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Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

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Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#181

Post by cramjabsyn »

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…

> I don't really get the motivation for this beyond personal greed

That's all you had to say

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#182

Post by [deleted] »

jpadkins wrote: post #91
MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild to think a country can have both too much employment and millions living below the poverty line.

Not everyone has the same skills and capabilities. Also the poverty line is a moving target. People with streaming TV and video game consoles are technically in poverty in the US. In the 1960-70s, access to those items would be only for ultra wealthy.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#183

Post by Nadya »

ratg13 wrote: post #164
Nadya wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The support ticket email requested I reply back with that information: Details about the payment method on the account, the date and amount of the last transaction by DO, a photo of a government-issued ID, and a photo of you holding the ID next to your face. I provided the payment details, the date and amount of the last transaction as text, a screenshot of my bank statement of the transaction, 2 forms of ID (passpor…

I’ve been burned by companies like this before, but there is no way for anyone to know if you are providing them with correct info, as this is also the easiest way to takeover someone else’s account. The tough lesson to learn is always to deploy from a source code repository. It sucks to lose your stuff, but if you follow best practices it will make you a better developer/architect and things like this will only beco…

My CTF [0] that has been running for years will break and that's honestly my biggest concern. I have no clue how to even get it up and running again because I've mostly forgotten everything I learned to get it setup to begin with... I kept it out of my repo to prevent accidental spoilers if I ever made the repo public - though thinking back I really should have set up a CTF branch and just never published that branch. So lesson learned if I ever make another CTF: extensively document every single step for how to recreate and setup the game again.

Redeploying the site and even saving all the files uploaded to the site are both relatively trivial. The deploy is almost entirely automated and I can still login to my root user panel, download any uploaded files, and transfer them over to the newly deployed site - so I'm only experiencing minor data loss. (eg. the DateUploaded for files will be lost and I don't care enough to try and back that up to restore it)

Hopefully I do everything right and prevent link rot. Thankfully I'm the sole user of my file host so nobody else is losing any data.

[0] If anyone wants to become the 4th and probably final person to ever solve my CTF - you have just shy of 2 weeks before it breaks: https://nadyanay.me/ctf

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#184

Post by sokoloff »

dcow wrote: post #100
sokoloff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some categories do deflate over time. Consumer electronics, cell phone services, toys are examples that are cheaper now than 10, 20, or 30 years ago. You can get a 43" 1080p TV for $150: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-43-class-n10-series-le...

I never quite understood this. For things that are new and novel it makes sense for price to decrease over time, like TV tech (do note that OLEDs today aren't any cheaper so the category is not TVs it’s LCD TVs). But games/toys it does not. It implies quality is lower or efficiency of production is higher and with something like video games I really doubt efficiency is higher. This is why I welcome the $10 price hike…

I paid $3500 for a high quality 480p TV in 1997. A 4K OLED TV that will stomp all over that TV can be had now for under $1500. In nominal dollars, the TV fell by over 50%. In real dollars, it fell by over 75%.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#185

Post by stu2b50 »

gtirloni wrote: post #179
colinmorelli wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because you have money, doesn’t mean you should burn more money than you need to. It’d be one thing if Google had a clear expansion goal that justified the extra headcount and cash burn, but they don’t.

In the end, hiring is a transaction. Google does not have obligations beyond that, and neither do employees toward Google when there is a better transaction or when the terms no longer suit their needs.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#186

Post by colinjoy »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #134
sct202 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gross profit is before a lot of people related expenses are taken out (R&D, sales and marketing, and other admin). Their net income was only $10m for the time frame you're quoting.

Its so crazy to put into perspective. After a whole year, what was their net productivity, with all that tech, all those people, all those degrees? about 25 single family homes.

That idea of productivity is odd to me. If I build a house for you and you build a house for me and we both compensate each other with the same $ amount for the work, is that a net productivity of 0? Two new houses got build.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#187

Post by strickman »

ihatepython wrote: post #71
monero-xmr wrote: post #8

When interest rates are 0%, any amount of growth compounded over years is attractive. When you can get a 5% risk-free return from treasuries, even 7% rate of return is unattractive when compared to the safest asset on earth returning 5%. My point is, layoffs will continue until companies are much more efficient, or interest rates go down.

> When you can get a 5% risk-free return from treasuries, even 7% rate of return is unattractive when compared to the safest asset on earth returning 5%. I got news for you. The riskiest place to park your money right now is government bonds. Long-dated US treasuries are risky. You will end up losing everything. But if you insist on US treasuries, be my guest. I need someone to trade against.

Well of course you don't do long-dated. You open a Vanguard account and put your cash in something like VMFXX; average maturity is 11 days. 4.5%

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#188

Post by marcosdumay »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #35
donavanm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The feds “dual mandate” is "maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates." There’s too much employment at the moment, imperiling price stability and forcing their hand on interest rates. Inflation expectations, particularly”wage spiral”, are tied to unemployment. The historically low unemployment would/should drive further increases in wages due to scarcity/bargaining position of labor. Mo…

Wild to think a country can have both too much employment and millions living below the poverty line.

It is also a joke on the very well (empirically) established characteristic of employment to self-regulate over the same range.

Pretending that the government can push that number low or high for any long period is a joke. It can smooth some noise, or make some extra noise, and that's all.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#189

Post by jaywalk »

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…

> Why do you trust them every day but not on the day of being laid off?

Because they had a job to care about before being laid off. It's entirely possible that being laid off triggers them to take malicious actions that they never would have when they were employed.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#190

Post by marcosdumay »

twoodfin wrote: post #148
contravariant wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too much employment is a weird problem description to begin with. The more I think about it the weirder it gets.

Just imagine an absurdly overheated economy where a few million workers are doing something of really marginal or negative value, like cold calling seniors to sell them dogecoin. That’s not our economy today, but that’s ultimately what the Fed is looking out for, and it’s what you’d get if you have too loose money for too long.

If negative social value work is lucrative, people will do it. If it's not lucrative, people won't do it.

This has no relation at all with the employment rate.

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