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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#241

Post by lxe »

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…

I wish all company execs made straightforward and human-sounding statements like this one in response to questions about difficult matters.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#242

Post by [deleted] »

alexitosrv wrote: post #221
notjustanymike wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#243

Post by georgeecollins »

sneak wrote: post #232
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…

Why would you lay people off if not to cut costs?

Because of a change in direction of the company. People often have skills and ambitions that relate to specific tasks. If the company no longer wants to do those tasks, those people can become redundant.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#244

Post by kickopotomus »

ogre_codes wrote: post #219
kickopotomus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, iCloud is actually hosted by Google.

This was never the case. They are self hosted and for a while they hosted a fair bit of data on Azure & AWS. Not sure if they still use Azure and AWS, but iCloud has never been on Google's infra. (Other Apple content has been served by Google at various times, maps being the big/ obvious one)

As of 2018, I believe they moved it to Google[1][2].

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17053496/apple-google-clo...

[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses-googl...

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#245

Post by ivankolev »

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…

Almost the same path for me, DO hits the sweetspot for me in terms of features, and the new offerings are looking very pragmatic and thought-out. Thanks DO, I am defunitely increasing my spend on your product!

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#246

Post by tams »

treebornfrog wrote: post #188
donarb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has their own competitive service against DigitalOcean called Lightsail. Their cheapest plan is $3.50 month (512MB/20GB SSD), the bigger plans are roughly similar in pricing and features to DigitalOcean.

The irony of this article is that current customers like myself who read this news are now looking at alternatives. I spend roughly $120/m with DO and have done for the last 2 years. I have a majority 5 usd droplets and 1 20 usd droplet. LightSail may be the way to go for now. Here comes all the migration work.. Fun :)

Last time I touched Lightsail it looked like a t2 instance rebrand without the option to pay for extra CPU credits.

It grinds to a half if you use up your compute stipend and you cannot do anything about it. That's a big risk for a VPS-like use-case.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#247

Post by hashhar »

raiyu wrote: post #230
hashhar wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can honestly say that one of the reasons people hop onto DO is due to those amazing tutorials and documentations. I know I was.

It's surprising really that in all the praise I threw to DigitalOcean the awesome documentation and tutorials flew under my radar. That's not to say that I don't value them. Rather the complete opposite. They had become such an integral part of my life when getting my hands wet with a new technology or a tool or setting up any new software or system that I completely forgot that they were something that someone invested a lot of time writing.

I was still in college/starting out then and had never learned that most developers don't document things (let alone write tutorials). I believed there must be internal websites similar to DO's documentation and tutorials in each company and took DO for granted.

It'd be really great if you could share my thoughts about how great and instrumental the documentation and tutorials have been to Etel and the team specially.

Also, have a great weekend.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#248

Post by zippy »

jimmaswell wrote: post #147
zippy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you, personally, may be a high margin customer, but some, and perhaps a lot, of the $5/no customers are potential liabilities due to not patching software or libraries or choosing terrible passwords for their services, databases, etc. one decent incident can cost a multiple of a year's revenue for the account.

is this just about cpu power from exploits?

no, more like someone's instance gets pwn-ed and is now part of a botnet and DO is getting calls and or isp-blocked and has to devote staff time to the incident.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#249

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

Yeah the way I see digital ocean (from when I first saw it years ago) is you can get professional cloud computing with quick spin ups etc. at a reasonable price. The basic stuff you need - a VM which you can run whatever you want on. I am hosting a side project on a $5 droplet it and sometimes I forget I use Digital Ocean (which is a good thing :-). Just bash command to install NodeJS etc. and a single VM but the uptime has been incredible.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#250

Post by busymom0 »

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…

Thank you for this! As someone who spends okay amount of money on DO ($40, $15, $5, $5), the title of the post gave me a bit of a scare but your comment helped me calm back down. Thank you!

I used to be with AWS before (still use their S3) but now I have switched from EC2 to DO droplets. Only thing I am missing with DO is the ability to set up ACL on the firewall itself so it can only be reached via cloudflare and the firewall IP isn't exposed to outsiders.

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