DigitalOcean is laying off staff • Hacker News Board

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#221

Post by alexitosrv » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:12 PM UTC

notjustanymike wrote: post #200

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

Would you mind teaching StackExchange a thing or two about PR while you're doing a good job here?

In case someone else, like me, is wondering about what is going on with StackExchange, I think notjustanymike means this: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/342039/firing-commu...

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#222

Post by hashhar » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

DigitalOcean has been instrumental in helping me transition from a college graduate into a professional developer who can build and design entire backends.

Those 5$/mo droplets let me explore a lot of software and run proper production-like benchmarks for my own learning.

Over time I moved a lot of my personal projects and infra over to DO (and started working on new ones now that I had a good provider to host them on).

And now with the new managed offerrings for the CORE technologies people need (databases, caches, K8S etc.) I'm happy to see that I can start being a little more productive with my side projects.

So, in essence I want to thank the people at DigitalOcean for what they've built and continue to build.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#223

Post by imroot » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #185

biztos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a "droplet" going at $7/mo for about half a year and probably used it less than ten hours so far, and not doing anything too heavy when I use it. Every time I think about turning it off I say "yeah but it's only $7 and I like to ssh into it sometimes." I've had a "shared hosting" setup on Dreamhost for at least 15 years, also using pennies per month in capacity, at most. I get that it can be a brutal, low-ma…

I’ll never forgive DigitalOcean for deleting my portfolio site after 5 weeks of nonpayment. 5 weeks. Deleted everything. Yes, I screwed up. But I would have happily paid them. They deleted the backups too. When we inquired as to whether the backups could be restored now that we’ve paid them, they said it was impossible. Blame me if you want and say it’s my fault. It certainly is; I admit that. But why was I paying th…

I had a similar situation, but, a completely different outcome.

I had my wallet stolen on one of my work trips, and had all of my credit cards deactivated and new numbers issued. Digital Ocean's emails went to my "bulk" folder, and I missed the notifications saying that they were going to disable, then deactivate my service.

What caught my attention was one of the support guys emailing me and saying basically, "Hey, I see that you've been a customer for a long time -- we're going to give you 30 more days to fix this (and btw, you still owe us for your services so far) before we delete everything."

That support interaction -- that wasn't flagged as spam -- is literally what kept my data, and it keeps me using Digital Ocean: amazing support.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#224

Post by freehunter » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

shard wrote: post #206

kbar13 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"i was able to pay rent but i forgot and got evicted and it's the landlord's fault!!!!!111"

I haven't decided whether DO did the right thing or not, but to be fair, your analogy should be more in the line of "they evicted me and burned everything of mine in the apartment".

But landlords kind of do that... there’s even an entire TV show dedicated to it, called Storage Wars. People didn’t pay the bill for their storage locker so the owners of the locker sell off all the stuff inside.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#225

Post by jhhdow » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

Real cool to see this kind of explanation provided in the HN comments and not to any of the people who got the axe. DO love!

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#226

Post by barkingcat » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

JDiculous wrote: post #178

Meekro wrote: post #54

Digital Ocean is a great company in a brutal, low-margin industry. Based on having run a similar (now mostly defunct) company in the past, I would guess that 80% of their customers are on the $5/mo plan. That $5/mo has to cover the hardware costs: you're buying expensive physical servers to put the VPSes on, and lots of SSDs too. SSDs have a limited lifetime measured in writes, and some of your customers will leave b…

How is AWS so profitable then?

AWS is just plain more expensive. They charge more money for more parts of services provided.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#227

Post by MuffinFlavored » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:22 PM UTC

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

> We are not running out of money

Are you running at a profit or at a loss?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#228

Post by freehunter » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #170

icedchai wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd get too many support requests from customers wondering why all their data disappeared after they rebooted.

I wonder if you could map the writes to the drive to some sort of permanent storage programatically.

You could. You’d just need some kind of file system driver that connects the application to a more stateful disk so as things pass through temporary memory they’re written to an SSD or HDD.

Of course that already exists, and DO offers it for $5.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#229

Post by busterarm » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:25 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #189

ForHackernews wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're a business that differentiates itself with good customer support, you can just fire expensive customers.

This is probably what I would do. Keep around the high margin customers like the OP, but do something with the Complainy Pants Inc; either force-migrate them to a higher cost service tier, throttle them until they leave, or maybe just slow down their service. The key to remaining competitive in cut-throat industries is knowing where to spend your limited time and money.

And now you've discovered the business model for Planet Fitness.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#230

Post by raiyu » Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

hashhar wrote: post #222

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

DigitalOcean has been instrumental in helping me transition from a college graduate into a professional developer who can build and design entire backends. Those 5$/mo droplets let me explore a lot of software and run proper production-like benchmarks for my own learning. Over time I moved a lot of my personal projects and infra over to DO (and started working on new ones now that I had a good provider to host them o…

Thank you for sharing.

Our goal with DigitalOcean was always to help more people get involved with technology.

The community team that is one of the pillars of DigitalOcean was built by Etel. She herself went through this transition. She graduated college with a liberal arts degree and was working as a bartender because she couldn't get another job.

I gave her a book on programming and told her that if she figured it out I would figure out a way to get her a job. She indeed did figure it out and when DigitalOcean was able to start hiring, she was the first hire we made.

Initially she worked customer support, and soon after we put her in charge of building "community".

She wrote the first several hundred articles herself. She then went on to build an entire team of writers and editors and community managers. And that team also created amazing events both on a local scale as well as Hacktoberfest.

So many people have been thankful for to us for our articles and resources, but they wouldn't be what they are without people like Etel. It's really an expression of who she is and her beliefs and values as a person.

That's why we want to continue investing in community and ensure that those individual developers just getting started feel like they truly have a home at DigitalOcean. Because those are the very same people that built DigitalOcean in the first place.