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DigitalOcean is laying off staff

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Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#281

Post by Aeolun »

jhhdow wrote: post #225
raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

Real cool to see this kind of explanation provided in the HN comments and not to any of the people who got the axe. DO love!

How do you know they didn’t get that explanation?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#283

Post by amerine »

wgerard wrote: post #193
amerine wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help me understand that “graduate” off sentiment towards Heroku? (Full disclosure: I work on Heroku for Salesforce).

Hey! Totally. I meant that Heroku is incredible for bootstrapping projects, but as time moves forward I usually find myself migrating services from Heroku to just run on AWS directly. There's some friction with AWS (e.g. SSL termination) that Heroku makes incredibly easy, so I usually don't migrate until it's clear that a service is going to continue to exist in the medium term - otherwise the investment isn't worth…

Word, I didn’t take it as a negative either. I just want to eliminate those pain points so you never feel the need to migrate. Do you move to cost-optimize early if a project seems to have legs?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#284

Post by kull »

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

Thank you for this comment. We run our startup on DO and seeing news like this always make me wonder if I should start looking for plan B, a new server provider. Your service is outstanding and a transition of 30+ large droplets to some other provider would be painful so I really hope you guys are doing well.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#285

Post by seppin »

raiyu wrote: post #235
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are not running out of money Are you running at a profit or at a loss?

Our profit/loss for the year is determined by growth rate. In 2013 when we hit product market fit, we ran at a huge loss (on a percent of revenue basis), so much so that we wouldn't be able to survive without raising capital from investors. That or 90% of the customers signing up wouldn't be able to launch a droplet. We are running at a modest loss now, which is ok because we are growing and also because whenever you…

> Our profit/loss for the year is determined by growth rate.

Could you operate at a profit if you wanted to?

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#286

Post by icebraining »

Proziam wrote: post #211
sillysaurusx wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll never forgive DigitalOcean for deleting my portfolio site after 5 weeks of nonpayment. 5 weeks. Deleted everything. Yes, I screwed up. But I would have happily paid them. They deleted the backups too. When we inquired as to whether the backups could be restored now that we’ve paid them, they said it was impossible. Blame me if you want and say it’s my fault. It certainly is; I admit that. But why was I paying th…

The other folks here are giving you a hard time, so I'll just say I actually see things differently here. Things get overlooked, card expiration dates being one of them. Deleting a backup after such a short time is really poor form. Especially because these backups only exist because people need contingencies for machine and human error. Sending a threatening email 'fix your CC in 60 days or everything goes bye-bye'…

DO sends an email when they can't charge. They send a second email 21 days later, when the account gets suspended (which doesn't deleted anything), with essentially your message, except it's 14 days instead of 60.

It's five weeks really poor form but eight acceptable? Seems a bit subjective.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#287

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

raiyu wrote: post #236
avip wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confused to see CEO of a big company just says the truth in simple terms. Did you pass that through legal? :) Thanks, yours, another loyal not-customer-support-harassing 5$/m DO customer.

Haha, thanks but I'm just a cofounder not the CEO, and no it didn't pass through legal =]

I was actually going to comment on how much I like your communication style, so I'm glad to see it getting praise from other HNers.

Besides the lack of BS, I think I can learn a lot from your sentence and paragraph structure. Well-thought-out but to-the-point sentences. Short paragraphs. Direct communication on a difficult subject that shows empathy but doesn't try to sugarcoat.

Thanks, I bookmarked this page just as a reminder of effective communication.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#288

Post by LifeIsBio »

cloverich wrote: post #186
amerine wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help me understand that “graduate” off sentiment towards Heroku? (Full disclosure: I work on Heroku for Salesforce).

(similar boat, use Heroku and some GCP in production for work) -- Heroku is great. But it is a bit limited and very expensive. It feels w/ modern cloud platforms you get something comparable with a little more flexibility for only a little more technical burden, _iff_ you have the chops. GCP / AWS are starting to encroach a bit w/ offerings like Cloud Run, I feel like they are one quality PM away from making a Heroku…

Yea, I would second this.

I've always enjoyed Heroku, but feel like I'm paying a premium because I don't know enough to do "real" cloud work.

"If I were a more experienced developer, I could run this on AWS for pennies on the dollar".

Honestly, I don't know where that sentiment comes from exactly. It's at least partially coupled with the fact that all of add-ons you would need to pay for to run a small business site add up pretty quickly, from what I can tell.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#289

Post by boycaught »

raiyu wrote: post #181

Hey folks, Cofounder of DigitalOcean here. Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number. Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here. We are not prepping the company for sale. As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 m…

Well-stated.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#290

Post by mejari »

echlebek wrote: post #253
georgeecollins wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of a change in direction of the company. People often have skills and ambitions that relate to specific tasks. If the company no longer wants to do those tasks, those people can become redundant.

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.
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