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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#261

Post by sunny--tech »

webscientist wrote: post #91

Omg! Yesterday I read a post where the author admitted that if people believe it's an advert then it is because they want great people to come and work in the company. https://blog.digitalocean.com/from-15-000-database-connectio...

Author here.

I think you might be referring to this:

https://dev.to/digitalocean/from-15-000-database-connections...

Same post, just on a different platform.

For context, I was responding to someone who said the article read like an advertisement for DO. To clarify, this post has nothing to do with the layoffs and was not coordinated for it. I had no prior knowledge of the org restructuring.

I’ve been working on that article on-and-off for over a year. The timing of its publishing and the layoffs are coincidental and unfortunate.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#262

Post by zomglings »

networkimprov wrote: post #148

DO will be just fine when GCP closes a few years hence, which Alphabet accidentally "announced". https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/google-reportedly-set-ambitio...

It seems insane for them to even be speaking about that internally given that:

1. It could scare away enterprise customers who look for reliability on a much longer timescale.

2. The extent of their investment into hiring for GCP. [1]

More likely the author of that article is trying to manufacture news.

[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/google-cloud-single-largest-dr...

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#263

Post by idclip »

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…

A very mature approach, more power to you and i will certainly be checking out your warez.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#264

Post by zomglings »

awinter-py wrote: post #183

IMO part of the value of DO is to have a cloud host that isn't running a competing business. netflix has done fine on AWS but that still feels iffy to me.

Anti-trust fear offers some protection to companies like Netflix.

I wonder if health insurance companies have the same protection given Amazon's moves into the space. [0]

[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-jpmorgan-roll-new-healt...

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#265

Post by maxdo »

My personal opinion , DO is in a middle of nowhere. There are huge vendors like aws google Microsoft, and there are cheap vendors eg hetzner. DO is not as advanced as big guys , lagging behind a lot and still not as cheap as most of the cheap vendors , the only great things about them is their docs. They are great.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#266

Post by fishtacos »

busterarm wrote: post #229
mywittyname wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"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."

How does this apply to Planet Fitness in any way?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#267

Post by alexis_fr »

busymom0 wrote: post #250
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 th…

$140 user here. I need DO to stay online for its simplicity. I simply don’t understand AWS and I’m too scared to wreak a subnet while trying to add lambdas and API Gateways. I wouldn’t mind spending double if necessary. Also, clicking in Create Droplet then on a big « $10, xGB RAM » button is incredibly clear to me. Then I « ansible » it and it’s live.

Please don’t add too many services to Digital Ocean ;)

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#268

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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…

Did they attempt to contact you in those 5 weeks?

A lot of people seem willing to blame you without knowing the answer to this question.

On a different note, this kind of thing is probably one of the top threats to the survivability of a cloud-powered site or service. Alongside vandalism by disgruntled (ex-)employees, I imagine it happens far more often than outages in cloud providers' infrastructure.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#269

Post by SmoothHacker »

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 just wanted to say thank you for providing an amazing service. DO is my number one preferred cloud because using Azure and AWS is incredibly difficult because of their UI. Thank you.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#270

Post by fogetti »

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…

So basically it's due to bad leadership and office politics... In other name incompetence?
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