Smart employees, quality product, poor leadership - Lead Product Designer DigitalOcean Employee Review

4.0
Apr 1, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I worked with a lot of really smart people—especially the other designers, and particularly some of the engineers. I learned a lot about cloud computing, and everyone there (at least on the IC level) was super kind.

Cons

Recently there have been some questionable firings after employees raised some concerns about product direction to leadership. Leadership emphasized that they wanted to move quickly and they told everyone to "disagree and commit", but refused to be transparent about the decisions they were making at the executive level. Constant changes are happening at the organizational level that affect individual contributors greatly, but very little is done to explain why decisions were made or ease any difficult transitions that have to be made.

Explore other reviews about DigitalOcean

5.0
Mar 30, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Solid engineering team, seems to have found a niche and is working it hard.

Cons

Smaller company, so low in the prestige

2.0
May 18, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- lots of ownership - decent middle management - great teammates - learning a lot - older employees do tend to have competitive RSU grants and salaries

Cons

- tons of legacy systems (10+ years version of Ruby on Rails... 10+ years since some products or services were updated, 0 associated automation to help) - last 2y of leadership has brought on tons of reorgs & changes. Example - recommended PTO days quietly went down, got rid of lots of free snacks, anniversary gifts went down $100s of dollars, plenty of silent layoffs - Senior leadership is focused on 1 thing - getting the stock price up. Has no interest in supporting some of our legacy systems that can prop up new products. - new hires are not fitting into our culture. Inflated titles. Empire building. Awarded for submitting buggy AI Slop code. Encourage working on the weekends. Starting to get toxic.

2
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