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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly it was very clear at around $10MM ARR that DO was on a trajectory to IPO. You can thank Moisey Uretsky for a fantastic product idea and his brother Ben for CEOing it for so long. Congratulations to everyone who was involved in building DigitalOcean, it was an INCREDIBLY wild ride in the early days, lots of chaos but through all the chaos and disfunction, I think everyone involved knew this day would come.

Personally I'm really proud of the work we did, and I'm overjoyed to have been part of building a business that is going to be a public company. Thanks to the HN community for being so supportive over the years.

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The thesis of DigitalOcean was literally “this very established market needs a venture capital growth play because we saw Slicehost exit to Rackspace”. In the beginning the entirety of DO’s offering, tech for tech, was almost a direct lift of Linode and, as they scaled, made all the same technical mistakes and learning experiences that Linode did.

I guess you could call that a fantastic product idea. I’d call it applying an aggressive exit strategy to Chris Aker’s fantastic product idea from 2003 and further commoditizing said product in its wake.

Actually, Ben and Moisey owned a managed hosting company that was coming under a lot of pressure from rackspace. DigitalOcean as a product was a direct response to that market pressure. I think if you ask any of the early executives, none of us loooovveed the venture component, it was a way to grow the business that was already growing rapidly with strong product market fit. Remember, a16z only invested once we were doing millions and millions in ARR. In terms of Linode, I have no idea what you're talking about. DigitalOcean had 1 click $5 SSD offerings years before linode/anyone else made any changes to their business.

Which is amusing because Rackspace is now overpriced garbage as far as I can tell, or a wrapper around public cloud.

I have dealt with Rackspace exact 2 times and both times, it has been a horrendous experience.

They make you call support to delete a “cloud server” - glad I’ll only have to do that once more.

Rackspace was always overpriced garbage

I remember Linode being hesitant to dip below $20 because the thinking was that it would diminish the quality of support. That thinking was reinforced when you started with $10 (if I recall, it’s been nearly a decade) and we started getting large numbers of refugees burned by experiences with your support organization. Neighboring comments tell me it’s still a problem. We consciously didn’t want to grow $5 fast because we didn’t have capital to throw at any problem that developed. We, the market, not just Linode, also knew competing to the bottom on price largely relegated shared/cpanel/etc hosting to $0.99 commodity status and we weren’t keen to kick off such a war for obvious reasons. (That was quite prescient, looking back from outside in 2021.)

Anyway, yes, you eventually reached a position where you dictated the pricing structure, slightly annoyingly because it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours (down to the incentivized Linode Library clone that’s getting praise elsewhere in this thread). I wasn’t talking about changes you forced. The entire product top to bottom was referenced against Linode’s work to grow you to a position to force those changes. Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I’m also not going after you for it; I’m only responding to fantastic product idea.

It’s just odd that when competitors would ask me my thoughts on the “Linode clone” at 2011-era conferences that’s something that’s news to you. Is that really not apparent to an executive? If not that you did so, at least that seemingly the entire incumbency, not just Linode, thought so?

You might be experiencing a form of survivorship bias / confirmation bias here.

If you work at Linode, presumably people would come up to you asking about something they then couched to you as a Linode clone. That doesn't mean it's how people were talking about DO when not directly speaking with someone at Linode.

I don’t understand how that impacts my point at all. If an opinion is only held in one context it’s not actually held? Is that what you’re saying? I’m sorry, I don’t follow.

Before DO VPS was (and somewhat remains) a community even among competition. I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the example given.

He is saying that your perspective as a Linode employee might not represent how others saw Digital Ocean at the time. Which for me is glaringly obvious from your comments.

EDIT: s/general public/others

I wasn’t talking about the general public. I was talking about the incumbents. I said competitors, not customers, and that wasn’t a corrected typo.

Edit: I responded to something that’s now been silently edited out and replaced with “others”.

I guess you may think of that in the same way the incumbents considered Amazon “another e-commerce play” or Google as “another search engine” while being blind to the real changes happening underneath.

I've noticed that the folks who aren't so attentive to product / market fit and other items (customer ergonomics maybe?) tend not to really see what they are missing, what's different about the "other" guy that means they are in some ways cleaning up. I wonder if that describes linode a bit.

Security:

One issue early on for Linode was just abysmal security despite claims. Lots of denial and lack of transparency too which was even worse. For a biz focused offering that was just a no go.

Even 8 year ago there was stuff with the bitcoin hacks? Do folks remember any of this?

They might have been using cold fusion or something because they got hacked again I think just like a year later?

These weren't just little corner case hacks / issues - but major with plenty of denial and obfuscation from linode.

There was this hack here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170

I'm sure I'm missing others (unsecured mysql databases etc?).

---

Anyways, at least in my world linode was actually seen as the cheap/crappy offering even though they actually cost more which was weird. But I def told folks to stay away just because of the repeated lack of care around security.

I had no idea DO was at 350M+ ARR - nice job by them - wow!

Well a non-DO employee (and someone who ran things on linode and then on DO) I would say its a fair read and what the mindshare at the time was.

Linode had decent service but honestly the irc channel was pretty toxic to noobs (one of the reasons I left!) and finding a "cheaper linode option" was great.

That might have switched quickly, but it was definitely a thing.

Perhaps it wasn’t their own mental model of the landscape at all, but just what they considered to be the most expedient way of getting the message across in terms customers would understand.

Hypothetical analogy: if I were describing my very-first-ever PaaS service, to competitors who’d only ever heard of IaaS services — and this wasn’t the point of the conversation (i.e. I wasn’t trying to sell them on the benefits of PaaS), but rather just a supporting statement to talking about how we do/don’t offer an IaaS feature, because we’re a PaaS — then I’d probably describe my PaaS by analogy to some popular IaaS that has a feature-set closest to a PaaS.

In my own mental model, I have a separate node for “PaaS”; but if I know that the people I’m communicating with don’t — and teaching them what a PaaS is would take time away from the real topic we’re trying to focus on — then I’m going to describe my PaaS provider as “basically like $foo IaaS provider” when talking about how it has the same feature X. To them.

Again, I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the conference example. I’m not arguing over the psychology of multiple conference conversations from ten years ago any further because it’s completely immaterial to my point (and one example of many; the point of the example was that it was openly discussed among competition, not “let’s go to the mat on what constitutes an actual opinion with the assumption that I don’t perceive conversation appropriately”).

Have you ever watched Kitchen Nightmares? Bad chef's are often surprised to get told their food tastes bad because everyone always tells them how good their food is!

If you know someone is from a particular company, you don't badmouth the company in front of them, but you might badmouth the competitors.

Your point makes sweeping claims that "the entire incumbency" thought of DO as a Linode clone.

Can I see your survey results from 10 years ago, or is this an opinion formed by a Linode employee from a handful of conference conversations?

As a user, I agree - DO was seen a cheaper clone of Linode / Slicehost when they launched. I used to usually recommend Pair and Linode to my clients and, later DO to my more cost-conscious clients. At that time, I preferred Linode over DO, because the support was better and the prevalent practice than was to look suspiciously at new hosts because a lot of them folded up. You looked to older hosts, like Pair (and later Rackspace and Linode) because you knew they were reliable in both tech and the hosting business.

I loved pair! Never followed what happened to them!

They still seem to be doing really well - last heard, they've migrated most of their servers from FreeBSD to Linux and also offer Linode and DO like VPS hosting.

> it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours

As a developer, DO never looked anything like it. Linode was expensive and on the same playfield as Rackspace and a ton of other cloud hosts, very different from the instantly-spin-up-a-tiny-vm-for-five-bucks model. Their web UI also has always been miles ahead.

The competition also didn’t have SSD as an option until much later, and that was a HUGE selling point for digital ocean at the time.

Right! Linode was $20/month at least and more focused to businesses. Not the then unbelievable $5/month for SSH ssh accessible virtual box with root access that DO started. Plus the SSD. Other hosting providers later caught on with DO.

But the thing I liked best was their "no hidden cost". You pay what you agreed before to pay. No surprise. No upsell, trick sell which were common with all hosting at that time.

DO still maintains that honesty. Not sure what will happen after their IPO.

> As a developer, DO never looked anything like it.

The UI, the simplicity, SSDs, additional block storage... but also the API and its doc, as well as IPv6, regions, snapshots/backups, and availability. Later on, load balancers, object storage and k8s. All of that much simpler than AWS and both better thought out and more featureful than Linode or OVH.

DO truly deserved their success.

I’m customer for years and I don’t use any of the features you mentioned past the first two; I’m part of the 5$ VM crowd for who this is the killer feature. Should OVH have provided on-demand instead of yearly plans for VPS I would have stayed there as I’ve my domains there already.

The simper than AWS aspect was one of the main reasons I choose DO to do most of my cloud stuff. Also AWS had this odd habit of not auto charging me so it would go a couple months then I would get hit with multiple months worth of a bill.

The API is a key point many people miss when they think of early DigitalOcean as just another VPS host.

DO definitely had UI, SSD first. But Block Storage, Regions, Snapshots Backup and Load Balancer all were either first on Linode or being worked on for a long time. Linode also had Pooled Transfer and other tidbit for a long time well before DO.

Remember we are talking about early days of DO. Of course later DO innovate more and Linode had to follow. And the new Linode UI is arguably better than DO. Although it did took them years to make it. The beauty of competition.

Before I ever paid DO a cent, I made significant use of a lot of their incredible documentation on setting up various servers, setting up your confide correctly, etc.

Gotta +1 that. Whenever I'm looking for a howto, I pray that there's a DO one already done. The quality (and brevity) is usually the best.

agreed, the recent HN feature of Cockpit piqued my interest and I prayed DO had a tutorial for debian. of course, they did

Lol, what? DO was basically a page for page copy of linode's site and product offering in 2011-2013.

They were both modeled after services like Slicehost I believe.

Negative. Slicehost launched in the middle of Linode pivoting virtualization stacks after proving out the business and running into limitations of their first stack (UML). Slicehost was ... 2006, if memory serves? Linode was a few years old by that point. For those keeping score, Linode then went to Xen and now KVM just like everyone else.

Linode and Slicehost were very similar stories, though. Slicehost bootstrapped as well and was run by good people.

You do know that Jason Seats, the founder of Slicehost, was pivotal in the DigitalOcean story also?

Yes. What’s your point?

I remember at that time feeling almost bad for Linode because they had built up so much valuable educational content about what you could run on their services, and I was using it step-by-step on DO. The only differentiator was the price. Of course DO quickly replicated and excelled in providing that tutorial value as well.

But were they really doing anything other than copy/pasting HOWTOs by Falko Timme?

> Their web UI also has always been miles ahead.

I'd strongly disagree (been on DO since about 2012 and on Linode a few years earlier; I still use both). DO UI is ok these days but years ago Linode UI was far better in every way.

Whether your claim is true or not, there’s more to a product than the underlying technology. Frankly, this line of discussion reads as sour grapes and reflects poorly on the Linode team.

> more to a product than the underlying technology

Back when I was just hacking about on some SaaS ideas I looked into both Linode and DO. The positioning of both seemed quite separate to me, and DO "felt" more like the product I should be using.

Whether or not the tech was different, or that feeling was justified by anything other than an initial veneer is well up for debate - but entirely agree, they're discreet products, and this doesn't really reflect well on Linode.

I don't think it reflects poorly on them at all. When DO started everyone still used the help document of Linode and Slicehost to setup and spin a server on DO. They could do that because DO was a clone of these services. To their credit DO improved and grew, and that's no mean feat.

Yes. For those of us that actually went through the Slicehost, Linode era, the time when paying per month and not per hour for a simple VPS before everything was rolled into the word Cloud. Those comment read more like an accurate account of history while others read it as an attack of a company.

They all offered a VPS, which is basically a Linux box with root access. Any Linux tutorial would work on all three services.

I'm not arguing if DO was a clone or not, but saying that "you could use Linode/Slicehost documentation because DO was a clone" is a bit of a stretch.

I was a huge Linode fan for years. I used them exclusively. DO showed up and slowly but surely started being the better deal. Lower entry points, better specs, and then finally a more robust product line. I slowly found myself going to DO for new servers and eventually moved everything there for simplicities sake.

Linode still has a special place in my heart, but they have some work to do if they want to remain competitive.

Wow - really? I use both Linode and DO extensively and Linode is better on almost all fronts in my experience. Faster servers, better network, Linode's Object Storage is way better than DO's "spaces" and Linode's support is hands down the better of the two. If you're going to spend $5 on a server why would you go with DO unless you're already there?

> If you're going to spend $5 on a server why would you go with DO unless you're already there?

I would go with anyone other than Linode, considering they left the control plane running a publicly accessible unpatched version of ColdFusion, which led to multiple instances of them losing control of customer's data.

Anyone but Linode.

Yeah I know about that incident - but also believe companies have the ability to learn from past mistakes and do better.

Unfortunately it wasn't a single incident.. fool me once..

I mean that was terrible, but I know full well that every company ever will have dumb vulnerabilities occasionally, so by that metric I could never use anyone.

Last time I provision on linode and do at the same time a created a ubuntu box. I found I had to setup a few additional things in linode. Linode never felt as polished which is fine.

The one thing that made do better was they had a datacenter in my region.

No one mentioned vultr killer $2.50 which is where I would go if I wanted a dev box to play around on.

I remember something being off in Vultr $2.50 offer which made me stop halfway during sign-up. Had to go to https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ again to remind myself: $2.50 VPS does not come with an IPv4 address. At least today they openly mark it and I think 5 years ago you'd only find it after a few clicks.

This was an advantage to me at the time. My ISP (Internode) had enabled dual-stack v6, and a few of the other options I was looking at on LowEndBox came with a NATed v4 address. Here was Vultr offering an IP I could fully control, even point real domains to!

I don't know if this is still the case, but I also got no SSH logspam from bots trying to log in on a v6 host.

Same here, I use both but prefer Linode in every aspect. Much better support and reliability in particular.

I moved a few very low-end hosts to DO when the $5 price point appeared but have never been overly impressed. Later Linode matched prices so no real reason to look into DO anymore.

But I do still use both. Partly to avoid migrating the DO hosts I have but more because I just like to keep aware of how both are evolving.

Linodes support is great; I can't say much about DO because I haven't had to use them.

Around the time I switched there was a lot going on. DO had released their $5 droplets. Linode was still stuck on their old, clunky UI, and the migration to the new "Cloud UI" wasn't executed well. Then there was a few DDOS attacks that took stuff down, and the multiple serious security vulnerabilities that they did a -horrible- job managing.

I've been at DO for a number of years now and it's been solid. I have a few dozen servers and take advantage of a few of their services. Their Managed Databases are incredibly well executed.

I've been happy over all so no reason to look elsewhere.

As an original Slicehost customer, and long time Digital Ocean and Linode customer, your version of history is bullshit. I was looking to move from Rackspace after the Slicehost aquisition. Moved to Digital Ocean because of the SSD offering. It performed wonderfully. Needed bigger servers, and Linode had just created an offering competitive with Digital Ocean. I signed up and ran some benchmarks and Linode was about 25% faster than DO. I moved everything to Linode and the company has been there ever since. For what it is worth, my Linode bill is currently about $2000, and DO is $40. I am calling you out as a loyal Linode customer who thinks Linode is great.

I've been a customer of both for years -- in Linode's case, since 2009. Your comments are coming across like sour grapes, so I think this is a good opportunity to hear about some of Linode's mistakes from a longtime Linode customer.

First, you guys had the customer support interface compromise in 2013, and the worst part about that was the way that it was handled by your organization. Linode wouldn't own up to the compromise initially, dragged their feet on announcing anything about it, and then tried to downplay it.

Then there was another similar incident in 2016, and, amazingly, the response from Linode was nearly identical to 2013. No lessons learned. After that, I started seeing influential people on HN say things like, "don't use Linode". I stayed on Linode, but I also started using DigitalOcean after the 2013 compromise and split my hosted services evenly between the two of you after 2016.

DigitalOcean aggressively iterated multiple aspects of their products in that time period. They announced block storage in 2016. Your customers immediately started asking when Linode would come out with a competing service, and that didn't happen until 2018. Here, it was Linode rushing to build a DigitalOcean feature.

Linode initially focused on expanding RAM and disk space for your customers' instances at the same price points. Every year, you'd announce, "hey, we're doubling your RAM!" or some such thing. It was awesome, but I also thought at the time that you were shooting yourselves in the foot. How many customers looked at that and went, "yep, cool, now I can downsize my Linode and give them less money each month"? I know I did, at least a couple of times.

Then, you chose to try to compete with DigitalOcean on price. As a long time Linode customer, I never wanted that. If I want a $5 VPS, I'll just go to DigitalOcean. Hell, you shouldn't even want me as a customer for $5. Let them deal with me instead. I wanted Linode to be the larger, slightly more expensive provider with the even better support.

I've had to deal with Linode support a few times over the years. They've mostly been awesome and first class. I've never been unhappy enough with Linode to want to leave altogether. Both of you should be focused on eating AWS, not each other; showing up to a competitor's HN thread to complain about them being copycats is really poor form.

This just nailed just about everything I was going to say. I’ve used and liked both since both started and this entire thread is pretty embarrassing.

The real story is Ben and Moisey were running one of the largest hosting co's in porn and then there was a security problem via one of their upstream providers and it created a DISASTER. Thats how DO was born from what I understand.

I always wondered if they would eventually make a deliberate attempt to take over the "shared Cpanel hosting" market with a non-shared-host, non-cpanel model. It seems ripe for change...lots of little players.

The market was considerably too small and it would mean building to much towards the past. The thesis of "millions of *new* developers are coming online over the next 20 years" was the main north star.

It is small compared to cloud, but it's a ~$22 billion / year market. Compare to IaaS at ~$50b. So it's not tiny, but it is highly fragmented.

And I think the solution could be layered on top of what they already have. Cpanel is just a bunch of buttons, icons, and little apps to create web server instances and tie them to domains, database instances, backups, web file management, manage DNS records, and so on. Basically just a consistent web app to put on top of their "droplet" ecosystem. Much of it already exists, so a fair amount of the effort would just be marketing it.

We were too busy building in the wake of AWS. Looking forward and building into the paradigm shift was the strategy (and it seemed to work!). :)

Makes sense, though paradoxically, that market is growing by around 10% per year.

I was on Linode for a while and moved to DigitalOcean. At the time it was a very simple calculus.

DigitalOcean was less established, less mature, offered fewer CPUs and less RAM per dollar and had only two (or was it three?) locations.

But they had SSDs and Linode did not.

The difference in Wordpress performance was night and day. So I switched and I'm still there. Linode dragged its feet on SSDs. I don't care why or how. I cared that I could get what I needed elsewhere.

What's the difference like today? As a long time Linode customer, I just never even felt the need to shop around. Maybe I should! It's always been just fine for my "tiny duty" Wordpress host. I always knew DO existed, but figured it's the same $5 and I'm probably getting about the same thing so why bother switching. I guess I'm a good example of why stickiness matters.

Today the pricing and services are essentially matched. Someone will obviously fight be on this statement, but I think today they are essentially equal from a cost perspective. They all run SSDs and have similar cost per RAM/CPU core.

But as others have said, Linode was around forever. Digital Ocean came in and disrupted them. When DO first came on the scene then you easily could have switched and got more for your money. But Linode has caught up and matched them. Right now they are both good. I have actually been favoring Linode lately with their new interface. But I have $3,000 or so of Digital Ocean credit that I am trying to use up first.

As a user of both services for years, the only point on which they are similar was/is that they both offer shared cheap VMs (as do lots of other services).

Presenting early DO as a ripoff of linode is frankly absurd, the UI, user experience, API, Load balancing, backups, and docs were all vastly superior to Linode, and it honestly felt like the copying was more the other way round as Linode tried to catch up with their UI.

I'm puzzled by the praises on DO UI, since in the early days in particular I always found it intolerably terrible. Far less useful than Linode UI. Nowadays it's ok, but Linode is still has better UI.

"An aggressive exit strategy" when they started in "2003"?

Aggressive, as in two turtles fighting.

Linode was founded in 2003, not DigitalOcean.

This doesn’t sound right. I know we evaluated linode vs do in 2016, and dropped linode because of lack of volume support. Digitalocean had that, even if only in FRA1, but it surely was ahead of linode back then

(Not sure if block storage came even earlier to other DO data centers, but as those were outside the EU they wouldn’t have been relevant)

Their approach to making VPS/Cloud offerings simple and approachable are really what set them apart, in my mind. I run all of my simple things there, because sometimes I don't want or need the complexity that actually managing things in Azure, GCloud, or AWS require.

As a happy Slicehost customer, I definitely saw Slicehost in every aspect of the DO approach.

Some are saying that about Linode and I just don't get it.

Loved Slicehost!!!

DO's offering was SSD backed small hosts for $5.

Nothing else in the market offered that at the time.

I remember interviewing with DO back in late 2014 and it was nuts! The entire interview process took ~3 months and it was clear that they were defining the process as they went. The entire process was basically:

  1. initial call with recruiter
  2. homework project
  3. call with engineer to discuss said homework project
  4. two phone screens with engineers
  5. onsite interview with 6 engineers

Finally I had was at the final step which was a call with Ben who was really interesting to talking to as we shared the sysadmin background.

They we going through some pretty crazy growth at the time so I forgave a lot of disorganization in the interview process. Unfortunately I didn't end up getting the role but I'm glad to have had that experience; it was definitely an interesting point in DigitalOcean's history.

> 2. homework project > 3. call with engineer to discuss said homework project

How much time does it typically take (or should take) to complete a 'homework' project?

> 4. two phone screens with engineers > 5. onsite interview with 6 engineers

This seems very 'camel is a horse by committee' to me.

Reminds me a bit (know it's different) of dating where someone wants you to meet their family for approval. I immediately pass on those dates (and will add I am happily married to a woman who did not do that).

I wonder about situations where it takes so many inputs to make a decision to me that speaks a great deal about the decision making process being faulty.

Fwiw when I graduated college years ago I was rejected by a company (friend of the family no less) who said they couldn't hire me because 'yes you are smart but you don't know this business' (true I knew zero). So I started a company like theirs myself and now many years later they are gone and my company (which I sold) still survives. (Will add this was years before the internet and common practice for people who knew nothing to go into businesses they knew about).

Now yes I do understand programming is not the same but my point still stands why so many chefs in the kitchen? Does anyone ever go back and track the people who were rejected what happened to them?

> How much time does it typically take (or should take) to complete a 'homework' project?

I was still in college at the time but I maybe spent 5-10 hours over the course of a week or so. I do remember it took a very long time for them to respond after I had sent it in though. I believe the project was to implement a basic web crawler in Go.

> Now yes I do understand programming is not the same but my point still stands why so many chefs in the kitchen?

After the homework problem I think that's where they were defining the process as they went. They seemed to be growing quite a bit at the time (IIRC when I was onsite they had just rented two more floors of office space) and I had bounced between a few contacts that were brand new to the company. The real struggle is that I never knew how many more steps were to come, and I'm not sure they knew either.

Though after the onsite they e-mailed me almost immediately to setup the call with Ben so I think everything had gone well up to that point. I don't think the call with Ben went poorly so my best guess is that they went with someone that had experience rather than a new grad.

FWIW I'm not actually bitter about this. I just found it to be an interesting snapshot of a particularly chaotic point in the company's history.

> Does anyone ever go back and track the people who were rejected what happened to them?

Almost never, in my experience. Several times I came second in the running and never heard from them again. Contacting them myself didn't work either. Typical shop would rather look thru another hundred randos than revisit one decent candidate.

Not long, perhaps 2h for the core and then some cleanup over a few hours as I cogit about it? This was my submission back in 2014 https://github.com/aybabtme/crawler/commits/master

Not to hijack this sub-thread, but just a general question: how does one deal with unethical 'homework projects'? I've had a case during an application where I was given a 'homework project' that seemed to me very much not like a theoretical scenario, but more like the company wanting me to do free work for an actual real-world issue they had. Have people had situations where you suspected the same? How do you deal with it?

If it were me I would be like: "here is proof I completed it and that it works, source code contingent on my being hired ;)"

I like the way you think!

We give new hires a homework project that is directly work related. We don't consider it unethical. It's really a fantastic way to sort out who can deliver. We used to have it be part of the onsite interview - they could sit for a few hours and do it.

I like these because they are not games. If you want something done, you'd ask an employee to do it. So just ask someone to do something you need done.

In our case at least by the time it was something that was part of an interview, it had already been implemented on the business side. Our projects were usually 2 hours tops?

The idea that this is unethical is wild.

We also do paid internships and have folks actually work on stuff that way -> do a good job, pretty good line up for a full time position.

You are misunderstanding. They are saying it is unethical to ask an interviewee to code for free and use that in production. In your case you are not doing that, although if I interviewed with you and saw the same feature added after I submitted the code I would definitely assume you did something unethical.

But is that what is happening? They said it was a work related project. That's exactly what we do.

Why would a place like google even use an interviewees code without careful copyright assignment and work for hire protections (ie, you need to pay someone in USA generally to own their code).

I've found some potential hires are randomly paranoid - and if they start giving you lots of hypothetical disaster / ripoff scenarios early, not worth the hire?

Sometimes companies do illegal things that save them money. I would assume Google wouldn't do that. Not every company is Google.

A 6-person company in New York did that to me. I reviewed the interview project I did for them and their latest product update. I had to ask them a week after the interview if they used my code in production and if so - this is how many hours I worked on it and a fair rate. The CEO emailed me threatening legal action and then called me 10 minutes later apologizing and venmo'd me the amount I stated it was worth.

If your interview process works for you that is great.

But I could totally see why potential hires are paranoid if you are giving them a situation to be paranoid about. I hope you are being super clear with your process and giving assurance you aren't using their code. If it was me, I would show them the code our team wrote at the same time they submit their project and use that as part of the follow up interview.

This happened to me in am interview. It was my first software engineering job, so I was a junior. Wound up solving a problem one of the senior engineers had been struggling with for days. It’s probably what got me the job. Assuming the company is actually hiring for the role I think it’s perfectly fine to do this. It identifies people who can fill in gaps.

My employer deals with this by compensating candidates for their time. Y'know... with money.

We also don't give them our actual problems as homework tasks. We'll occasionally talk about our real problems with candidates in interviews, but we're very clear about it when we do.

It's not a perfect system. Some candidates will choose to spend longer on the task so that in the follow-up interview they'll have the opportunity to talk about stuff that really shows off their strengths, so their effective hourly compensation for doing it would be quite low. The task is explicitly flexible like this, and we've also hired people who spent _half_ the par time on it (e.g. life circumstances making spare hours hard to come by) and didn't implement much at all, but then were able to confidently answer our questions about the bits they didn't actually implement.

Even if we were to only hire 1 out of every 15 people who get far enough through the pipeline to do the homework task (I don't recall the actual numbers) it costs us _nothing_ to compensate people for their time compared to, e.g., what it would cost us to make a bad hire. So it seems like an obvious thing to do even if only to stop candidates from having to wonder "am I getting screwed here?"

Doesn't this discriminates against people who are on visas who can't accept remuneration from anyone other than their current employers..? They then either have to do the same project for free or decline to continue the interview process.

Paying someone for their work isn't discrimination. It never is.

The visa process may be flawed, but putting the blame on the employer is... weird.

or they can just take the money anyways and no one will know. besides, you can accept a gift in btc

Not only visa, but also while employed one often can't simply be paid by a "competitor" for similar work, that would break the loyality to the current employer which is mandated by contract law and general low.

This is always, always the answer. It's not only the decent thing to do, it ensures you'll get an accurate representation of the quality of the prospective employee's work.

Nearly every worker in the US is covered by an employment agreement that says they have to get pre-approval for moonlighting. It may or may not be legal in their jurisdiction but by paying people to do your interview process you potentially open them up to bad liabilities.

That said it is completely unethical to make people do real work as part of an interview process. We collectively should name and shame any firm that does that.

I did do analytical "sample" work for a company that took me two weeks. They were thankful for the work but did not hire me. I published it on my website and they were not very amused.

Agilent is not great either. They interviewed me for 6 month and implemented some of my ideas. (In fact, I got the job, out of 500 applicants, but then they axed the job and hired nobody)

"Nearly every worker in the US is covered by an employment agreement that says they have to get pre-approval for moonlighting."

This is not true.

I've can think of one employer my entire career that had conditions regarding work outside of my normal work hours.

Granted, if you worked for your competetors and they found out about it you could be fired due to trade secrets or conflicts of interest. I only remember one employer I had where I signed something with binding agreements related to other work (and, as it happens, that was perhaps the worst employer I ever had).

I know some employers in some regions do this, but it is a far cry from affecting "nearly every worker in the US". In fact, I am not aware of any of my friends in tech positions currently being under such an agreement (that is, an agreement requiring pre-approval for outside work). In fact I believe it is illegal under many circumstances in some states for an employer to require it (but don't rely on me for that, conditions/laws change, and I have had no reason to look into it recently). I do remember discussions about it in the not too distant past, however.

It was definitely part of the agreement when I worked in Univerisity IT, and part of the agreement when I accepted an offer from a FAANG company.

The language you're looking for in the contract is 'preponderance of time'.

I don't know about the US but anecdotally it's been definitely the case for most of my work contracts in Brazil and Sweden for the past 17 years, I believe that only 2-3 startups I worked for didn't have a clause about moonlighting requiring pre-approval from management.

One downside is that to do this properly, you probably should be sending out 1099s for all of those candidates. Depending on the number of open reqs out there, your payroll department may be less than thrilled with this idea. I’ve seen some teams that have tried to sidestep this by paying in gift cards, but that sure does seem to be playing with fire.

You are not required to file a 1099 if the payment is less than $600. Even then, I can't imagine it's that hard to send out an additional 1099 if needed.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

This seems reasonable. I've never been offered anything like that. It would be minimum $1000 a day.

When I give homework projects, they are extracted from a previous part of the interview: What is a personal project that you’ve wanted to do but haven’t had time to do? Then I just ask them to do that. Win / win.

Some people don't like whiteboarding or timed pair programming because it's not close to a real-work environment.

Some people don't like take-homes that replicate scenarios/projects because they think it's too close to real work and want to be paid instead!

There's no pleasing everyone with interviewing processes.

Simple - you give candidates assignments you've designed solely for interviewing. Ones that you clearly state up front are not real, not based around current project deliverables and commit that the code will ever be used in production.

Then it's no different to the rest of the candidate's time spent interviewing - it's cost of doing business that no one expects to be remunerated for.

The other benefit is that you then keep a benchmark of deliverables by having each candidate complete the same task (you have to change tasks over time as the details of the project get leaked/discussed).

We don't use homework projects at my current job (I don't care for them personally and thankfully have a bit of influence in the hiring process), but I've worked places that did. We always took real-world problems we had but had already solved. This has a couple benefits: a) we have full context around edge cases, bugs, historical stuff, etc. that the candidate doesn't; b) we can see pretty quickly when a candidate does something innovative we didn't think of and it's always lead to extremely good discussions in the interview; c) it's very similar to the work they'd be doing day-to-day, so if they have a lackluster resume and/or don't interview well, but shine on this, their odds of an offer skyrocket; d) the company gains nothing from the work so that settles most (but not all) of the ethical objections to it.

It's pretty simple: the interviewing process goes both ways. The company interviews the candidate, the candidate interviews the company.

If you feel that a request is unethical and it's not what you want in a company, well... you - as a candidate - can terminate the interviewing process.

It's actually a good idea to pick a JIRA/project ticket from your backlog and see how the new engineer tries to solve the problem.

It's good because it will determine if they're a good fit for the team and gauge how much they have to offer.

I had to solve a real world problem for my current employer in my assignment. However, when they usually say it takes 20% to make a nice demo and 80% to make a the demo production-ready, I'd say the distribution for my assignment was even more uneven. It's just a PoC, a toy, nothing that can really be used. I did not know the tools used, the coding style or anything when I coded the assignment.

I see nothing unethical in it.

3 years later the feature has still not made it to production. I hate that every time it would have made my working day easier :)

I just don't do them and move on to the next company. I've never had an issue landing my next gig. I'll do all day multi round interviews and white board questions. I'm not doing your work or taking a college exam again. Good luck and godspeed is all I can tell them.

I will only ever commit to a homework assignment if the employers' commitment level is on par. For example, if they want me to do a homework assignment before meeting the hiring manager, no way. In other words, the assignment CANNOT be the first gate otherwise companies will just spray and pray then find the most desperate candidates.

Ubiq (YC company) interviewed me with an 8 hour assignment that had ridiculously challenging requirements. It was very fun because there was no way any normal human could do it in 8 hours... but how far could I get? And they paid me for 8 hours working on it.

I felt this was good. I got paid and it was a fun challenge. It also obviously wasn't "actual work," but even if it was, I was getting paid, so why not?

I don't think it would have been out of the question to say I was too busy to dedicate 8 hours either, but in my case I had the time.

Overall it was an excellent experience.

I was bored so I clicked on the key proof in your profile and it says it's been revoked.

oops! I rotated my private key a couple years back and never updated that. Fixed!

That interview process sounds completely standard.

Overall I don't think the total amount was excessive, or maybe just slightly. My experience has always been been technical phone screen or homework problem before onsite, but not both.

The real issue was how chaotic the process was. I had started out talking to an engineer that had picked up my application, but was handed off to recruiter only after the homework portion was done (said recruiter even mentioned that they had just been hired). The two technical phone screens also were two discrete steps (i.e. the second was only scheduled after the success of the first).

That was really the issue: neither I nor them knew how many more steps there were. It wasn't helped by having long periods of radio silence between each step either. But it was painfully obvious that they were scrambling to figure out how to scale their processes, so much so that it still stands out to me 6+ years later.

As a sysadmin, you probably have a number of areas of responsibility. Imagine a time in your career when you had the least amount of sleep, and still tried your hardest to keep everything together. Then you meet someone who gives you the feedback that they enjoyed talking to you, but they noticed that one of those areas is not quite as buttoned up as it should be. Presumably you take that feedback to heart and fix it as quickly as the circumstances allow. 6+ years later, that person goes on HN and takes you through the dirt. Would that seem reasonable to you?

The feedback is completely reasonable. No chance you’re going to hire someone decent today if your interview process for IC roles takes 3 months!

Thanks for calling this out: you're right. I don't think I highlighted properly what I actually wanted to highlight.

I more wanted to emphasize my view as a bystander at a very hectic point of their growth, not actually complain about the experience. It was an interesting experience to me, not a negative one.

I have no hard feelings about it and I'm sure things got sorted out. I certainly have no negative views of any individual I dealt with.

I'm really happy to see Ben and Moisey get this far. They are both extremely competent sysadmins and system architects too.

They retained a lot of equity as well - good to see.

Between the two of them, they own less than 20% of the company. Is this a lot? Not in my opinion. They sold 80% of their company.

It's a pretty big pie that got baked, that <20% is quite a lot in the scheme of things.

Compared to how much most VC-fueled founders would own at IPO stage, sounds like a lot to me.

They are also in the holding co

Yes it is. Usually founders would only have a few percentage points at the tail end of things.

My experience is that not only did they start out as incompetent, they actively downplayed early security issues and outright lied about certain aspects of their products.

I found major, glaring security/architecture issues with their main product early on, and was told by DO staff to go full-disclosure because it was working as designed. When I did so, DO lied about the impact on their blog.

Those lies are still up:

https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/transparency-regarding-dat...

> At no time was customer data "leaked" between accounts.

(I have screenshots of other DO customers' data.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983097

Even their outage blog post from a few months ago is now deleted.

My experience is that DO is a shady company, and I'll not do any serious/critical business with them or ever use them to store secret information.

As for the lying, I'd personally never do business with any of the early DO management/founders.

There's no amount of money that can be used to buy a reputation for integrity.

Your issue was exactly, and I mean exactly, what I had in mind when I said “learning experiences” upthread. I followed it closely. Linode painfully learned the scrubbing lesson as well - and DO was in a worse position to learn it at the time, being forced to throw the scrub write load at SSDs that don’t like that type of load. That’s the real issue, honestly, that they probably started noticing SMART warnings from scrubbing by default on SSDs (particularly for cheap instances that turn over often), and took the venture capital approach of taping over it to make the next round by making it opt in.

It’s a tough problem to deal with and not something you’re likely to think of designing such a product from first principles. That’s not an indictment, it’s just fundamental to experience gained doing this stuff (and it’s perilous to get wrong). Filtering unsolicited ARP to prevent domUs from hijacking default gateways was another lesson in blood, and one of the first things we tried within five minutes when we did competitive on DO around launch time (they hadn’t thought of it; it worked).

It's not tough to solve.

The whole scrub thing was a red herring: you don't need to scrub anything to not leak data, you just thin provision. It's (mostly) fine if customer data stays on your disks after they delete. It's not fine to give it to the next customer because you don't know how disk abstraction works.

My issue is mainly how they coped with it, which has nothing to do with their (at the time) technical incompetence: they simply lied about the effects.

Competent or not, lying on your corporate blog isn't a good choice. It doesn't take any special skills or training to be honest on your journey from incompetence to competence, all it takes is integrity.

Yeah. Agreed. I unfairly walked back solve to “deal with” on you simply from knowing the considerations that go into bursts of write load every time a customer clicks “delete”.

At the time Linode had a host-side scrub daemon that simply ate LVs as customers deleted. It’s technically simple, but drive longevity and capacity on the host (the user is probably recreating their VM, for example) is where it gets tricky. External considerations. In the end scrubbing is basically killing a few dozen inodes of user data, but the architecture in VPS usually requires you to nuke the whole image, including what is ultimately the host’s 59th copy of Ubuntu. Just managing the iops without annoying neighboring customers is a challenge.

To my cloning point I made at the top of the thread, Linode was certainly no stranger to the reality distortion field when it suited, and I think that’s yet another thing DO copied. That vertical is closer to B2C since you’re usually dealing with individuals, not sales teams, and glossing over stuff is a bit easier than when your counterparty has a better engineering team than you.

What do you mean by "thin provision" here?

Use an abstraction layer between the virtualized block device and the underlying storage system, and only write used blocks to disk, and return zeroes for all unused blocks.

You don't need to wipe, zero, or TRIM anything to not leak customer A data to customer B.

I second that. Over last 6 years I happened to login and see other people dashboard a few times. First time it happened hair raised up on my arms thinking someone else can see my stuff. I simply logout and logged back in. I never manage to delete or do any reckless stuff with other people servers. But I feel what the OP was going thru.

As somebody who followed SliceHost (Jason Seats and Matt Tanase) the predecessor to DigitalOcean, I 100% knew that DigitalOcean was on a trajectory to exit/IPO and be huge early on. Bravo, and congratulations to the entire team.

I was also building a startup piggybacking on hosting providers around 2012 and 2013 and saw the explosive growth. DigitalOcean should be the go-to case study on how to build a developer oriented company. Just like SliceHost and PickledOnion before; the technical guides on setting up LAMP stacks, Wordpress, NGINX, Node.js become resources just as important as Stackoverflow and Serverfault. DO showed up first in Google search results for technical questions.

I actually prefer that companies stay private so they can have more control over their long term outlook rather than slowly moving to quarterly profits and quarterly thinking mindset that haunts most of the industry tech and otherwise. It was great while it lasted, and I guess those early guys are going to make a killing on the options. Congrats to them. Nothing lasts forever.

The best year of my career was at DO in 2014/15. We were growing like a weed. It was hard to appreciate the magnitude of the growth until I compared it to everywhere I've worked since.

It was a heck of a lot of fun. Thanks for bringing me on board.

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