Sucks. Hope it's not financial. I run a bunch of projects on DO, much prefer it over AWS. It's easier to use and straight to the point.
DigitalOcean is laying off staff
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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#22If this cutoffs are made for the sake of increasing profitability of an already profitable company, they are a bad sign in terms of management style and quality - it will affect morale, creativity and enthusiasm of remaining employees.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#23[deleted]
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#24(Throwaway, obviously) I'm a DO employee on the tech side of the house. According to the CTO, the primary reason for this was actually reorg, not financial though that obviously played a part. Mostly managers got cut, with the goal of flattening the org. I'm keeping my ear to the ground but it doesn't seem like there's going to be more cuts any time soon at least. Apparently we're still hiring a ton this year, so tha…
Thanks for the info and best of luck. Re-orgs are hard as the company is trying to find its new identity in the new structure.
I love DO and what it stands for. Sadly, I don't use it outside of personal pet projects.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#26This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work. That being said, and I can’t put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you “graduate” to just using one of the major cloud providers.
It's funny—my experience is pretty much opposite. At a certain scale AWS will provide really world-class support beyond just troubleshooting. DO forwards you to (granted, fairly in-depth) documentation an expects you to read it and engineer your own solutions.
Are you over $500/month spend with DO? They offer a different tier of support at that point which has been solid in my experience.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#27I love DigitalOcean, my second favorite hosting company so this is concerning. As a recent Layoff survivor, this whole paragraph sets off alarm bells:
> In that context, it’s notable that the company not only appointed a new CFO last summer, but also a CEO with prior CFO experience. It’s been a while since DigitalOcean has raised capital. According to PitchBook, DigitalOcean last raised money in 2017, an undisclosed amount from Mighty Capital, Glean Capital, Viaduct Ventures, Black River Ventures, Hanaco Venture Capital, Torch Capital and EG Capital Advisors.
Nothing in particular, but finance guys and VCs tend to squeeze companies dry or push hard for acquisitions. Hopefully I'm wrong here.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#28Everyone is seeing this as negative and a warning sign for DO... but they're an 8 year old privately owned company that has raised over $300m. The last time they obtained funding was a 130m credit line in 2016. It's been 4 years since then... and if they're still losing money, they likely need to either make this profitable, or they're going to need to raise more money. If they're close to being profitable (likely gi…
Agreed in that this isn't an absolute negative. Cost cutting, flattening org structure and pointing towards break-even/profitability is always good.
The old mantra, change or die, is ringing true here. I personally want to see the success of DO because only having good experiences for my pet projects. Sadly no professional prod environments for me.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#29Everyone is seeing this as negative and a warning sign for DO... but they're an 8 year old privately owned company that has raised over $300m. The last time they obtained funding was a 130m credit line in 2016. It's been 4 years since then... and if they're still losing money, they likely need to either make this profitable, or they're going to need to raise more money. If they're close to being profitable (likely gi…
It’s been both for me several times, and the management team made it sound perfectly normal in each case.
When you’re courting investor it’s not uncommon to look at your finances and do some work to make the balance sheet look better. You goose your margins a percent or three. But it’s kinda gaming the numbers because you can’t keep doing it without hurting your revenue. You’re putting a little S-curve on the graph of your margins and what? Hoping some people see the beginning of a hockey stick instead? If the round closes successfully you probably will get a hockey stick soon afterward. But this isn’t when it started.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#30This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work. That being said, and I can’t put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you “graduate” to just using one of the major cloud providers.
Digital Ocean is pretty similar to Vultr: they offer a straight easy API for starting up VMs and managing DNS (I've written a tool that uses both of their API[1]; been meaning to do a post on the differences). It's kinda nice because you're just putting up VMs and there's not the type of vendor lockin you get with AWS/Azure/Google. That being said, DO is obviously trying to compete on that scale now. It has managed d…
You mean Vultr is pretty similar to DO :)
When I worked at DigitalOcean all we could do was shake our head and laugh at how blatantly hard Vultr tried to copy what we did.