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Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

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Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#81

Post by fragmede »

onion2k wrote: post #79
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.

layoffs will continue until companies are much more efficient DO made a profit of a little over $250m in 2022, on revenue of $428.6m. That's a 60% margin. How much efficiency does a company need? EDIT: Correction.. those are the 2021 numbers. The latest numbers on the DO website for Q3 2022 state; " Gross profit of $97.6 million or 64% of revenue, an increase of 300 basis points year-over-year, and adjusted gross pro…

divided across 1,000 employees, that's pretty low per employee. Nowhere near Google's $1,486,779 per employee, pre-layoff.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#82

Post by ejb999 »

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.

I always felt like DO had one of the very, very best set of documentation available on a lot of very technical topics (even things that didn't related only to D.O.) - sorry to see there were cuts in that area.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#83

Post by contravariant »

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.

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

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#84

Post by version_five »

onion2k wrote: post #79
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.

layoffs will continue until companies are much more efficient DO made a profit of a little over $250m in 2022, on revenue of $428.6m. That's a 60% margin. How much efficiency does a company need? EDIT: Correction.. those are the 2021 numbers. The latest numbers on the DO website for Q3 2022 state; " Gross profit of $97.6 million or 64% of revenue, an increase of 300 basis points year-over-year, and adjusted gross pro…

That doesn't address the point in the comment you replied to. He is talking about returns. The question is what return they made on invested capital. It might still be very good, I have no idea, but it's not the same as margin.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#85

Post by stonecharioteer »

bad416f1f5a2 wrote: post #66
arcturus17 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When my company did layoffs recently I got to peek behind the curtain a bit. It started with an all-hands video call from the CEO announcing the layoff. HR had loaded emails to send immediately following the call directly to your company email that either said "you are not fired" or "you are". For those who were fired, infosec ran a script during the CEO call to pull their access packages for production systems, cran…

what happens to your equipment? especially if you're remote?

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#86

Post by Jommi »

psyhigh wrote: post #58

I was laid off too from DigitalOcean this morning. Just an email that I was terminated effectively immediately. Don't companies give a month's notice in advance though?

Unfortuantely this is the reality for most companies in the US. Only in most european countries do they have this courtesy.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#87

Post by lokar »

onion2k wrote: post #79
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.

layoffs will continue until companies are much more efficient DO made a profit of a little over $250m in 2022, on revenue of $428.6m. That's a 60% margin. How much efficiency does a company need? EDIT: Correction.. those are the 2021 numbers. The latest numbers on the DO website for Q3 2022 state; " Gross profit of $97.6 million or 64% of revenue, an increase of 300 basis points year-over-year, and adjusted gross pro…

Margin is sort of the wrong metric to the above argument. You need to consider revenue vs capital.

DO has a negative roe

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#88

Post by jackson1442 »

Nadya wrote: post #68
eigenhombre wrote: post #49

Have been a mostly happy DO customer for some time. Would be interested to know if the layoffs were carried off skillfully/compassionately or messily/carelessly.

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…

> Never lose your 2FA backup codes or you're locked out of your account forever if you lose your 2FA device

In the case of digital infrastructure, I'm actually kinda ok with this. Would be better if it was a policy or if you could prove ownership of the payment account, but at the very least it's much harder to social engineer someone out of an account.

Of course, the lack of support isn't good.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#89

Post by sf_rob »

arroz wrote: post #23
alephnerd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To combat inflation in the housing market. A subset of White collar professionals (such as those in Tech, Real Estate, Finance) ended up earning so much that housing became unaffordable as a small but significant minority began buying multiple investment properties https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/10/rent-inflation-bide... https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/31/labor-market-high-i... “Tech and finance are taki…

Tech workers are a small portion of workers overall

You are correct. The FED is not targeting tech workers as implied above; they do not have a granular "toolkit" at their disposal. Although workers in growth industries will be harder hit due to valuations being based on future cash flows.

Re: Tell HN: DigitalOcean is doing layoffs

#90

Post by Bluecobra »

I wonder if they will start trying to monetize stuff like Netbox. It's a really solid free product and some of the paid closed-source alternatives are terrible and cost a lot of money. The potential revenue is likely a droplet in the bucket though.
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