No trust anymore - Senior Software Engineer DigitalOcean Employee Review

2.0
Feb 16, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pay is good, fully remote, still a lot of talented engineers left. If you're on a good team, day-to-day work is very enjoyable.

Cons

With constant change of priorities and reorgs there's never time to focus on long-term projects. Instead of performance-based terminations, there are periodic layoffs with people chosen at random. Lots of hard-working engineers with glowing performance reviews gone. ICs are blamed for management mistakes. When tech debt creeped in and customers started leaving due to platform instabilities, the executives didn't even acknowledge that prioritizing fast feature shipment led to this situation, they just blamed individual engineers for not being cautious enough when deploying changes.

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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