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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#361

Post by xenihn »

epiphanitus wrote: post #339
raiyu wrote: post #230

Earlier 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 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…

The tutorials are good, but I hope people realize many of them aren't written by employees.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#362

Post by xenihn »

blowski wrote: post #359
dutchrapley wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason to be apologetic. The fact of the matter is that there are two types of employees, those who work and those who have a job. Employees who work are creating value, whereas employees who have a job are trading time for money. When a company becomes a certain size, it's inevitable that you will hire people looking for a job. Firing people sucks. Yes, it affects their livelihood, but having warm bodies…

I have seen nothing to suggest that the people who have lost their jobs weren't working hard enough or creating enough value. The comment above merely says the jobs they were doing are no longer considered strategically valuable, and that's no fault of their own.

I think his point was that you're no longer creating value when your job is no longer considered valuable.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#363

Post by xenihn »

mejari wrote: post #290
echlebek wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are usually flexible enough to switch directions. I wonder how many of those laid off employees would have been happy to do so given the chance?

I would assume such things were considered. You should also wonder how many people weren't fired because they did switch directions. Don't assume you have the entire story.

>I would assume such things were considered. >Don't assume you have the entire story.

You're contradicting yourself here.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#364

Post by blowski »

xenihn wrote: post #362
blowski wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen nothing to suggest that the people who have lost their jobs weren't working hard enough or creating enough value. The comment above merely says the jobs they were doing are no longer considered strategically valuable, and that's no fault of their own.

I think his point was that you're no longer creating value when your job is no longer considered valuable.

I interpreted it differently, like it was saying "some people are lazy, and you need to get rid of them". If I were one of the people who'd just been made redundant because a layer of management above me changed strategy, I'd find that comment really hurtful.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#365

Post by kick »

AYBABTME wrote: post #355
kick wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-Topic: [anything that] gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Satisfying people's curiosity improves the conversation, and calling someone out in the public square is a good way to create accountability that doesn't exist in private communication.

That's a pretty blank check to write. All kind of awful, distasteful things are satisfying to some people's curiosity. Not all curiosities should be satisfied. IMO the comment I was responding to was going beyond measured, actionable feedback. It was TMI, public dirty laundry based on speculations, from an insider who goes on a limb stating guesses as truths, claiming knowledge of proprietary information. Is HN an ap…

Most curiosities should be gratified, and this isn't an unreasonable one.

They're an employee concerned about their company (and arguably more important, their job security). A public forum like HN is absolutely a way to highlight workplace discrimination, which this person did in a way that doesn't publicly accuse anyone yet allows someone with power ('raiyu in this case) to know who is doing it.

Also, they points out that 'raiyu is lying, or at minimum being misleading, to everyone on HN in his comments. That's valuable to the community.

There's no such thing as proprietary information, and I think most people on HN will agree with that statement. There are secrets, but proprietary information is a buzzword. That sounds like a defense contractor term.

It's also not "guesses as truths." That's a very curious way to describe "shared knowledge." The person seems to have gotten information from their coworkers, and they're talking about it in the context of that.

Sending a private message on another protocol/platform brings zero accountability while reducing the person's anonymity (which they're clearly worried about maintaining), while this at least leaves a mark that can't be deleted (by replying to it, you actually made it so it couldn't be deleted if the person wanted to within the deletion window. That's one of my favorite features of HN; it makes historically-relevant information stay there forever, essentially).

A public forum is an appropriate place to tell someone who has power over you that someone else who has power over you should be fired, especially given Digital Ocean's seeming lack of a way to do so with anonymity otherwise. Anonymous disclosure is necessary for power structures to function without serious abuse.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#367

Post by x0 »

AYBABTME wrote: post #355
kick wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On-Topic: [anything that] gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Satisfying people's curiosity improves the conversation, and calling someone out in the public square is a good way to create accountability that doesn't exist in private communication.

That's a pretty blank check to write. All kind of awful, distasteful things are satisfying to some people's curiosity. Not all curiosities should be satisfied. IMO the comment I was responding to was going beyond measured, actionable feedback. It was TMI, public dirty laundry based on speculations, from an insider who goes on a limb stating guesses as truths, claiming knowledge of proprietary information. Is HN an ap…

Send an anonymous email and you'll be ignored. Reply to a big boss on HN, and you might make some waves.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#368

Post by Havoc »

ogre_codes wrote: post #32
dothrowaway wrote: post #10

(Throwaway, obviously) I'm a DO employee on the tech side of the house. According to the CTO, the primary reason for this was actually reorg, not financial though that obviously played a part. Mostly managers got cut, with the goal of flattening the org. I'm keeping my ear to the ground but it doesn't seem like there's going to be more cuts any time soon at least. Apparently we're still hiring a ton this year, so tha…

It could easily be both a re-org and dressing the profitability numbers prepping for a sale. The fact that its mostly management is encouraging though.

Do founder above just said no sale

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#369

Post by seized »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #312
jjwiseman wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But why was I paying them for backups that they wiped along with my server?" The issue seems to have been that you weren't.

Paid them for four years. If I had known they were going to delete the backups in just over one month, I wouldn’t have risked that. Lost everything when they deleted the backups. They turned off the server on the same day, and it was running fine right up until then. Zero warning other than the emails I didn’t see.

So you didn't pay attention to the emails, didn't pay them, then get mad when they don't store data for free for you? Ok...

How should they get ahold of you? A call that you don't answer? A letter that goes unopened? African swallow laden with a note that you don't see?

Keep backups elsewhere. Regardless of cloud provider or payment terms or whatever. 3-2-1 backups.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#370

Post by [deleted] »

speedplane wrote: post #340
epiphanitus wrote: post #339

Earlier 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…

[deleted]
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