DigitalOcean

The work life balance is great and my team works really hard to protect that.

This is a deeply technical company run by a C-suite that has zero product vision.

We haven't built a substantially new product in years with our only new releases being through acquisitions or white-labeling other company's products.

For example: before recently acquiring Paperspace for its GPU compute platform, we had multiple aborted attempts to build our own GPU product that were always abandoned as soon as the current crypto or AI hype cycle waned.

And now that we have Paperspace, that's being run by our M&A division instead of product or engineering and there's no plan from leadership on how to integrate their wildly-incompatible tech stack.

The C-suite is a bunch of clowns LARPing as successful tech execs as they drive this company into the ground. At least the board is finally starting to fire them though.

For the board: hire a C-suite that trusts its employees to guide their priorities. We’ve been telling the company for years what needs to be done but the only way they prioritize those things is if an external audit tells them to do it.

For the current C-suite: take your golden parachutes and get out of our way.