DigitalOcean axes about 11 percent of workforce | Hacker News Reader

DigitalOcean axes about 11 percent of workforce

theregister.com

43 pointsohjeez13 comments

Previous related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803696

> Consequently, the IT rental biz intends to prioritize global hiring in places like Pakistan and Mexico where relevant talent is available, and works for low wages compared to folks in some other nations.

Is what every tech company ends up doing. Wonder about the type of problems that will arise.

I've been told by private equity people that if a job can be done from home, then it can be done from India (I can't help but notice they seem to like working from places a bit nicer than India themselves though). Some will say timezones make a difference, and if that's true, there's plenty of the developing world near enough to the same longitude as the US. But it's not like relying on physical presence for your job is much of a guarantee either. Sometimes I think a life of crime is the answer, but that has some issues too.

We've been doing it for 25 years now - shipping IT work overseas, that is. We know the pros and cons. We know what works, and what doesn't work. It's not like any of this is new. I suspect in this respect the SV companies are 25 years behind where the rest of Corporate IT has been.

Oh, and the other thing we've learned in the past 25 years is a cheaper labor rate does not necessarily yield reduced cost. In fact the total cost actually increases in many cases if not managed carefully which means judiciously selecting what kind of work gets shipped overseas. That's all part of the lessons we've learned over the past 25 years.

Unfortunately when offshore employees steal or sell PII and do fraudlent activities the U.S. has limited means to go after them. We need to hold corporations more accountable (i.e. heavier fines) whenever fraud and fraudulent activities occur under their umbrella. Perhaps then corporations will weigh how much U.S. employees are deterred by U.S. criminal law and jurisdiction...

   "Our goal was to do this once so we would move forward towards business as usual again. Ongoing reductions are disruptive to the business and more importantly our employees, and we would like to minimize this as much as possible. There is no plan at this moment in time to conduct future reductions in force."

At least they didn't have ChatGPT insert a quote from a historical civil rights leader in their letter.

I feel terrible for saying this, but I hope the majority of that 11% is from the army of people they seemed to hire recently to upsell existing customers. At one point I was getting three or four emails per day, from different people at DO all trying to upsell me on support, or "have a chat" about my requirements. The self-service nature of Digital Ocean's platform is what hooked me in the first place.

At this point, I don't even think these companies need to have layoffs, they're literally just following the fad.

> DigitalOcean on Wednesday told staff it was laying off about 11 percent of them, or approximately 200 employees.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DOCN/

I had no idea they were publicly traded.

Same, apparently it was back in 2021. I'm surprised

DigitalOcean starts to cut corners now that it's biggest competitor has been absorbed by Akamai

Makes sense.

Is Linode similar in scale? I always assumed Digital Ocean’s biggest competitor was AWS Lightsail, GCP, Heroku?

I don't have that information. I only know the results of marketing on my brain goop.

In my mind that puts DO and Linode (RIP) next to each other for cost-capped VPS services and the rest land above and below depending on what you're trying to do.

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