DigitalOcean reviews

- HORRIBLE onboarding. I literally trained myself. I would clock in at 7am, be given little to no direction or training material. Maybe once or twice per week, I'd have a 30 minute Zoom training call with a tech based in the other side of the world who can barely speak English. Then it was back to just sitting around reading documentation. There is no on the job training, there are no learning materials, there are no trainers. You are just told "play around with the platform and try to break/fix stuff". When you're starting from scratch that's insanely vague. - Awful internal documentation. Very often with tech support, there will be internal docs that explain how to do a certain process or at least provides a roadmap for proper protocol. Not at DigitalOcean. Nearly all of our playbooks for tech support were outdated and deprecated or just not helpful in the slightest. It slows everything way down when you cannot find a clear answer on how to do something without having to DM someone directly. - They also just laid off the majority of their support team in America and are outsourcing it to Pakistan/India/Mexico. I was laid off after only four months of being here and now DO is hiring for my job in countries where they can pay half my salary.

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.