Horrible management and horrible work/life balance overpower great comp/perks - Tax Manager (Finance) DigitalOcean Employee Review

1.0
Dec 4, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

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.

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