Comment by HonestShark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HonestShark | Hacker News Reader

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Moisey, big fan of yours, always have been.

DO's board has been atrocious (not you and Ben). The way they handled bonuses even the years that we were growing 40+% because we missed #'s due to factors outside any employees control, was a joke. The hiring of Mark Templeton was one of the absolute worst things that could have happened, he damn near put DO on the brink of destruction.

That said, it seems like Yancey is doing all the right things. The internal DO culture has been coddled for way too long and has been way to top heavy, predominately due to the revolving door of engineering leadership. Since I joined, I've seen Julia, Greg, Dizzy, now Al w/ Barry... and that's been what like 3.5 years?

The Boards support of the current GC is also astonishing, he's been incredibly anti-people and has downright participated in discriminatory practices. I'd HIGHLY encourage DO to setup an ethics hotline, there's been a long-term lack of ability to report concerning behavior without fear of reprisal.

Also, in your previous comments, yes the profitability #'s look surprisingly good, but lets be honest with the community and talk about cash. It's easy to look profitable when you are capitalizing so much, and it's not a fair representation of company performance. While I admittedly don’t really have any transparency into our #’s, its been talked about internally plenty that we have a cash issue. (Although it’s never been indicated that it’s desperate, and for those reading the company isn’t in financial distress, although they’ve been subtly cutting a lot of benefits and doing things to save cash like reduce travel, cut meal benefits, etc).

I'm proud of Yancey and Bill. GC needs to go, period, demonstrate ’togetherness’ Yancey talked about by showing us that accountability applies to all levels. Head of people is doing her best, but we deserve someone that wasn’t a Mark hire that understands our industry, and CTO I'm on the fence about, he's not an inspiring leader.

(Apologies for the throwaway account, surviving here for as long as I have has been difficult. I’ve connected through TOR and two VPNs, and don’t know PW so will never be logging into this account again — so, don’t bother trying to find me.)

You bring up a number of issues that we've went through as a company, but I think this is no different than many other companies that grow quickly and struggle through the complex process of getting alignment.

There is no company that gets everything right and I know that DigitalOcean hasn’t, and personally I haven’t gotten everything right myself. Certainly, I’ve made a ton of mistakes.

The real question is are we headed in the right direction now?

And you yourself have said that it looks like Yancey is right leader for DigitalOcean. And I would agree with that wholeheartedly.

I feel like a message like this is better sent by throw away email or something else that's private, than put in a public forum for all to see. What's the point exactly in putting all this ostensibly proprietary information out there, on HN? Is it benefiting anything to the conversation, aside from satisfying some people's curiosity? What's the intent here, why do you feel that this sort of post needs to be done publicly? What does it improve?

On-Topic: [anything that] gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Satisfying people's curiosity improves the conversation, and calling someone out in the public square is a good way to create accountability that doesn't exist in private communication.

That's a pretty blank check to write. All kind of awful, distasteful things are satisfying to some people's curiosity. Not all curiosities should be satisfied. IMO the comment I was responding to was going beyond measured, actionable feedback. It was TMI, public dirty laundry based on speculations, from an insider who goes on a limb stating guesses as truths, claiming knowledge of proprietary information.

Is HN an appropriate way to tell the DO board that XYZ people should be fired? In the end I just don't get it. This sort of comment isn't doing the commenter any good.

Most curiosities should be gratified, and this isn't an unreasonable one.

They're an employee concerned about their company (and arguably more important, their job security). A public forum like HN is absolutely a way to highlight workplace discrimination, which this person did in a way that doesn't publicly accuse anyone yet allows someone with power ('raiyu in this case) to know who is doing it.

Also, they points out that 'raiyu is lying, or at minimum being misleading, to everyone on HN in his comments. That's valuable to the community.

There's no such thing as proprietary information, and I think most people on HN will agree with that statement. There are secrets, but proprietary information is a buzzword. That sounds like a defense contractor term.

It's also not "guesses as truths." That's a very curious way to describe "shared knowledge." The person seems to have gotten information from their coworkers, and they're talking about it in the context of that.

Sending a private message on another protocol/platform brings zero accountability while reducing the person's anonymity (which they're clearly worried about maintaining), while this at least leaves a mark that can't be deleted (by replying to it, you actually made it so it couldn't be deleted if the person wanted to within the deletion window. That's one of my favorite features of HN; it makes historically-relevant information stay there forever, essentially).

A public forum is an appropriate place to tell someone who has power over you that someone else who has power over you should be fired, especially given Digital Ocean's seeming lack of a way to do so with anonymity otherwise. Anonymous disclosure is necessary for power structures to function without serious abuse.

Spreading vague rumors of misbehavior without any evidence nor detail is not helpful to anyone.

It gave enough detail so that 'raiyu will know who it is; it was very descriptive in that way.

Send an anonymous email and you'll be ignored. Reply to a big boss on HN, and you might make some waves.

> ostensibly proprietary information out there

One mans opinion, whether he be a wage slave or not, is not the property of his employer.

I'm not saying otherwise.

This laundry bag of personal grievances could only have made sense at a coffee machine on the premises. It is worthless in a public forum.

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