Whenever I talk to startups, I check their domain. If they are on GoDaddy, it means that they are technically incompetent.
I imagine that is the class of companies the GP is trying to avoid.
I work for a startup with ~60 employees. The DNS was setup through GoDaddy by our CEO over 6 years ago when the company consisted of just founders.
Employee #1 updated GoDaddy to point to AWS for nameservers. We've been managing DNS through Route53 ever since. It's tech debt, sure, but migrating domain ownership to AWS gives us almost no benefits. I guess having more consolidated billing would be nice, but until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it.
It would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company based on domain registrar. Then again, I don't know if I'd care to interview someone who makes such large decisions based on small details with no context.
Everything always depends... But the initial team tends to turn into the top management team, and a company managed by people that can do its main work is completely different from one managed by people that can't. It's reasonable for somebody to want to avoid it.
GoDaddy are on my shitlist after the elephant killing incident, their predatory business practices and low quality tooling. And don't ever forget to renew your domain or GoDaddy will squat it.
I would absolutely yellow flag a tech company for using GoDaddy.
I was not aware of the elephant killing incident, have not experienced their poor tooling (because I have not used them) and was not aware that GoDaddy squats expired domains.
Does this lack of knowledge yellow flag me as a competent person?
Domain registration often happens in a hurry. After a brainstorm that revealed an aha! In that moment, the only thing that matters is grabbing that domain while it's still available. Someone hurriedly registers the thing, with knowledge that it can always be moved later.
If you want to judge a company based on the early inception of the domain, often before deeply technical/experienced folks get involved, that's obviously your prerogative. But I think you'd be unnecessarily filtering out great opportunities in the process.
Oh, and didn't Google Domains use GoDaddy and others behind the scenes for awhile?
Obviously it's not a 100% sign. Just a heuristic. One of many, I'd assume. But I can't fault someone for using one when the cost of a false positive so far outweighs the cost of a false negative.
> until finance complains at me I'm not bothering to change it.
> would pain me to find out that a candidate would red flag the company
You have a good grasp on one perspective, what I would call the purely pragmatic business-owner perspective.
There is another (perhaps flawed) perspective, let's call it the idealistic engineer's perspective. This perspective notices the vestigial godaddy remnants. The flawed DB schema fragments from two refactorings ago which stubbornly survive. The fact that the site goes down for 30 seconds every time someone ships a change to production. The fact that shipping frequently is discouraged because of this. The overly aggressive cache invalidation strategy which causes 30% more DB load. The fact that no one is monitoring the DB load. The API endpoints with 4,000ms of latency. The fact that this will never be fixed because you are way too deep in bed with a poorly chosen framework and ORM.
All of these things can be justified from a business perspective as "not worth the effort to fix". Customers aren't leaving, revenue isn't dipping. It's fine. Just focus on the sprint.
But on every engineer's internal balance scale of "should I stay or should I go", all of these things get noticed. Each one adds a pebble to the "leave" side of the scale. For your talented engineers, two pebbles.
Don't let too many pebbles pile up.
Edit: It is also exactly this kind of thinking that keeps people in bad situations. Nobody wins when anyone thinks like that, except of course the people in the exploiting position in the first place.
You are touching on an important point, which I did not state: that there are no companies with zero pebbles on the scale.
The goal is not perfection. The goal is to avoid a pile of pebbles large enough that engineers feel hopeless / "why do I bother" / "this place is a joke anyway". Good people don't stick around long for that.
But the main point was that thinking that a technical blemish has "zero cost" is a trap. The cost is not zero. The cost is having one more pebble on the scale.
I.e. "technically incompetent"?
brian1999@yahoo.com
I'd be interested to know what percentage of 21 year olds know what yahoo is (they would have sold Tumblr right around them being 18 years old).
Bonus laughter if it's something massively inappropriate. Some e-mail stems from the last position search (this is at a college, granted it is an entry level position, but it's still a college): cuntcrasher, c00rslight, bigswag420, trideltaFcups, and my personal favorite, milfhunter9inch.
These are supposed to be professional people. This is real life. This is real. I can't wake up.
I used to work with a guy whose first + middle initials and last name resulted in an official corporate email of "xlwang", no lie.
Only you can save Corbin Untcrasher and Tyrone Ridel-Tafcups from crushing student loan debt.
1: I didn't make up the terminology, I'm just using it because it exists...
I'm technically competent but have one domain on GoDaddy for a startup I'm handling.
See, the domain we wanted was after market, and the purchase deal was done through a service that requires GD as the registrar.
So, after $12000 for the domain, we have to wait before we can transfer into our AWS.
Then they'll search for technical people to implement their idea. So being hosted there is not necessarily connected with the people actually doing the work.
I think you may be used to cases where the startup idea generator and implementer is the same person. But it's not always that way.
yes, a startup registered through Route 53 is a better sign of competency on staff or in their network
but propping up domains wherever you want and changing the cname whenever you want doesn't tell you anything
They wrote a blog about their bad experiences with registrars in 2016 (I guess). Since then they have steadily worked to make it a reality.
https://www.cloudflare.com/products/registrar/
When I checked last, it was not possible to buy a domain at Cloudflare, but you could buy it at other providers and transfer to Cloudflare. It might also be possible to buy directly now.
All my domains are transferred to Cloudflare. Their UX is dope. It's like Apple vs Windows. Also since I use CF for DNS and Cache, it makes sense to let CF manage the domain too.
That's because all domains transferred to CloudFlare are required to use CloudFlare's DNS servers. It's just a different business model.
I typically don't use them by choice (I actually like the AWS admin for DNS, but they aren't cheap - I probably need to check out other services like NameCheap).
But I don't think it is fair to label them technically incompetent, when it is not uncommon to get shanghai'd by accident (maybe that's what you mean by technically incompetent - but frankly if it burns more than 1 hour of my time to fix - I leave it alone because I have other priorities. I also only change about 10~20 vim defaults on a new VM. Fight me.)
All that said: If the startup is using GoDaddy's name servers or certificates (but not their hosting), that actually is a pretty good indicator of ineptitude.
And if a startup is using GoDaddy _hosting_, that is completely indefensible. No startup should be on that sort of shared web hosting, GoDaddy or otherwise. You spin up the VMs, containers, functions, or PaaS (ie Heroku, Firebase) service of your choice in the cloud. Hell, put it on IPFS, host it on a push CDN, distribute it via a data: url. Pretty much anything would be better.
You don't build software at your startup and all this sounds complicated? Then perhaps consider SaaS solutions like GSuite, Shopify, Squarespace etc.
GoDaddy's hosting is unfit for any purpose.
That's a mixed signal. I can really help my technically incompetent clients.
Let's just say it can be used as an indicator.
Most registrars will include a year as part of the transfer so if you have a domain at GoDaddy that expires in 2024, you can transfer it to Namecheap and then it'll expire in 2025 -- without "wasting" what you've already paid for.