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Comment by der-erlkonig | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Yes, I was a technical writer on the content team. I am hearing that our entire team was laid off. It just isn't a big money-maker in these trying times. More of a cost center, I suspect.

It's too bad, as DO tutorials and content have been respected for so many years by developers and sysadmins. The end of an era.

fwiw their decision is foolish and shortsighted imo; the only reason i ever used do was because they hooked me in with their tutorials and guides

Kind of you to say. I know many devs have loved our content for a long time. I was one of them, which is the whole reason I joined as a tech writer. I can't claim to have helped create that solid library of tutorials, as I was only at the company for a little while. It's a real shame.

Just want to call out that I owe a lot of my career in webdev to DO tutorials. My first stack, LAMP, was heavily covered by DO.

Kudos to you and your teammates.

Which is crazy because a lot of the stuff I built out initially on DigitalOcean was due to reading the excellent tutorials. I appreciate your efforts.

Just want to add my 2c that DO tutorials are pretty damn amazing and I've got a number of them bookmarked for several common tasks. Even for such mundane tasks as wiping one's machine of stale docker containers/images.

This is really sad to see it go. I wonder if this could have been handed over to a better home. e.g. I love how Mozilla hosts a lot of pretty good content explaining basic web concepts.

Content should be thought of as an investment, because the value it returns extends over many years: some of the most valuable and popular DigitalOcean tutorials were written over a decade ago. For that reason, losing people responsible for writing new tutorials is not going to have a negative impact on developers relying on their tutorials in the short term, rather, DigitalOcean will suffer years from now when they have competitors using the content vacuum to steal marketshare. Teams that are an investment in the future are the first to go in a difficult financial climate, it's natural, it doesn't really speak to DigitalOcean's attitude towards developers.

That's the marketing department and I would be shocked if they don't continue down that route unless they decide to pivot to a different target market.

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.

Agreed!

Good content was always a marketing strategy. For a while DO's content ranked high for a lot of tech searches. Rightfully so too, it is high quality.

Then another Google algo change pushed high quality content, like DO's tutorials, down in ranking. No need to spend money on something that isn't having the intended effect.

I worded this a bit tongue in cheek but seriously, search results have gotten really terrible in the past few years. At least DO's stuff was helpful. Now the first page is full of spun garbage just because it follows the new outline format that Google loves.

At least we can thank DO for training ChatGPT on high quality content

The funny thing is, a few of us who have been following the ChatGPT frenzy were supposed to have a meeting TODAY to discuss "So, what we gonna do about AI?"

Too little too late! :laughcry:

There is a newer portal within the DO Docs site (not the Community site) for similar tutorials:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/developer-center/

The content is created by Developer Advocates rather than Technical Writers and Editors. I am not sure if this team was impacted in the layoffs, but I suspect not, as this portal is a very new effort. It's only been around for a matter of weeks.

Time will tell whether developers and sysadmins will value this content as highly as they have always valued the Community tutorials.

This is a mistake. I'm a designer by trade but do a lot of development in my free time. I use DO for serving all my projects. The reason I initially selected them is because their tutorials are so good. Besides price, it was a huge factor in my decision to host with them.

Eliminating teams that create technical content is going to backfire.

That's a shame given the quality of their content. I wonder what this means for CSS Tricks.

I wouldn't mind knowing haha.

Add me to that watchlist!

That is such a bummer to hear. The DigitalOcean tutorials are such an amazing resource.

I really like DO. I was thinking though, awhile back the seemed like they suddenly got tons of money and starting pouring it into all these "initiatives" around the world as if they were a charity org. I found it odd at the time. Not that its related but seems a bit hypocritical to "splurge" on all of that stuff and then have to layoff lots of people a few months later.

I knew it was only a matter of time once they went public.

> I knew it was only a matter of time once they went public.

Very common. "This was a great place for an engineer to work. Then the MBAs came..."

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