, Charles also got to know Steve well. Seeing the promise in both node.js and cloud computing, Charles became an investor in the company. When companies hit challenging times, some investors will hide — but Charles was the kind of investor to figure out how to fix what was broken. When Joyent needed a change in executive leadership, it was Charles who not only had the tough conversations, but led the search for the leader the company needed, ultimately positioning the company for success. Aside from his investment in Joyent, Charles was an outspoken proponent of node.js, becoming an organizer of the Node Summit conference. In 2017, he asked Bryan to deliver the conference’s keynote, but by then, the relationship between Joyent and node.js had become… complicated, and Bryan felt that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. Any rational person would have dropped it, but Charles persisted, with characteristic zeal: if the Joyent relationship with node.js had become strained, so much more the reason to speak candidly about it! Charles prevailed, and the resulting talk, Platform as Reflection of Values, became one of Bryan’s most personally meaningful talks. Charles’s persistence was emblematic: he worked behind the scenes to encourage people to do their best work, always with an enthusiasm for the innovators and the creators. As we were contemplating Oxide, we told Charles what we wanted to do long before we had a company. Charles laughed with delight: "I hoped that you two would do something big, and I am just so happy for you that you’re doing something so ambitious!" As we raised seed capital, we knew that we were likely a poor fit for Charles and his fund. But we also knew that we deeply appreciated his wisdom and enthusiasm; we couldn’t resist pitching him on Oxide. Charles approached the investment in Oxide as he did with so many other aspects: with curiosity, diligence, empathy, and candor. He was direct with us that despite his enthusiasm for us personally, Oxide would be a challenging investment for his firm. But he also worked with us to address specific objections, and ultimately he won over his partnership. We were thrilled when he not only invested, but pulled together a syndicate of like-minded technologists and entrepreneurs to join him. Ever since, he has been a huge Oxide fan. Befitting his enthusiasm, one of his final posts expressed his enthusiasm and pride in what the Oxide team has built. Charles, thank you. You told us you were proud of us — and it meant the world. We are gutted to no longer have you with us; your influence lives on not just in Oxide, but also in the many people that you have inspired. You were the best of venture capital. Closer to the heart, you were a terrific friend to us both; thank you.
Here’s a sobering thought: today, data centers already consume 1-2% of the world’s power, and that percentage will likely rise to 3-4% by the end of the decade. According to Goldman Sachs research, that rise will include a doubling in data center carbon dioxide emissions. As the data and AI boom progresses, this thirst for power shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Two key challenges quickly become evident for the 85% of IT that currently lives on-premises. How can organizations reduce power consumption and corresponding carbon emissions? How can organizations keep pace with AI innovation as existing data centers run out of available power? Figure 1. Masanet et al. (2020), Cisco, IEA, Goldman Sachs Research Rack-scale design is critical to improved data center efficiency Traditional data center IT consumes so much power because the fundamental unit of compute is an individual server; like a house where rooms were built one at a time, with each room having its own central AC unit, gas furnace, and electrical panel. Individual rackmount servers are stacked together, each with their own AC power supplies, cooling fans, and power management. They are then paired with storage appliances and network switches that communicate at arm’s length, not designed as a cohesive whole. This approach fundamentally limits organizations' ability to maintain sustainable, high-efficiency computing systems. Of course, hyperscale public cloud providers did not design their data center systems this way. Instead, they operate like a carefully planned smart home where everything is designed to work together cohesively and is operated by software that understands the home’s systems end-to-end. High-efficiency, rack-scale computers are deployed at scale and operate as a single unit with integrated storage and networking to support elastic cloud computing services. This modern archietecture is made available to the market as public cloud, but that rental-only model is ill-fit for many business needs. Compared to a popular rackmount server vendor, Oxide is able to fill our specialized racks with 32 AMD Milan sleds and highly-available network switches using less than 15kW per rack, doubling the compute density in a typical data center. With just 16 of the alternative 1U servers and equivalent network switches, over 16kW of power is required per rack, leading to only 1,024 CPU cores vs Oxide’s 2,048. Extracting more useful compute from each kW of power and square foot of data center space is key to the future effectiveness of on-premises computing. At Oxide, we’ve taken this lesson in advancing rack-scale design, improved upon it in several ways, and made it available for every organization to purchase and operate anywhere in the world without a tether back to the public cloud. Our Cloud Computer treats the entire rack as a single, unified computer rather than a collection of independent parts, achieving unprecedented power efficiency. By designing the hardware and software together, we’ve eliminated unnecessary components and optimized every aspect of system operation through a control plane with visibility to end-to-end operations. When we started Oxide, the DC bus bar stood as one of the most glaring differences between the rack-scale machines at the hyperscalers and the rack-and-stack servers that the rest of the market was stuck with. That a relatively simple piece of copper was unavailable to commercial buyers — despite being unequivocally the right way to build it! — represented everything wrong with the legacy approach. The bus bar in the Oxide Cloud Computer is not merely more efficient, it is a concrete embodiment of the tremendous gains from designing at rack-scale, and by integrating hardware with software. — Bryan Cantrill The improvements we’re seeing are rooted in technical innovation Replacing low-efficiency AC power supplies with a high-efficiency DC Bus Bar This eliminates the 70 total AC power supplies found in an equivalent legacy server rack within 32 servers, two top-of-rack switches, and one out-of-band switch, each with two AC power supplies. This power shelf also ensures the load is balanced across phases, something that’s impossible with traditional power distribution units found in legacy server racks. Bigger fans = bigger efficiency gains using 12x less energy than legacy servers, which each contain as many as 7 fans, which must work much harder to move air over system components. Purpose-built for power efficiency less restrictive airflow than legacy servers by eliminating extraneous components like PCIe risers, storage backplanes, and more. Legacy servers need many optional components like these because they could be used for any number of tasks, such as point-of-sale systems, data center servers, or network-attached-storage (NAS) systems. Still, they were never designed optimally for any one of those tasks. The Oxide Cloud Computer was designed from the ground up to be a rack-scale cloud computing powerhouse, and so it’s optimized for exactly that task. Hardware + Software designed together By designing the hardware and software together, we can make hardware choices like more intelligent DC-DC power converters that can provide rich telemetry to our control plane, enabling future feature enhancements such as dynamic power capping and efficiency-based workload placement that are impossible with legacy servers and software systems. Learn more about Oxide’s intelligent Power Shelf Controller The Bottom Line: Customers and the Environment Both Benefit Reducing data center power demands and achieving more useful computing per kilowatt requires fundamentally rethinking traditional data center utilization and compute design. At Oxide, we’ve proven that dramatic efficiency gains are possible when you rethink the computer at rack-scale with hardware and software designed thoughtfully and rigorously together. Ready to learn how your organization can achieve these results? Schedule time with our team here. Together, we can reclaim on-premises computing efficiency to achieve both business and sustainability goals.
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Today’s my last day at Carta, where I got the chance to serve as their CTO for the past two years. I’ve learned so much working there, and I wanted to end my chapter there by collecting my thoughts on what I learned. (I am heading somewhere, and will share news in a week or two after firming up the communication plan with my new team there.) The most important things I learned at Carta were: Working in the details – if you took a critical lens towards my historical leadership style, I think the biggest issue you’d point at is my being too comfortable operating at a high level of abstraction. Utilizing the expertise of others to fill in your gaps is a valuable skill, but–like any single approach–it’s limiting when utilized too frequently. One of the strengths of Carta’s “house leadership style” is expecting leaders to go deep into the details to get informed and push pace. What I practiced there turned into the pieces on strategy testing and developing domain expertise. Refining my approach to engineering strategy – over the past 18 months, I’ve written a book on engineering strategy (posts are all in #eng-strategy-book), with initial chapters coming available for early release with O’Reilly next month. Fingers crossed, the book will be released in approximately October. Coming into Carta, I already had much of my core thesis about how to do engineering strategy, but Carta gave me a number of complex projects to practice on, and excellent people to practice with: thank you to Dan, Shawna and Vogl in particular! More on this project in the next few weeks. Extract the kernel – everywhere I’ve ever worked, teams have struggled understanding executives. In every case, the executives could be clearer, but it’s not particularly interesting to frame these problems as something the executives need to fix. Sure, that’s true they could communicate better, but that framing makes you powerless, when you have a great deal of power to understand confusing communication. After all, even good communicators communicate poorly sometimes. Meaningfully adopting LLMs – a year ago I wrote up notes on adopting LLMs in your products, based on what we’d learned so far. Since then, we’ve learned a lot more, and LLMs themselves have significantly improved. Carta has been using LLMs in real, business-impacting workflows for over a year. That’s continuing to expand into solving more complex internal workflows, and even more interestingly into creating net-new product capabilities that ought to roll out more widely in the next few months (currently released to small beta groups). This is the first major technology transition that I’ve experienced in a senior leadership role (since I was earlier in my career when mobile internet transitioned from novelty to commodity). The immense pressure to adopt faster, combined with the immense uncertainty if it’s a meaningful change or a brief blip was a lot of fun, and was the inspiration for this strategy document around LLM adoption. Multi-dimensional tradeoffs – a phrase that Henry Ward uses frequent is that “everyone’s right, just at a different altitude.” That idea resonates with me, and meshes well with the ideas of multi-dimensional tradeoffs and layers of context that I find improve decision making for folks in roles that require making numerous, complex decisions. Working at Carta, these ideas formalized from something I intuited into something I could explain clearly. Navigators – I think our most successful engineering strategy at Carta was rolling out the Navigator program, which ensured senior-most engineers had context and direct representation, rather than relying exclusively on indirect representation via engineering management. Carta’s engineering managers are excellent, but there’s always something lost as discussions extend across layers. The Navigator program probably isn’t a perfect fit for particularly small companies, but I think any company with more than 100-150 engineers would benefit from something along these lines. How to create software quality – I’ve evolved my thinking about software quality quite a bit over time, but Carta was particularly helpful in distinguishing why some pieces of software are so hard to build despite having little-to-no scale from a data or concurrency perspective. These systems, which I label as “high essential complexity”, deserve more credit for their complexity, even if they have little in the way of complexity from infrastructure scaling. Shaping eng org costs – a few years ago, I wrote about my mental model for managing infrastructure costs. At Carta, I got to refine my thinking about engineering salary costs, with most of those ideas getting incorporated in the Navigating Private Equity ownership strategy, and the eng org seniority mix model. The three biggest levers are (1) “N-1 backfills”, (2) requiring a business rationale for promotions into senior-most levels, and (3) shifting hiring into cost efficient hiring regions. None of these are the sort of inspiring topics that excite folks, but they are all essential to the long term stability of your organization. Explaining engineering costs to boards/execs – Similarly, I finally have a clear perspective on how to represent R&D investment to boards in the same language that they speak in, which I wrote up here, and know how to do it quickly without relying on any manually curated internal datasets. Lots of smaller stuff, like the no wrong doors policy for routing colleagues to appropriate channels, how to request headcount in a way that is convincing to executives, Act Two rationales for how people’s motivations evolve over the course of long careers (and my own personal career mission to advance the industry, why friction isn’t velocity even though many folks act like it is. I’ve also learned quite a bit about venture capital, fund administration, cap tables, non-social network products, operating a multi-business line company, and various operating models. Figuring out how to sanitize those learnings to share the interesting tidbits without leaking internal details is a bit too painful, so I’m omitting them for now. Maybe some will be shareable in four or five years after my context goes sufficiently stale. As a closing thought, I just want to say how much I’ve appreciated the folks I’ve gotten to work with at Carta. From the executive team (Ali, April, Charly, Davis, Henry, Jeff, Nicole, Vrushali) to my directs (Adi, Ciera, Dan, Dave, Jasmine, Javier, Jayesh, Karen, Madhuri, Sam, Shawna) to the navigators (there’s a bunch of y’all). The people truly are always the best part, and that was certainly true at Carta.
Some major updates to our open-source Automerge library, an introduction to Sketchy Calendars, and a peek at our work on collaborative game development. Also some meta content—a refreshed website, and a talk about how we work.
Test UI outcomes, not API requests. Mock network calls in setup, but assert on what users actually see and experience, not implementation details.
Do you feel that the number of applications needed to land a role has skyrocketed? If so, your instincts are correct. According to a Workday Global Workforce Report in September 2024, job applications are growing at a rate four times faster than job openings. This growth is fuelled by a tight job market as well as the new availability of remote work and online job boards. It’s also one of the results of improved generative AI. Around half of all job seekers use AI tools to create their resumes or fill out applications. More than that, a 2024 survey found that 29 percent of applicants were using AI tools to complete skills tests, while 26 percent employed AI tools to mass apply to positions, regardless of fit or qualifications. This never-before-seen flood of applications poses new hardships for both job candidates and recruiters. Candidates must ensure that their applications stand out enough from the pile to receive a recruiter’s attention. Recruiters, meanwhile, are struggling to manage the sheer number of resumes they receive, and winnow through heaps of irrelevant or unqualified applicants to find the ones they need. These problems worsen if you’re an overseas candidate hoping to find a role in Japan. Japan is a popular country for migrants, thereby increasing the competition for each open position. In addition, recruiters here have set expectations and criteria, some of which can be triggered unknowingly by candidates unfamiliar with the Japanese market. With all this in mind, how can you ensure your resume stands out from the crowd—and is there anything else you can do to pass the screening stage? I interviewed nine recruiters, both external and in-house, to learn how applicants can increase their chances of success. Below are their detailed suggestions on improving your resume, avoiding Japan-specific red flags, and persisting even in the face of rejection. The competition The first questions I asked each recruiter were: How many resumes do you review in a month? How long does it take you to review a resume? Some interviewees work for agencies or independently, while others are employed by the companies they screen applicants for. Surprisingly, where they work doesn’t consistently affect how many resumes they receive. What does affect their numbers is whether they accept candidates from overseas. One anonymous contributor stated the case plainly: “The volume of applications depends on whether the job posting targets candidates in Japan or internationally.” In Japan: we receive around 20–100+ applications within the first three days. Outside of Japan: a single job posting can attract 200–1,000 applications within three days. ”[Because] we are generally only open to current residents of Japan, our total applicant count is around 100 or so in a month,” said Caleb McClain, who is both a Senior Software Engineer and a hiring manager at Lunaris. “In the past, when we accepted applications from abroad it was much higher, though I unfortunately don’t have stats for that period. It was unmanageable for a single person (me) reviewing the applications, though! “Given that I deal with 100 or so per month, I probably spend a bit more time than others screening applications, but it depends. I’ll give every candidate a quick read through within a minute or so and, if I didn’t find a reason to immediately reject them, I’ll spend a few more minutes reading about their experience more deeply. I’ll check out the companies they have listed for their experience if I’m not familiar with them and, if they have a Github or personal projects listed, I’ll also spend a few minutes checking those out.” For companies that accept overseas candidates, the workload is greater. Laine Takahashi, a Talent Acquisition employee at HENNGE, estimated that every month they receive around 200 completed applications for engineering mid-career roles and 270 applications for their Global Internship program. Since their application process starts with a coding test as well as a resume and cover letter, it can take up to two weeks to review, score, and respond to each application. Clement Chidiac, Senior Technical Recruiter at Mercari, explained that the number of resumes he reviews monthly varies widely. “As an example, one of the current roles I am working on received 250+ applications in three weeks. Typically a recruiter at Mercari can work from 5–20 positions at a time, so this gives you an idea.” He also said that his initial quick scan of each resume might take between 5–30 seconds. External recruiters process resumes at a similar rate. Edmund Ho, Principal Consultant for Talisman Corporation, works with around 15 clients a month. To find them, he looks at 20–30 resumes a day, or 600–700 a month, and can only spend 30 seconds to 2 minutes on each one before coming to a decision. Axel Algoet, founder and CEO of InnoHyve, only reviews 200 resumes a month—but “if you count LinkedIn profiles, it’s probably around 1,000.” Why LinkedIn? “I usually start by looking at LinkedIn—the companies they’ve worked at and the roles they’ve had,” Algoet explained. “From there, I can quickly tell whether I’m open to talking with them or not. Since I focus on a very specific segment of roles, I can rapidly identify if a candidate might be a fit for my clients.” Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) Given the sheer volume of resumes to review and respond to, it’s not surprising that companies are using Applicant Tracking Systems. What’s more unexpected is how few recruiters personally use an ATS or AI when evaluating candidates. Both Ho and Algoet reported that though a high percentage of their clients use an ATS—as many as 90 percent, according to Ho—they themselves don’t use one. Ho in particular emphasized that he manually reads every resume he receives. Lunaris doesn’t use an ATS, “unless you count Notion,” joked McClain. “Open to recommendations!” Koji Hamane, Vice President of Human Resources at KOMOJU, said, “Up to 2023, we were managing the pipeline on a spreadsheet basis, and you cannot do it anymore with 3,000 applications [a year]. So it’s more effective and efficient in terms of tracking where each applicant sits in the recruiting process, but it also facilitates communication among [the members of] the interview panel.” The ATS KOMOJU uses is Workable. “Workable, I mean, you know, it works,” Hamane joked. “It’s much better than nothing. . . . Workable actually shows the valid points of the candidates, highlights characteristics, and evaluates the fit for the required positions, like from a 0 to 100 point basis. It helps, but actually you need to go through the details anyway, to properly assess the candidates.” Chidiac explained that Mercari also uses Workable, which has a feature that matches keywords from the job description to the resume, giving the resume a score. “I’ve never made a decision based on that,” said Chidiac. “It’s an indicator, but it’s not accurate enough yet to use it as a decision-making tool.” For example, it doesn’t screen out non-Japanese speakers when Japanese is a requirement for the role. I think these [ATS] tools are going to be better, and they’re going to work. I think it’s a good idea to help junior recruiters. But I think it has to be used as a ‘decision helper,’ not a decision-making tool. There’s also an element of ethics—do you want to be screened out by a robot? HENNGE uses a different ATS, Greenhouse, mostly to communicate with candidates and send them the results of their application. “ Everything they submit,” said Sonam Choden, HENNGE’s Software Engineer Recruiter, “is actually manually checked by somebody in our team. It’s not that everything is automated for the coding test—the bot only checks if they meet the minimum score. Then there is another [human] screener that will actually look over the test itself. If they pass the coding test, then we have another [human] screener looking through each and every document, both the resume and the cover letter.” How to format your resume The good news is that, according to our interviewees, passing the resume screening doesn’t involve trying to master ATS algorithms. However, since many recruiters are manually evaluating a high number of resume every day, they can spend at most only a few minutes on each one. That’s why it’s critical to make your resume stand out positively from the rest. You can see tips on formatting and good practices in our article on the subject, but below recruiters offer detailed explanations of exactly what they’re looking for—and, importantly, what red flags lead to rejection. Red flags The biggest red flags called out by recruiters are frequent job changes, not having skills required by the position, applications from abroad when no visa support is available, mismatches in salary expectations, and lack of required Japanese language ability. Frequent job changes Jumpiness. Job-hopping. Career-switching. Although they had different names for it, nearly everyone listed frequent job changes as the number one red flag on a candidate’s resume—at least, when applying to jobs in Japan. “There’s a term HR in Japan uses: ‘Oh, this guy is jumpy,’” Clement Chidiac told me. When he asked what they meant by that, they told him it referred to a candidate who had only been in their last job for two years or less. “And my first reaction was like, ‘Is that a bad thing?’ I think in the US, and in most tech companies, people change over every two to three years. I remember at my university in France, I was told you need to change your job externally or internally every three years to grow. But in Japan, there’s still the element of loyalty, right?” It’s changing a little bit, but when I have a candidate, a good candidate, that has had four jobs in the past ten years, I know I’m going to get questioned. . . . If I get a candidate that’s changed jobs three times in the past three years, they’re not likely to pass the screening, especially if they’re overseas. “Which is fair, right?” he added. “Because it’s a bit expensive, it’s a bit of a risk, and [it takes] a bit of time.” Why do Japanese companies feel so strongly on this issue? Some of it is simply history—lifetime employment at a single company was the Japanese ideal until quite recently. But as Chidiac pointed out, hiring overseas candidates represents additional investments in both money and time spent navigating the visa system, so it makes sense for Japanese companies to move more cautiously when doing so. Sayaka Sasaki, who was previously employed as a Sourcing Specialist by Tech Japan Inc., told me that recruiters attempt to use past job history to foresee the future. “A lack of consistency in career history can also lead to rejection,” she said. “Recruiters can often predict a candidate’s future career plans and job-switching tendencies based on their past job-change patterns.” Koji Hamane has another reason for considering job tenure. “When you try to leave some achievement or visible impact, [you have to] take some time in the same job, in the same company. So from that perspective, the tenure of each position on a resume really matters. Even though you say, ‘I have this capability and I have this strength,’ your tenure at each company is very short, and [you] don’t leave an impact on those workplaces.” In this sense, Hamane is not evaluating loyalty for its own sake, but considering tenure as a variable to assess the reproducibility of meaningful achievement. For him, achievement and impact—rather than tenure length itself—are the true signals of qualities such as leadership and resilience. Long-time or regular freelancers may face similar scrutiny. Though Chidiac is reluctant to call freelancing a red flag, he acknowledged that it can cause problems. “[With] an engineer that’s been doing freelance for the past three or four years, I know I’m going to get pushback from the hiring team, because they might have worked on three-, four-, five-month projects. They might not have the depth of knowledge that companies on a large scale might want to hire.” Also my question is, if that person has been working on their own for three or four years, how are they going to work in the team? How long are they going to stay with us? Are they going to be happy being part of a company and then maybe having to come to the office, that kind of thing? He gave an example: “If you get 100 applicants for backend engineer roles, it’s sad, but you’re going to go with the ones that fit the most traditional background. If I’m hiring and I’m getting five candidates from PayPay . . . I might prioritize these people as opposed to a freelancer that’s based out of Spain and wants to relocate to Japan, because there are a lot of question marks. That’s the reality of the candidate pool. “Now, if the freelancer in Spain has the exact experience that I want, and I don’t have other applicants, then yeah, of course I’ll talk to that person. I’ll take time to understand [their reasons].” How to “fix” job-hopping on your resume If you have changed jobs frequently, is rejection guaranteed? Not necessarily. These recruiters also offered a host of tips to compensate for job-hopping, freelancing stints, or gaps in your work history. The biggest tip: include an explanation on your resume. Edmund Ho advises offering a “reason for leaving” for short-term jobs, defining short-term as “less than three years.” For example, if the job was a limited contract role, then labelling it as such will prevent Japanese companies from drawing the conclusion that you left prematurely. Lay-offs and failed start-ups will also be looked upon more benevolently than simply quitting. In addition, Ho suggested that those with difficult resumes avail themselves of an agent or recruiter. Since the recruiter will contact the company directly, they have the chance to advocate and explain your job history better than the resume alone can. Sasaki also feels that explanations can help, but added a caveat: “Being honest about what you did during a gap period is not a bad thing. However, it is important to present it in a positive light. For example, if you traveled abroad or spent time at your family home during the gap period, you could write something like this: ‘Once I start a new job, it will be difficult to take a long vacation. So, I took advantage of this break to visit [destination], which I had always dreamed of seeing. Experiencing [specific highlight] was a lifelong goal, and it helped me refresh myself while boosting my motivation for work.’ “If the gap period lasted for more than a year, it is necessary to provide a convincing explanation for the hiring manager. For instance, you could write, ‘I used this time to enhance my skills by studying [specific subject] and preparing for [certification].’ If you have actually obtained a qualification, that would be a perfect way to present your time productively.” Hamane answered the question quite differently. “Do you gamble?” he asked me. He went on: “ When I say ‘gamble,’ ultimately recruiting is decision-making under uncertainty, right? It comes with risks. But the most important question is, what are the downside risks and upside risks?” “In the game of hiring,” Hamane explained, “employers are looking for indicators of future performance. Tenure, to me, is not inherently valuable, but serves as a variable to assess whether a candidate had the opportunity to leave a meaningful impact. It’s not about loyalty or raw length of time, but about whether qualities like resilience or leadership had the chance to emerge. Those qualities often require time. However, I don’t judge the number of years on its own—what matters is whether there is evidence of real contributions.” A shorter tenure with clear impact can be just as strong a signal as longer service. That’s why I view tenure not categorically, but contextually—as one indicator among others. If possible, then, a candidate should focus on highlighting their work contributions and unique strengths in their resume, which can counterbalance the perceived “downside risk” of job-hopping. Incompatibility with the job description Most other red flags can be categorized as “incompatible with the job description.” This includes: Not possessing the required skills Applying from abroad when the position doesn’t offer visa support Mismatch in salary expectations Not speaking Japanese Many of the resumes recruiters receive are wholly unsuited for the position. Hamane estimated that 70 percent of the resumes his department reviews are essentially “random applications.” Almost all the applications are basically not qualified. One of the major reasons why is the Internet. The Internet enables us to apply for any job from anywhere, right? So there are so many applications with no required skills. . . . From my perspective, they are applying on a batch basis, like mass applications. Even if the candidate has the required job skills, if they’re overseas and the position doesn’t offer visa support, their resume almost certainly won’t pass. Caleb McClain, whose company is currently hiring only domestically, said, “The most common reason [for rejection] is the person is applying from abroad. . . . After that, if there’s just a clear skills mismatch, we won’t move forward with them.” Axel Algoet pointed out that nationality can be a problem even if the company is open to hiring from overseas. “I support many companies in the space, aerospace, and defense industries,” he said, “and they are not allowed to hire candidates from certain countries.” It’s important to comprehend any legal issues surrounding sensitive industries before applying, to save both your own and the company’s time. He also mentioned that, while companies do look for candidates with experience at top enterprises, a prestigious background can actually be a red flag—-mostly in terms of compensation. Japanese tech companies on average pay lower wages than American businesses, and a mismatch in expectations can become a major stumbling block in the application process overall. “Especially [for] candidates coming from companies like Indeed or some foreign firms,” Algoet said, “if I know I won’t be able to match or beat their current salary, I tell them upfront.” Not speaking Japanese is another common stumbling block. Companies have different expectations of candidates when it comes to Japanese language ability. Algoet said that, although in his own niche Japanese often isn’t required at all, a Japanese level below JLPT N2 can be a problem for other roles. Sasaki agreed that speaking Japanese to at least the JLPT N3 level would open more doors. Anticipating potential rejection points If you can anticipate why recruiters might reject you, you can structure your resume accordingly, highlighting your strengths while deemphasizing any weak points. For example, if you don’t live in Japan but do speak Japanese, it’s important to bring attention to that fact. “Something that’s annoying,” said Chidiac, “that I’m seeing a lot from a hiring manager point of view, is that they sort of anticipate or presume things. . . . ‘That person has only been in Japan for a year, they can’t speak Japanese.’ But there are some people that have been [going to] Japanese school back home.” That’s why he urges candidates to clearly state both their language ability and their connections to Japan in their resume whenever possible. Chidiac also mentioned seniority issues. “It’s important that you highlight any elements of seniority.” However, he added, “Seniority means different things depending on the environment.” That’s why context is critical in your resume. If you’ve worked for a company in another country or another industry, the recruiter may not intuitively know much about the scale or complexity of the projects you’ve worked on. Without offering some context—the size of the project, the size of the team, the technologies involved, etc.—it’s difficult for recruiters to judge. If you contextualize your projects properly, though, Chidiac believes that even someone with relatively few years of experience may still be viewed favorably for higher roles. If you’ve led a very strong project, you might have the seniority we want. Finally, Edmund Ho suggested an easy trick for those without a STEM degree: just put down the university you graduated from, and not your major. “It’s cheating!” he said with a chuckle. Green flags Creating a great resume isn’t just about avoiding pitfalls. Your resume may also be missing some of the green flags recruiters get excited to see, which can open doors or lead to unexpected offers. Niche skills Niche skills were cited by several as not only being valuable in and of themselves, but also being a great way to open otherwise closed doors. Even when the job description doesn’t call for your unusual ability or experience, it’s probably worth including them in your resume. “I’ll of course take into consideration the requirements as written in our current open listings,” said McClain, “as that represents the core of what we are looking for at any given time. However, I also try to keep an eye out for interesting individuals with skills or experience that may benefit us in ways we haven’t considered yet, or match well with projects that aren’t formally planned but we are excited about starting when we have the time or the right people.” Chidiac agrees that he takes special note of rare skills or very senior candidates on a resume. “We might be able to create an unseeable headcount to secure a rare talent. . . . I think it’s important to have that mindset, especially for niche areas. Machine learning is one that comes to mind, but it could also be very senior [candidates], like staff level or principal level engineers, or people coming from very strong companies, or people that solve problems that we want to solve at the moment, that kind of thing.” I call it the opportunistic approach, like the unusual path, but it’s important to have that in mind when you apply for a company, because you might not be a fit for a role now, but you might not be aware that a role is going to open soon. Sasaki pointed out that niche skills can compensate for an otherwise relatively weak resume, or one that would be bypassed by more traditional Japanese companies. “If the company you are applying to is looking for a niche skill set that only you possess, they will want to speak with you in an interview. So don’t lose hope!” Tailoring to the job description “I don’t think there’s a secret recipe to automatically pass the resume screening, because at the end of the day, you need to match the job, right?” said Chidiac. “But I’ve seen people that use the same resume for different roles, and sometimes it’s missing [relevant] experience or specific keywords. So I think it’s important to really read the job description and think about, ‘Okay, these are all the main skills they want. Let me highlight these in some way.’” If you’re a cloud infrastructure engineer, but you’ve done a lot of coding in the past, or you use a specific technology but it doesn’t show on your CV, you may be automatically rejected either by the recruiter or by the [ATS]. But if you make sure that, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve seen the need for coding skill. I’m going to add that I was a software engineer when I started and I’m doing coding on my side project,’ that will help you with the screening. It’s not necessary to entirely remake your resume each time, Chidiac believes, but you should at least ensure that at the top of the resume you highlight the skills that match the job description. Connections to Japan While most of this advice would be relevant anywhere in the world, recruiters did offer one additional tip for applying in Japan—emphasizing your connection to the country. “Whenever a candidate overseas writes a little thing about any ties to Japan, it usually helps,” said Chidiac. For example, he believes that it helps to highlight your Japanese language ability at the top of your resume. [If] someone writes like, ‘I want to come to Japan,’ ‘I’ve been going to Japanese school for the last five years,’ ‘I’ve got family in Japan,’ . . . that kind of stuff usually helps. Laine Takahashi confirmed that HENNGE shows extra interest in those kinds of candidates. “Either in the cover letter or the CV,” she said, “if they’re not living in Japan, we want them to write about their passion for coming to Japan.” Ho went so far as to state that every overseas candidate he’d helped land a job in Japan had either already learned some Japanese, or had an interest in Japanese culture. Tourists who’d just enjoyed traveling in Japan were less successful, he’d found. How important is a cover letter? Most recruiters had similar advice for candidates, but one serious point of contention arose: cover letters. Depending on their company and hiring style, interviewees’ opinions ranged widely on whether cover letters were necessary or helpful. Cover letters aren’t important “I was trying to remember the last time I read a cover letter,” said Clement Chidiac, “and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever screened an application based on the cover letter.” Instead, Mercari typically requests a resume and poses some screening questions. Chidiac thought this might be a controversial opinion to take, but it was echoed strongly by around half of the other interviewees. When applying to jobs in Japan, there’s no need to write a cover letter, Edmund Ho told me. “Companies in Japan don’t care!” He then added, “One company, HENNGE, uses cover letters. But you don’t need,” he advised, “to write a fancy cover letter.” “I never ask for cover letters,” said Axel Algoet. “Instead, I usually set up a casual twenty-minute call between the hiring manager and the candidate, as a quick intro to decide if it’s worth moving forward with the interview process.” Getting to skip the cover letter and go straight to an early-stage interview is a major advantage Algoet is able to offer his candidates. “That said,” he added, “if a candidate is rejected at the screening stage and I feel the client is making a mistake, we sometimes work on a cover letter together to give it another shot.” Cover letters are extremely important According to Sayaka Sasaki, though, Japanese companies don’t just expect cover letters—they read them quite closely. “Some people may find this hard to believe,” said Sasaki, “but many Japanese companies carefully analyze aspects of a candidate’s personality that cannot be directly read from the text of a cover letter. They expect to see respect, humility, enthusiasm, and sincerity reflected in the writing.” Such companies also expect, or at least hope for, brevity and clarity. “Long cover letters are not a good sign,” said Koji Hamane. “You need to be clear and concise.” He does appreciate cover letters, though, especially for junior candidates, who have less information on their resume. “It supplements [our knowledge of] the candidate’s objectives, and helps us to verify the fit between the candidate’s motivation and the job and the company.” Caleb McClain feels strongly that a good cover letter is the best way for a candidate to stand out from a crowd. “After looking at enough resumes,” he said, “you start to notice similarities and patterns, and as the resume screener I feel a bit of exhaustion over trying to pick out what makes a person unique or better-suited for the position than another.” A well-written and personal cover letter that expresses genuine interest in joining ‘our’ team and company and working on ‘our’ projects will make you stand out and, assuming you meet the requirements otherwise, I will take that interest into serious consideration. “For example,” McClain continued, “we had an applicant in the past who wrote about his experience using our e-commerce site, SolarisJapan, many years ago, and his positive impressions of shopping there. Others wrote about their interests which clearly align with our businesses, or about details from our TokyoDev company profile that appealed to them.” McClain urged candidates to “really tie your experience and interests into what the company does, show us why you’re the best fit! Use the cover letter to stand out in the crowd and show us who you are in ways that a standard resume cannot. If you have interesting projects on Github or blogs on technical topics, share them! But of course,” he added, “make sure they are in a state where you’d want others to read them.” What to avoid in your cover letter “However,” McClain also cautioned, “[cover letters are] a double-edged sword, and for as many times as they’ve caused an application to rise to the top, they’ve also sunk that many.” For this reason, it’s best not to attach a cover letter unless one is specifically requested. Since cover letters are extremely important to some recruiters, however, you should have a good one prepared in advance—and not one authored by an AI tool. “I sometimes receive cover letters,” McClain told me, “that are very clearly written by AI, even going so far as to leave the prompt in the cover letter. Others simply rehash points from their resume, which is a shame and feels like a waste. This is your chance to really sell yourself!” He wasn’t the only recruiter who frowned on using AI. “Avoid simply copying and pasting AI-generated content into your cover letter,” Sasaki advised. “At the very least, you should write the base structure yourself. Using AI to refine your writing is acceptable, but hiring managers tend to dislike cover letters that clearly appear to be AI-written.” Laine Takahashi and Sonam Choden at HENNGE have also received their share of AI-generated letters. Sometimes, Choden explained, the use of AI is blatantly obvious, because the places where the company or applicant’s name should be written aren’t filled out. That doesn’t mean they’re opposed to all use of AI, though. “[The screeners] do not have a problem with the usage of AI technology. It’s just that [you should] show a bit more of your personality,” Takahashi said. She thinks it’s acceptable to use AI “just for making the sentences a bit more pretty, for example, but the story itself is still yours.” A bigger mistake would be not writing a cover letter at all. “There are cases,” Takahashi explained, “where perhaps the candidate thought that we actually don’t look at or read the cover letter.” They sent the CV, and then the cover letter was like, ‘Whatever, you’re not going to read this anyway.’ That’s an automatic fail from our side. “We do understand,” said Choden, “that most developers now think cover letters are an outdated type of process. But for us, there is a lot of benefit in actually going through with the cover letter, because it’s really hard to judge someone by one piece like a resume, right? So the cover letter is perfect to supplement with things that you might not be able to express in a one-page CV.” Other tips for success The interviewees offered a host of other tips to help candidates advance in the application process. Recruiters vs job boards There are pros and cons to working with a recruiter as opposed to applying directly. Partnering with a recruiter can be a complex process in its own right, and candidates should not expect recruiters to guarantee a specific placement or job. Edmund Ho pointed out some of the advantages of working with a recruiter from the start of your job search. Not only can they help fix your resume, or call a company’s HR directly if you’re rejected, but these services are free. After all, external recruiters are paid only if they successfully place you with a company. Axel Algoet also recommended candidates find a recruiter, but he offered a few caveats to this general advice. “Many candidates are unaware of the candidate ownership rule—which means that when a recruiter submits your application, they ‘own’ it for the next 12–18 months. There’s nothing you can do about it after that point.” By that, he means that the agency you work with will be eligible for a fee if you are hired within that timeframe. Other agencies typically won’t submit your application if it is currently “owned” by another. This affects TokyoDev as well: if you apply to a company with a recruiter, and then later apply to another role at that company via TokyoDev within 12 months of the original application, the recruiter receives the hiring fee rather than TokyoDev. That’s why, Algoet said, you should make sure your recruiter is a good fit and can represent you properly. “If you feel they can’t,” he suggested, “walk away.” And if you have less than three years of experience, he suggests skipping a recruiter entirely. “Many companies don’t want to pay recruitment fees for junior candidates,” he added, “but that doesn’t mean they won’t hire you. Reach out to hiring managers directly.” From the internal recruiter’s perspective, Sonam Choden is in favor of candidates who come through job boards. “I think we definitely have more success with job boards where people are actively directly applying, rather than candidates from agents. In terms of the requirements, the candidates introduced by agents have the experience and what we’re looking for, but those candidates introduced by agents might not necessarily be looking for work, or even if they are . . . [HENNGE] might not be their first choice.” Laine Takahashi agreed and cited TokyoDev as one of HENNGE’s best sources for candidates. We’ve been using TokyoDev for the longest time . . . before the [other] job boards that we’re using now. I think TokyoDev was the one that gave us a good head start for hiring inside Japan. “And now we’re expanding to other job boards as well,” she said, “but still, TokyoDev is [at] the top, definitely.” Follow up Ho casually nailed the dilemma around sending a message or email to follow up on your application. “It’s always best to follow up if you don’t hear back,” he said, “but if you follow up too much, it’s irritating.” The question is, how much is too much? When is it too soon to message a recruiter or hiring manager? Ho gave a concrete suggestion: “Send a message after three days to one week.” For Chidiac, following up is a strategy he’s used himself to great effect. “Something that I’ve always done when I look for a job is ping people on LinkedIn, trying to anticipate who is the hiring manager for that role, or who’s the recruiter for that role, and say ‘Hey, I want to apply,’ or ‘I’ve applied.’” [I’ve said] ‘I know I might not be able to do this and this and that, but I’ve done this and this and this. Can we have a quick chat? Do you need me to tailor my CV differently? Do you have any other roles that you think would be a good fit?’ And then, follow up frequently. “This is something that’s important,” he added, “showing that you’ve researched about the company, showing that you’ve attended meetups from time to time, checking the [company] blogs as well. I’ve had people that just said, ‘Hey, I’ve seen on the blogs that you’re working on this. This is what I’ve done in my company. If you’re hiring [for] this team, let me know, right?’ So that could be a good tip to stand out from other applicants. [But] I think there’s no rule. It’s just going to be down to individuals.” “You might,” he continued, “end up talking to someone who’s like, ‘Hey, don’t ever contact me again.’ As an agency recruiter that happened to me, someone said, ‘How did you get my phone [number]? Don’t ever call me again.’ . . . [But] then a lot of the time it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re both French, let’s help each other out,’ or, ‘Oh, yeah, we were at the same university,’ or ‘Hey, I know you know that person.’” Chidiac gave a recent example of a highly-effective follow-up message. “He used to work in top US tech companies for the past 25 years. [After he applied to Mercari], the person messaged me out of the blue: ‘I’m in Japan, I’m semi-retired, I don’t care about money. I really like what Mercari is doing. I’ve done X and Y at these companies.’ . . . So yeah, I was like, I don’t have a role, but this is an exceptional CV. I’ll show it to the hiring team.” There are a few caveats to this advice, however. First, a well-researched, well-crafted follow-up message is necessary to stand out from the crowd—and these days, there is quite a crowd. “Oh my goodness,” Choden exclaimed when I brought up the subject. “I actually wanted to write a post on LinkedIn, apologizing to people for not being able to get back to them, because of the amount of requests to connect and all related to the positions that we have at HENNGE.” Takahashi and Choden explained that many of these messages are attempts to get around the actual hiring process. “Sometimes,” Choden said, “when I do have the time, I try to redirect them. ‘Oh, please, apply here, or go directly to the site,’ because we can’t really do anything, they have to start with the coding test itself. . . . I do look at them,” Choden went on, “and if they’re actually asking a question that I can help with, then I’m more than happy to reply.” Nonetheless, a few candidates have attempted to go over their heads. Sometimes we have some candidates who are asking for updates on their application directly from our CEO. It’s quite shocking, because they send it to his work email as well. “And then he’s like, ‘Is anybody handling this? Why am I getting this email?’,” Choden related. Other applicants have emailed random HENNGE employees, or even members of the overseas branch in Taiwan. Needless to say, such candidates don’t endear themselves to anyone on the hiring team. Be persistent “I know a bunch of people,” Chidiac told me, “that managed to land a job because they’ve tried harder going to meetups, reaching out to people, networking, that kind of thing.” One of those people was Chidiac himself, who in 2021 was searching for an in-house recruiter position in Japan, while not speaking Japanese. In his job hunt, Chidiac was well aware that he faced some major disadvantages. “So I went the extra mile by contacting the company directly and being like, ‘This is what I’ve done, I’ve solved these problems, I’ve done this, I’ve done that, I know the Japanese market . . . [but] I don’t speak Japanese.’” There’s a bit of a reality check that everyone has to have on what they can bring to the table and how much effort they need to [put forth]. You’re going to have to sell yourself and reach out and find your people. “Does it always work? No. Does it often work? No. But it works, right?” said Chidiac with a laugh. “Like five percent of the time it works every time. But you need to understand that there are some markets that are tougher than others.” Ho agreed that job-hunters, particularly candidates who are overseas hoping to work in Japan for the first time, face a tough road. He recommended applying to as many jobs as possible, but in a strictly organized way. “Make an Excel sheet for your applications,” he urged. Such a spreadsheet should track your applications, when you followed up on those applications, and the probation period for reapplying to that company when you receive a rejection. Most importantly, Ho believes candidates should maintain a realistic, but optimistic, view of the process. “Keep a longer mindset,” he suggested. “Maybe you don’t get an offer the first year, but you do the second year.” Conclusion Given the staggering number of applications recruiters must process, and the increasing competition for good roles—especially those open to candidates overseas—it’s easy to become discouraged. Nonetheless, Japan needs international developers. Given Japan’s demographics, as well as the government’s interest in implementing AI and digital transformation (DX) solutions for social problems, that fact won’t change anytime soon. We at TokyoDev suggest that candidates interested in working in Japan adopt two basic approaches. First, follow the advice in this article and also in our resume-writing guide to prevent your resume from being rejected for common flaws. You can highlight niche skills, write an original cover letter, and send appropriate follow-up messages to the recruiters and hiring managers you hope to impress. Second, persistence is key. The work culture in Japan is evolving and there are more openings for new candidates. Japan’s startup scene is also burgeoning, and modern tech companies—such as Mercari—continue to grow and hire. If your long-term goal is to work in Japan, then it’s worth investing the time to keep applying. That said, hopefully the suggestions offered above will help turn what might have been a lengthy job-hunt into a quicker and more successful search. To apply to open positions right now, see our job board. If you want to hear more tips from other international developers in Japan, check out the TokyoDev Discord. We also have articles with more advice on job hunting, relocating to Japan, and life in Japan.
With search getting worse by the day, maybe it's time we rebounded in the other direction. The long forgotten directory. The post Can Directories Rise Again? appeared first on The History of the Web.
