I have some qualms with Oxide's hiring philosophy (I will have opinions on anything I allow myself to have opinions on, and "opinions on hiring processes" are part of my personal identity) but I want to call this complaint out.
You can see from this thread that Oxide is a company with an online fan base. If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open. It is extraordinarily difficult to service those kinds of candidate flows. That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it) or other unfriendly/unfair practices --- which are rife across the industry, most especially at companies that don't have the reputation Oxide is trying to cultivate --- but it does give some context to it.
Long story short: you can't really predict how a company treats its team from the first-contact inbound candidate experience. It's a signal, but it's a small signal among a great many others.
> If our own experience at Fly.io is anything to go by, they are getting an avalanche of applications for every role they have open.
It is not just that: it's an avalanche of very high quality applicants. If it were a lot of poor ones, that would be easier! I'm sure yinz get lots of great ones too, but I do think that there is a meaningful difference between "thousands of resume spam people you'd never hire" and "hundreds of good applicants, dozens of great ones". It's more than just the numbers, though the numbers do matter.
> That doesn't excuse ghosting (something we did a bunch even when trying hard to avoid it)
I fully agree, both in that it's not an excuse for ghosting, but also that the reality of things is that sometimes things take longer than they should, even though that sucks. And while you can try to avoid it, and Oxide does, startups are very difficult.