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DigitalOcean Is Laying Off Staff (techcrunch.com) 23

Cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean announced a round of layoffs, with potentially between 30 and 50 people affected. TechCrunch reports: DigitalOcean has confirmed the news with the following statement: "DigitalOcean recently announced a restructuring to better align its teams to its go-forward growth strategy. As part of this restructuring, some roles were, unfortunately, eliminated. 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."

Before the confirmation was sent to us this morning, a number of footprints began to emerge last night, when the layoffs first hit, with people on Twitter talking about it, some announcing that they are looking for new opportunities and some offering help to those impacted. Inbound tips that we received estimate the cuts at between 30 and 50 people. With around 500 employees (an estimate on PitchBook), that would work out to up to 10% of staff affected.

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DigitalOcean Is Laying Off Staff

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  • by notdecnet ( 6156534 ) on Friday January 17, 2020 @06:06PM (#59631332)
    DigitalOcean recently announced a restructuring to better align its teams to its go-forward growth strategy.”

    We bought into all that Cloud hype too :]
    • by tattood ( 855883 )
      Yes, in theory, moving things to the cloud look like they will save money. But you will eventually end up paying the same (or more) in the long run.
    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      DigitalOcean is finally following suit and moving some of their operations to the cloud.

  • this will ameliorate the rising digital sea levels.
  • by Indy1 ( 99447 ) on Friday January 17, 2020 @06:32PM (#59631424)

    https://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/l... [spamhaus.org]

    They've been firewall bait on my servers. Massive amounts of spam and botnets on their network, and they could care less.

    • by leonbev ( 111395 )

      Yeah, the script kiddies really seem to like Digital Ocean. I've pretty much added their entire reserved IP address space to the blacklists on my public facing SFTP servers due to the brute force logon attempts that I've received from them.

    • So I'm not the only one. So many spammers using them. Blocked several ranges of their IPs in Australia

    • > .....and they could care less.

      soooo you WANT them to care less? Not more?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I hate to see folks losing their jobs... especially because I LOVE Digital Ocean and have been a customer for years. They make throwing a server together trivial and have excellent documentation. I also applaud their UX team as it's so easy to navigate and use. Teamed with Cloudflare, my sites are fast and always up.

    • I agree 100%. No BS, full REST support, and cheap (for what I do anyway). The folks I've interacted with have also been on their game. With luck this isn't any more than an organizational tweak (though I echo your sentiment about it being unfortunate to see people out of work).

  • Hmm... 10% seems good right? Yeah, lets trim the fat. Let's ask the team leads... Oh and let's cut from that one group, I don't like that guy.

  • Never heard of them. Meanwhile, Clearchannel, oops, I mean iHeart, is having big layoffs nationwide of their on-air DJs. Seems they're moving to AI to program their stations, and local people who know the local tastes and markets are no longer needed.

    Good thing I quit listening to radio some 15-20 years ago, or I might have to give a shit.
  • recently announced a restructuring to better align its teams to its go-forward growth strategy. As part of this restructuring, some roles were, unfortunately, eliminated.

    Or: At midnight last night we fired a bunch of expensive people that didn't seem to be pulling their weight. (OR: we could have risen your prices.)

    By the way, does ANYONE have a going-backwards growth strategy? Working? Non-working? Is this thing on? So, nothing at all?? Then let's come up with a NEW description with less letters AND punctuation, perhaps: "future". (Hey, I just got rid of another PR guy!)

  • Digital Ocean has been an almost continuous source of spam. So much so my email servers block all email from their IP space.

  • Look into the source of the most domestic IP-based attacks and you find Digital Ocean. the worst managed ISP ever. They are the single biggest domestic source of compromised web sites in North America.

  • All these years I thought they were doing well enough to avoid laying people off, ever.

    What went wrong?!

    • > All these years I thought they were doing well enough to avoid laying people off, ever.

      If they're a growing company and can't find jobs for this 10% then that says something about the 10%.

      GE had a policy about firing the bottom 10% every year at one point too. The entire trick is how that 10% is determined. Apparently at GE the people who wanted quality manufacturing eventually became the "most expensive" and got fired.

      Be careful how you measure.

      • by kriston ( 7886 )

        Stack ranking is the worst idea for any company. It's on my top five in the list of questions you ask during an interview.

        It's more an intuition than an actual measure. So many companies fail to develop young talent just because they are in the bottom 10% and get automatically fired.

Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.

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