Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DigitalOcean is laying off staff

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 420 posts

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#41

Post by chadlavi »

wgerard wrote: post #2

This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work. That being said, and I can’t put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you “graduate” to just using one of the major cloud providers.

I feel like that "this is not serious enough" feeling is an ironic result of the fact that they have such good UX.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#42

Post by cabaalis »

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…

Curious.. does your employment agreement not put you at very, very significant personal risk for putting information out like this? Throwaway account or not?

I'm inclined to trust HN and it's community to a pretty strong degree. But forgive me for simply not seeing this as anything but controlled information release.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#43

Post by toast0 »

kbar13 wrote: post #5
wgerard wrote: post #2

This sucks. I really want DO to succeed because I love their offerings - whereas I occasionally feel like I really do need to RTFM in depth for many AWS offerings (even EC2), DO seemed to just work. That being said, and I can’t put my finger on why necessarily, it sometimes feels a bit like Heroku - the thing you use before you “graduate” to just using one of the major cloud providers.

past a certain point you want your provider to do more and more for you (more features). like you mentioned, AWS is complex but they do pretty much everything for you. I've built systems that are just glued together AWS services.

My experience is the opposite, for less critical systems, it's fine for the provider to do everything; as things get more critical, I want more control.

At that point, all I need from the hosting provider is a server that stays up with a network that stays up. And contacts to skip bullshit triage when the network is broken and their monitoring doesn't show it.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#44

Post by jermaustin1 »

chrisan wrote: post #38
ttul wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also read this as: Digital Ocean raised a $130M credit line and their creditors have noticed that profits aren't what they will need to be in X years time, hence the hair cutting. Their headcount only increased by 4% in the past six months. AWS increased its 10,000+ headcount by 16% in the same time period. I mean, it's all sheer speculation, but I think it is equally likely that Digital Ocean is having a h…

> I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the same world as AWS these days. Having used both daily for years now I can certainly see why DO will have an appeal to some over something as large as AWS. It is way less confusing and their docs are much easier to get through. I always recommend people starting out with cloud VMs to go DO instead of AWS

I agree. If I want to set up something at Digital Ocean, I can know the costs without any complex algebra or a specialized calculator like AWS and Azure have.

Obviously DO has a lot less features than AWS or Azure, but they do add features every couple of years, and their interface is so much simpler to navigate.

I feel DO/Linode/etc are more closely related to a hosted vSphere + f5, than a "cloud provider" in the same vein as AWS/Azure.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#45

Post by [deleted] »

cabaalis wrote: post #42
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…

Curious.. does your employment agreement not put you at very, very significant personal risk for putting information out like this? Throwaway account or not? I'm inclined to trust HN and it's community to a pretty strong degree. But forgive me for simply not seeing this as anything but controlled information release.

[deleted]

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#46

Post by fareesh »

gist wrote: post #3

> DigitalOcean continues to be a high-growth business with $275M in [annual recurring revenues] and more than 500,000 customers globally. Under this new organizational structure, we are positioned to accelerate profitable growth by continuing to serve developers and entrepreneurs around the world.” If not obvious this can be translated as positioning the company so it can be acquired by a larger entity for it's custo…

If they're counting accounts it's definitely much lower. Our firm manages web applications / web services / websites for multiple clients and they all have their own DO account and there isn't 1 developer per account.

We were pretty excited to become part of their partner program but after signing up we realized that if we onboarded new clients we'd have to do it all under a single account, which sadly doesn't work for us because extremely delayed payments are very common, and we'd be fronting hosting costs for everyone.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#47

Post by lbotos »

cabaalis wrote: post #42
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…

Curious.. does your employment agreement not put you at very, very significant personal risk for putting information out like this? Throwaway account or not? I'm inclined to trust HN and it's community to a pretty strong degree. But forgive me for simply not seeing this as anything but controlled information release.

You think that DO sent out a shill to pretend to be a throwaway to give hackernews confidence in the DO platform?

My read of this is very different than yours: Naive IC who doesn't have optics into the actual mechanization of the business trusting the CTO fully.

I think this message from the CTO is a partial truth as they often are in orgs that aren't extremely internally transparent.

AKA I don't think the "shilling" is working if that's what they were doing.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#48

Post by peteradio »

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.

I really hope they don't get acquired by one of the big cloud providers.

Re: DigitalOcean is laying off staff

#50

Post by RussianCow »

Matheus28 wrote: post #35
ttul wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also read this as: Digital Ocean raised a $130M credit line and their creditors have noticed that profits aren't what they will need to be in X years time, hence the hair cutting. Their headcount only increased by 4% in the past six months. AWS increased its 10,000+ headcount by 16% in the same time period. I mean, it's all sheer speculation, but I think it is equally likely that Digital Ocean is having a h…

> I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the same world as AWS these days. They aren’t competing in the same space

They most certainly are, especially given the managed products DO has introduced recently (object storage, DB, Kubernetes, and load balancer). They definitely want a slice of Amazon's pie.
Post reply on HN