DigitalOcean Employee Reviews about "ceo"

Pros

- The hiring process was a bit long, but probably one of the best, most straightforward hiring experiences I have been through. - The remotee-first culture is fantastic, really setting the bar for how to operate a company in a distributed fashion. - There is a lot of cutting-edge technology to work with/on, and a lot of smart, helpful people to work on it with you. - The path forward is starting to materialize with a new CEO and executive suite at the helm, with (seemingly) a lot of opportunity for innovation and career growth within the company.

Cons

- A lot of longer-term employees are starting to churn. It isn't clear why people leave all the time, but this can be off-putting or demoralizing when just starting out, not being sure if they have better context on whether we are headed in "the right direction." - It is not clear that there is strong technical leadership at the top. This has led to a lot of disparity at the bottom, which needs to be cleaned up if we want to grow at the pace we have been recently.

Pros

- You'll work with some really great talent here, and you'll have no shortage of brilliant minds to bounce ideas off of. - The CEO is easily approachable, and he clearly has your best interest at heart. - Commuter benefits like no other - they'll pay some or all of your commute costs, including a free monthly unlimited metro card on top. - Free lunches! Corporate Seamless account and pizza fridays! - Amazing, low-cost health insurance for the whole family, 100% coverage of employee's costs covered and 50% of premiums covered for family members. - Relaxed work environment and atmosphere.

Cons

- Sometimes there are conflicts with instructions received from multiple higher-ups. - Slightly less accessible since the move

Pros

My type of role is quite unique, but this is what I've seen after being part of DigitalOcean for more than six months. As you'll see, I had a pretty good experience at DigitalOcean, which is reflected in this review... Part of the DigitalOcean values are things like simplicity, love, community and respect, which are things I care about and lived by the whole company, from top to bottom. We have great products, easy to use but full of advanced features for developers, all this, at a competitive price which makes my life easier in my role. The fact that our editors and technical writers teams are delivering worldwide class quality is also a blessing. Most tutorials written aren't centered around our product, which says a lot about the focus on community and helping others. I obviously cannot speak for all the business, but within my team, and my department, the motto is people first. We have a long-term vision: the management and the company invest in people instead of just thinking of them as production machines. The culture is highly remote, and the people team goes the extra mile to make us feel like we are part of the company with perks that are quite amazing like sending us coffee and snacks every month, or even some comfort food during the holidays. Those are small gesture that, again, strongly speaks about the culture. As for the salary and compensation, is it on par with any companies from the West Coast even if the head office is in NYC.

Cons

As a fast-growing company, a lot of emphasis are put on sales now, which may (hopefully not), change the culture of the enterprise. Don't get me wrong, I know we are a for-profit company, and I love seeing us grow as much as I love getting benefits out of it, but we need to keep our community focus culture. We also just had a new CEO and other changes in the structure, which means that right now, nothing is set in stone. On a positive note, we had a company-wide offsite recently and Yancey, our new CEOly and Yancey, our new CEOly and Yancey, our new CEO, gave me a great impression. He seems to be aligned with our values, and quite transparent about his future plans. We'll see where it goes!

Pros

amazingly smart people that are driven, passionate and just generally good people who care about making products and experiences that are elegant yet simple

Cons

the company is maturing and undergoing a lot of change with a new CEO at the helm, so the path isn't always 100% clear yet, but if you thrive in a place where you can create a bit of your own destiny and don't stress about change, then no problem!

Pros

- DO owns the developer market that they are going after and has a strong company branding in the marketplace - Perks on perks. The company takes care of their employees with catered meals, corporate seamless accounts for you to order breakfast, lunch, and dinner, complimentary kindle loaded with books, gym reimbursement, and more. - The people are awesome and incredibly smart. Everyone that has joined the company has had a thorough and rigorous interview process that requires meeting the CEO as a final step. Not sure how Ben has time to do that still but it goes to show that he clearly cares about the employees and wants to make sure that the prospective candidates are a culture fit before joining - You feel like you are on the A-Team. There are plenty of startups out there and more that get created every single day. Most fail. Few get acquired. One will get to go the whole way (IPO possibly) and really build a lasting legacy in the tech market. DigitalOcean has that potential to go the whole way. In just a short, few years - we've become the 2nd largest cloud provider in the world next to Amazon Web Services. Few players in the market can say they've done what we've done. Actually... no one else can say that : )

Cons

- More communication please. Common startup weakness but with the potential of becoming a unicorn that dominates the cloud market, this absolutely cannot be one of our weak points. Lots of stakeholders doing different things without any communication cross-departmentally which creates bottlenecks and slows down processes.

Pros

One thing DigitalOcean has is really good perks - you can work remote pretty much whenever, fully pay for MTA card, lunch everyday, team outings, gym reimbursement, good insurance, etc. But perks aren't everything - they can't create a culture (with terrible leadership) and it's really easy to tell when the business isn't doing so well when they start cutting back. Honestly, the "working" employees are the best thing about the business.

Cons

The CEO of the company is not a leader, is unapproachable and is slowly driving the company into the ground. He is disrespectful to almost everyone and his ideas are always correct. They are pushing for diversity, but it doesn't seem like any female leaders are liked. I would be surprised if the board didn't push him out by the end of the year. On top of it, another member of the exec team is a brother (who left and came back - never a good sign) and several Directors/Managers throughout the organization are related to one another - conflict of interest? Turnover has been terrible - reading in a newsletter that 2-3 people left every few weeks is absolutely insane. They preach an amazing growth opportunity, but continue to hire outside of the organization because they have no career paths laid out or development plans in place. They ARE well funded, but don't mistake this for having great leaders. The company has been slow to adapt to the enterprise sales trend of technology companies for revenue growth and is now scrambling to fix it since they aren't hitting projected revenue. They have relied on word of mouth and their 'community' for business and are just now realizing they need a sales team...5 years after inception. They underpay a lot of teams outside of engineering (they are the most important) and then do 'off cycle comp reviews' just to say they are 'working to fix' pay inequities. A lot of managers are inexperienced, which isn't the bad part - but it's that they don't have the leadership (or qualified leadership) to train these young professionals to succeed. They have a ton of values, but in reality, it seems like the executive team is exempt from all of them. I won't continue to ramble on, but you get the idea. It appears great on the outside, but inside it's is a mess, their growth is slowing, and you need to be prepared to be frustrated and stressed everyday with no explanation and a 'this is the way I want it' attitude from the top.

Pros

1) Salary + bonus + equity compensation were top of the market. There are other places that don't give any equity compensation to Tax/Accounting professionals, so this was a huge plus. Also the company only just went public in 2021, so the equity isn't as much of a crapshoot/lottery ticket as a startup. 2) Great perks. $300 per month, ostensibly stipends for health and wellness and internet/phone (don't need to provide receipts). $1,000 one-time work from home stipend (don't need to provide receipts). Health/vision/dental insurance up to 90% covered by the company. 401k matching that vests immediately. 3) 100% remote work

Cons

1) The worst management. Management expects people to have no work/life balance during quarter close. 'Quarter close' is defined by management as 5 weeks long and closer to 8 weeks for year-end close. So about half of the year. Management expects you to work long hours (10+ hours a day) and/or be glued to your computer and respond immediately to any issues that pop up. And by respond immediately, they mean within 15 minutes of an email being sent. If you want a half hour or hour for lunch, management expects that you block off lunch time on your calendar or otherwise they will consider it fair game to ask you to do something urgently. Management will defend themselves by saying 'this is the way it is' and that they were 'very transparent' about this during the interview process. 2) A pervasive fire drill culture in the overall Finance group. It's one thing if someone is out sick or if something truly unpredictable happens. But the Finance group struggles to meet deadlines that are known far in advance. There is a lack of organization, established processes, and communication between departments. This leads people to realize on a given day 'oh crap, X is due today!' which sets off a chain reaction as people the need to be glued to their computers as messages are exchanged back and forth until issues are ultimately resolved. 3) Unrealistic and undefined expectations for the work product in general. Management will have a vague/broad sense of what work needs to get done, but will not provide any specifics and expects people to 'figure it out'. This leads to an unnecessarily iterative process. Management considers themselves 'too busy' to really think about what needs to get done and actually plan/organize, so they think they're being 'efficient' by telling someone to start working on something even though they're provided incomplete instructions. 4) A ton of corporate BS (that honestly is probably to be expected from a company of this size). One of the company's core values is 'love'. At a Finance offsite, the CFO gave out t-shirts and hats that said 'The Finance Team Gets **** Done' (with the 4 letter word actually spelled out). 5) The company got rid of 'recharge days' (basically extra vacation days). There had been at least 1 per month, and they always landed on days that made a long weekend. At the Company All Hands meeting, they announced that these recharge days had been cancelled. The CEO seemed to imply that these were never meant to be permanent, but the company never communicated the expectations clearly.

Pros

Lots of talent, legacy of doing things right

Cons

Cutthroat CEO killed everything good about the company, including diversity, instilling fear and decimation of good people.

Pros

Financial: - Competitive pay - Good personal computer perks, especially for remote - 401k 4% match - Personal budget toward learning/growth (books, conferences, courses, etc.) - Paid travel a few times a year Cultural: - Most (all?) positions have remote options, and outstanding remote culture (more than half employees remote) - If you're working in or visiting the office, it looks dope - the designers did some great custom work - Regular AMA's with the CEO and other upper management (transparency) - Focus on removing cultural bias in hiring process - Strong engineering culture - Minimal politicking (everywhere has some, but this is on the lower side) - Well organized and welcoming

Cons

- Compared to the bigger cloud players, DigitalOcean is an underdog in many areas. Maybe a pro depending on your point of view, but it means comparable teams and projects are smaller. - Rapid growth, which means growing pains due to reorganization, learning to scale. Some people are less excited about incoming changes, which causes friction.