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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#291

Post by mr_toad »

tams wrote: post #246
treebornfrog wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

t2.nano is fine for a low traffic website, which is what most Lightsail instances will be.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#292

Post by neycoda »

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 last raised an equity round in the summer of 2015 and haven't had a need to raise capital since. This is because we are very capital efficient and have been since our founding."

If you haven't had a need to raise capital since your founding because your were capital-efficient, then why did you raise an equity round in 2015?

Either your statement is worded inaccurately or you did need capital funding after your founding, indicating you also need it now or will soon.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#293

Post by getlawgdon »

alexis_fr wrote: post #267
busymom0 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

I'm glad someone said it. I dont understand AWS either.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#294

Post by getlawgdon »

neycoda wrote: post #292
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 last raised an equity round in the summer of 2015 and haven't had a need to raise capital since. This is because we are very capital efficient and have been since our founding." If you haven't had a need to raise capital since your founding because your were capital-efficient, then why did you raise an equity round in 2015? Either your statement is worded inaccurately or you did need capital funding after your fo…

The original wording makes sense. Capital is for scaling an already efficient model.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#295

Post by Proziam »

icebraining wrote: post #286
Proziam wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other folks here are giving you a hard time, so I'll just say I actually see things differently here. Things get overlooked, card expiration dates being one of them. Deleting a backup after such a short time is really poor form. Especially because these backups only exist because people need contingencies for machine and human error. Sending a threatening email 'fix your CC in 60 days or everything goes bye-bye'…

DO sends an email when they can't charge. They send a second email 21 days later, when the account gets suspended (which doesn't deleted anything), with essentially your message, except it's 14 days instead of 60. It's five weeks really poor form but eight acceptable? Seems a bit subjective.

6-week vacations aren't that uncommon, which is a scenario I would expect to encounter if I was DO. If that email doesn't get seen for 6 weeks it definitely shouldn't result in all backups being deleted. Beyond that, it's not unreasonable to imagine health issues or other external circumstances putting someone out of commission for 6 weeks (or even more, making it quite subjective).

All in all, from the moment of non-payment to the moment that everything you have on their servers is gone shouldn't be less than 90 days in my personal opinion. If that raised the cost of my backups by a few dollars, so be it. The backups are there to account for things I may not have been able to consider.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#296

Post by dboreham »

shreyshrey wrote: post #279
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…

Hey thank you for your sincere reply. Felt touched. We use DO (not in a big way though). But it always has worked for us. Just curious, why DO needs an outsider as ceo rather than somebody from founding team?

I have no idea about the specific people here but common reasons: missing skills/experience in the founding team. Sometimes something quite focused such as "have run a public company".

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#297

Post by kup0 »

Proziam wrote: post #295
icebraining wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DO sends an email when they can't charge. They send a second email 21 days later, when the account gets suspended (which doesn't deleted anything), with essentially your message, except it's 14 days instead of 60. It's five weeks really poor form but eight acceptable? Seems a bit subjective.

6-week vacations aren't that uncommon, which is a scenario I would expect to encounter if I was DO. If that email doesn't get seen for 6 weeks it definitely shouldn't result in all backups being deleted. Beyond that, it's not unreasonable to imagine health issues or other external circumstances putting someone out of commission for 6 weeks (or even more, making it quite subjective). All in all, from the moment of non…

> 6-week vacations aren't that uncommon

I would love to live on the planet you live on

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#298

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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…

This doesn’t really track as an explanation. Why couldn’t you restructure teams or retrain people instead of firing them? If it was an internal organizational conflict as you say, it seems rash and strategically unsound to let good people go instead of refactoring the internal conflict in a way that deploys those people in other roles, or at least some of them.

While I don’t think there is anything deceptive or mean-spirited about your comment, it just doesn’t add up, and comes off a bit like the same old corporate verbal shuffling.

Nothing obligates you to comment or speak out on this. Why do so here in this forum if this is all there is to say?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#299

Post by swuecho »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #275
hashhar wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

more and more my google searches lead to DO document and tutorials.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#300

Post by Proziam »

kup0 wrote: post #297
Proziam wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6-week vacations aren't that uncommon, which is a scenario I would expect to encounter if I was DO. If that email doesn't get seen for 6 weeks it definitely shouldn't result in all backups being deleted. Beyond that, it's not unreasonable to imagine health issues or other external circumstances putting someone out of commission for 6 weeks (or even more, making it quite subjective). All in all, from the moment of non…

> 6-week vacations aren't that uncommon I would love to live on the planet you live on

I may have said vacations, but people take time off work for any number of reasons. Paternity/Maternity leave, health, family needs, and so on. I had a 2-month lapse when I moved from Germany to the United States for example.

If there were, for any reason, an internal lapse in communication or processes (imagine small companies...) that could result in a pretty sour situation.

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