Building Big Systems with Remote Hardware Teams Oxide Computer Company Blog
The product we’re building, a rack-scale computer, is specifically designed to be a centralized, integrated product because that’s what our customers need. This requirement and the design choices we’ve made to meet this need create some daily efficiency challenges for our team. As a remote-first company, we’re designing this product with team members (including the hardware team) across most North American time zones and even multiple continents, so a large portion of our team is not going into the office/l
Our racks are rather inconvenient for a home installation: over 2.3 m (7.7') tall, very heavy, and have 3-phase power inputs that aren’t usable in a typical residential setting. Aside from the logistical challenges of a home installation, there’s also the actual cost: these are expensive, and outfitting each remote team member with a full, or even partially populated, rack is economically infeasible. Further, a racked target is not terribly useful for development, as accessing them for debugging is challeng