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DigitalOcean is laying off staff
341–350 of 420 posts
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They did. My issue was the timing. They turned off the server and deleted everything, including the backups, in a single day. In contrast, I haven’t paid Dropbox for years and my data is all still there.
I'd rather have lower cost DO than pay to subsidize people who forget to pay for over a month. If you want that, use Dropbox.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
They are hosted on all three, AWS, GCP, and Azure as well as on their own Server in their own DC.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There is almost always a comprehensive article with good overview covering "How to set up X" on their website so when I see it in the search results that's the first place I choose. Even if I don't use DO for that particular project.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#345Earlier 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...
I assumed it was a reference to the ridiculous firing of Monica Cellio. Apparently they've done more stupid stuff?
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#346Digital 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…
> 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 $5/mo plan. Well, to be honest, Vultr has 2.5$ (IPv6 only) and 3.5$ plans. So, if they're getting by, so could DO. https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing I actually migrated from DO to Vultr because at the time…
I do wonder why Vultr doesn't get more attention.
Recently I ave got into Upcloud.com, they have [1] flexible plan that you could mix and match resources, allow me to spin up 20x vCPU, 1GB RAM, 10GB SSD for $168 / month, or 4x vCPU, 128GB RAM, 10GB SSD for $550 / month.
Pretty damn good if you ask me.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. After many months cobbling together a frankenstinean tangle of Kubernetes clusters, db instances and even an AI that could write bad limericks, I got a job as a backend engineer. You have to work your tail off in this job b…
> I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. ... its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn. Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers Programming in the 2010s and 2020s is kind…
>> Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever.
Agreed. I have several (very smart) coworkers in other countries. And our political system is an atrocious thing to watch these days. Whatever happened to compromise?
I don't think anybody really knows for sure what the future holds. The thing is with cloud computing and with the spread of technology into the developing world they will likely be needing engineers too.
Of course that may not happen if the software world is so carved up that all of the business goes to a handful of companies that are employing a fixed number of people and concentrating the gains.
And if Elon Musk has a breakthrough with neuralink, then maybe we'll all be out of a job. Why write code when you can think print('hello world')?
On the other hand, big players can get disrupted, technology can change, and its not like every human being has the capacity/stomach for the abstract problem solving we do day to day.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. After many months cobbling together a frankenstinean tangle of Kubernetes clusters, db instances and even an AI that could write bad limericks, I got a job as a backend engineer. You have to work your tail off in this job b…
> I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. ... its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn. Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers Programming in the 2010s and 2020s is kind…
> Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries.
People have been saying this for like 2 decades now when the magic buzz word then “offshoring” [0]. Offshoring and its cousins still happen as a cost-cutting measure, except not at the scale most people would imagine based on the enormous hype it received from “thought leaders”.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat#Ten_flattene...
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. ... its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn. Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers Programming in the 2010s and 2020s is kind…
> Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. People have been saying this for like 2 decades now when the magic buzz word then “offshoring” [0]. Offshoring and its cousins still happen as a cost-cutting measure, except not at the scale most people would imagine based on the eno…
> People have been saying this for at like 2 decades now when the magic buzz word was “offshoring” [0]. Offshoring and its cousins still happen as a cost-cutting measure, except not at the scale most people would imagine.
I think it is happening at the scale people imagined. The amount of foreign trade and offshoring that the U.S. is doing with developing countries is multiple orders of magnitude higher than it was in the early 1990s.
Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. After many months cobbling together a frankenstinean tangle of Kubernetes clusters, db instances and even an AI that could write bad limericks, I got a job as a backend engineer. You have to work your tail off in this job b…
> I was in a similar position not too long ago. I had nothing but a liberal arts degree, a miserable first career and a yawning resume gap. I just stumbled into coding and I was completely addicted. ... its a life changing opportunity in a field where you get to make things for a living and there's always something new to learn. Thank you thank you thank you cloud providers Programming in the 2010s and 2020s is kind…
What can I do to stay in demand in this field?