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Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

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Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#191

Post by Nadya »

noirbot wrote: post #167
Nadya wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never lose your 2FA backup codes or you're locked out of your account forever if you lose your 2FA device - despite support having a verification process to remove 2FA in the event you lost your codes - the support tickets are ignored or unmonitored. I was also a happy DO customer for the last 5 years or so. But now I'm locked out of my account. My fault for losing my codes (DO are the only backup codes I can't seem…

I'm literally in thee process of trying to do this right now and have gotteen responses from their support within an hour or two, including late at night. Maybe stuff got better, but 2FA Recovery seems to not be as bad as you're saying.

I'm glad to hear the process is working for you but I'm also in the process right now.

This is my "Sent" folder: https://imgur.com/a/3D1FSYz

Initial ticket was sent to Support on Jan 23rd, I bumped and asked if there was any issue with the information I provided on Jan 29th or if they needed more information, I then provided February's payment on Feb 7th. I wanted the answer to "The date and amount (in USD) of the last billing transaction by DigitalOcean." to be up-to-date since January's was no longer a valid answer for the information that was being requested.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#192

Post by maerF0x0 »

colinjoy wrote: post #186
maerF0x0 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you're right in that regard. But I'm looking at it as net of the whole system inputs.

You put in one house, I put in one house. There are no resultant houses for others to consume remaining.

Another way to think about it might be manual farm labor. If an acre of food grows enough potatoes to feed 1.2 people (idk if that's true), and it takes 1 person to labor over. The acre is only producing enough food to have .2 people as non-farmers.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#193

Post by jcadam »

eastbound wrote: post #149
jcadam wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not sure if it's better to do it that way (one big cut) rather than multiple waves of smaller layoffs spread over time.

And call it stack ranking. Every six months you lose one person on your team.

Sounds like a good way to create a cutthroat working environment :O.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#194

Post by dcow »

sokoloff wrote: post #184
dcow wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

I spent $3500 on a nice OLED a few years ago. You’re not wrong, but there’s a lot of variance in what you compare.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#195

Post by PragmaticPulp »

reisse wrote: post #142
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 can understand it if you have brought on a lot of fat and you want to lean out your team and need an excuse but outside of that rather narrow situation This doesn't really seem to be a rather narrow situation. The tech companies were hiring like crazy for the past two years. Quick googling shows that DigitalOcean increased headcount by 31% last year. And contrary to the popular opinion here, for me this does soun…

This is a commonly overlooked point. Most of these companies doing layoffs will still have much larger employee counts than they did two years ago.

Hiring in 2021 and 2022 was really out of control at many companies. There was a feeling that companies had to keep even the underperforming engineers earning $200K TC because it was so hard to hire replacements. That has changed, so it makes sense to start cutting the employees who were hired into roles they couldn’t handle.

My company had layoffs late last year. It has only made things more efficient. We lost some good people, but there were too many people assigned to every project. Half of our time was spent dividing up work and coordinating across teams for things that should have been handled by a single team. There was just too much hiring in 2021 when money was cheap.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#196

Post by csomar »

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.

That's how the current economy works.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#197

Post by onemoresoop »

dobbysfirstsock wrote: post #120
jpadkins wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Also the poverty line is a moving target. People with streaming TV and video game consoles are technically in poverty in the US Yea, this is a tricky one. Is there something below poverty? Googling it says the poverty line is $35,801 for a family. I have relatives in a foreign country that would die for $35k (even all things relative). They have a TV but that's about it. No streaming, no reliable cell phones, etc. A…

Depending on where one lives 35k may not even cover rent and food after taxes so that basically leaves you with debt or constantly accruing more and more poverty which in turn it becomes harder and harder to get out of.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#198

Post by ravagat »

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…

> Why handicap yourself in the future just to make one quarter look better? Surely if you have faith your stock options will be worth more if you play the longer game? Is this specifically in reference to "I really don't understand cutting stuff like technical writers etc during these periods." ? If so, do you think technical writers are important business value wise?

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#199

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #172
aCoreyJ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

The difference between being laid off and having job offers versus going onto a growing roll of the unemployed is major. We're not seeing a meaningful increase in unemployment [1][2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ICSA

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CCSA

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#200

Post by csomar »

wwkeyboard wrote: post #55
arroz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech workers are a small portion of workers overall

HN has a lot of main character syndrome. Anyone posting here is closer to 1/330,000,000th of Jay Powell's concern.

Indeed. Dude is concerned about inflation for the US dollar. Last thing he’ll care about is 20-something making 200K a year sending emojis over the Internet.
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