Role consolidation and a lack of clarity / support for successful outcomes - Senior USer Researcher DigitalOcean Employee Review

1.0
Mar 11, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Fully remote - Somewhat competitive pay - Relatively good work-life balance if you're not trying to progress in your career.

Cons

- UXR and Product Design have been consistently devalued an divested from in the last 2-3 years. - There seems to be a constant leadership churn, and a lack of understanding or clarity on how non-engineering roles provide value to the organization - Super top-down decision making, but without any effort to provide context or clarity. It's a highest-paid-person in the room kind of culture. And many product decisions seem to be made based on gut feel or board demands.

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
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All