great coworkers, terrible "leaders" - Software Engineer DigitalOcean Employee Review

1.0
Mar 11, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Individual contributors and line managers are generally onboard with company values. The hiring process tends to result in good company value matches. The pay is roughly competitive with comparable employers.

Cons

Upper management doesn't live up to company values, doesn't prioritize customer experience, chronically under-staffs product and infrastructure teams, and generally creates an environment that leads people who actually do work at the company to repeatedly burn out. The CTO doesn't hold himself accountable for understanding information passed up to him by his direct reports and misleads the rest of senior management with his misunderstandings of key metrics.

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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