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Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

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Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#171

Post by dopeboy »

kmshultz wrote: post #72
der-erlkonig wrote: post #48

Hearing that a lot of Community teams were let go, including the teams responsible for tutorials. Seems obvious DigitalOcean doesn't care about developers anymore. But this has been obvious for a while now. I guess their value "Our Community is bigger than just us" only matters when profits are up. Pour one out for DigitalOcean. It's the end of an era.

Yes, I was a technical writer on the content team. I am hearing that our entire team was laid off. It just isn't a big money-maker in these trying times. More of a cost center, I suspect. It's too bad, as DO tutorials and content have been respected for so many years by developers and sysadmins. The end of an era.

Just want to call out that I owe a lot of my career in webdev to DO tutorials. My first stack, LAMP, was heavily covered by DO.

Kudos to you and your teammates.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#172

Post by Octoth0rpe »

aCoreyJ wrote: post #146
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the reason why people keep repeating it is because that's more or less what Powell keeps saying: "Reducing inflation will likely require a sustained period of below-trend growth, and it will very likely require a softening of labor conditions," (source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/federal-reserve-interest-rate-h... ) Softening of labor conditions is pretty directly saying "Increase unemployment". > and why cut…

There is a major difference between "this thing we have to do in order to hit our target 2% inflation rate may unfortunately increase unemployment" and "the fed wants layoffs" Also job numbers have been incredibly good so it's not even generally true unemployment is increasing outside of sectors that are incredibly susceptible to fears of recession.

> There is a major difference between "this thing we have to do in order to hit our target 2% inflation rate may unfortunately increase unemployment" and "the fed wants layoffs"

I don't think that is a major difference to someone who is laid off because of intentional decisions that the fed makes to effect an outcome, knowing that layoffs will be a consequence.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#173

Post by throwaway5959 »

kmshultz wrote: post #72
der-erlkonig wrote: post #48

Hearing that a lot of Community teams were let go, including the teams responsible for tutorials. Seems obvious DigitalOcean doesn't care about developers anymore. But this has been obvious for a while now. I guess their value "Our Community is bigger than just us" only matters when profits are up. Pour one out for DigitalOcean. It's the end of an era.

Yes, I was a technical writer on the content team. I am hearing that our entire team was laid off. It just isn't a big money-maker in these trying times. More of a cost center, I suspect. It's too bad, as DO tutorials and content have been respected for so many years by developers and sysadmins. The end of an era.

Which is crazy because a lot of the stuff I built out initially on DigitalOcean was due to reading the excellent tutorials. I appreciate your efforts.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#174

Post by senko »

time_to_smile wrote: post #163
mguerville wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross Profit isn't a helpful number as it doesn't account for any fixed costs like offices, wages, sales and marketing, etc. Operating profits is a better indicator (EBIT or EBITDA) and also much closer to the holy grail of Free Cash Flow that companies need to keep an eye on to make sure they make payroll and fulfill their interest payments obligation, among other things

Exactly. Parent's comment is only meaningful if you completely ignore paying workers which seems pretty relevant if you're going to be talking about layoffs. I've found a lot of tech workers (including myself) really need to learn how to read an earnings statement. Coursera has an excellent Intro to Financial account course [0] that I've found very helpful in understanding what's really happening at these places. 0.…

Also, Aswath Damodaran has (among loads of other teaching material) a crash course into accounting just enough to get by when reading financial statements:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbp3-AU9v_g&list=PLUkh9m2Bor...

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#176

Post by kijin »

skrebbel wrote: post #159
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting this. I see so many comments that fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between rising interest rates and layoffs, e.g. "Many of these companies have very low debt and don't need to borrow right now, so why do they need to do layoffs?" Interest rates are the key parameter for calculating the present value of future cash flows, which is (theoretically) how companies are valued. When interest…

But why does that matter? Why does a wildly profitable company need to compete with “risk-free investment options”? Why do they need to be an investment option at all? Obviously I’m not understanding something very basic about finance here, but I don’t see how “profitable company is not more profitable than a loan would be” implies layoffs.

The only reason DigitalOcean exists is because people have invested money in it. But those people have every right to invest their money elsewhere if they see a more profitable option, such as U.S. treasury bonds. As a result, DigitalOcean needs to compete with loans, not just other cloud computing companies.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#177

Post by AlwaysRock »

arcturus17 wrote: post #9
kmshultz wrote: post #3

Same here. Rolled over in bed to an email from Yancey to my personal email. Went to my laptop, can't log in, Slack is also dead. Early Spring Break!

Very sorry to hear that, though you seem to have a fairly good outlook about it. Excuse me if it's callous to ask this at this time, but as I've been observing layoffs and been hearing that people are immediately shut down from their systems, I'm wondering: how do they communicate it to you if you can't access your email? Do they reach out to your personal email, call you, send you a letter? I might understand revoki…

> Rolled over in bed to an email from Yancey to my personal email

Personal email. I've heard of people getting linkedin messages too.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#178

Post by kmshultz »

throwawaycopter wrote: post #96
steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why it's necessary to treat employees with such sudden distrust. It is necessary to immediately cut off all access? These employees aren't being fired because they are suspected of perpetrating a crime, right? I I understand the need for layoffs, but I can't respect an organization/leadership that treats people so coldly. This behavior also affects non-fired employees that may have a need to ask kn…

> I don't understand why it's necessary to treat employees with such sudden distrust To be honest, every employee should treat their employers with the same level of distrust. It's important to have mutual mistrust as baseline for a healthy professional relationship.

Thank you for this, I had a good laugh. XD

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#179

Post by gtirloni »

colinmorelli wrote: post #161
jpgvm wrote: post #121

I don't really get the motivation for this beyond personal greed on behalf of executives that are only seeking to prop up the share price in the short term. The market forces at work will force all technology companies down in valuation pretty much regardless, what is the difference of a few extra million market cap to handicap your ability to grow during the next expansion phase? I can understand it if you have brou…

It's not to make one quarter look better, it's to align the company with new market expectations. Investors now are expecting responsible cash burn, since capital has become significantly more expensive than before. Companies exchanging cash for market share are no longer as attractive. Profitability and sustainable growth are the new objectives (personally I wish this was always the goal and think the last 3-5 years…

Maybe this apply at startups but not to established and cash-rich companies like Google.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#180

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

nickjj wrote: post #168
apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the administrative/IT point of view, I understand it entirely. It's a simple risk/value proposition. If an employee gets mad they were laid off (and that does happen) and decides in a fit of rage to start deleting Slack channels, damaging or even just accessing production environments, deleting shared logins in the team password manager, downloading company/employee/customer/client data, stealing company IP, etc…

On paper I agree with all of that but in practice folks who are getting laid off already had access to all of those things every day. Why do you trust them every day but not on the day of being laid off? Unless you're extremely close friends with them at a personal level you don't know what their state of mind is while employed without being laid off. They could do all sorts of destructive things at any point in time…

You don't. But you're also not purposefully doing something that is going induce undue stress and potentially upset or anger the employee. You don't know how anyone is going to react to being told they've been let go. That's not an easy thing to be told and I have seen people get violent afterward.

As an example, about a decade ago, we let go an underperforming employee. His reaction was to walk out of the room before the conversation had finished, take a trash can and dump it onto his desk and computer, then go outside and into his car, pull a gun out of his trunk and start walking around the building rambling like a mad man. We had to go on lockdown and wait for a police response. Prior to that moment, he had never shown a single indication he would react like that and was trustworthy, he just wasn't performing well. If he had been someone with elevated privileges anywhere, he could have instead reacted by going back home or even into his car, accessed systems, and done damage that way.

I get what you're saying, but you're discounting how big a deal it is to lose your job and the things it can do to you mentally. Some people come out the other side of that a completely different person for a while.

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