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Ex-GoDaddy employee here:

Everyone there is on pins and needles at this point. Since Silverlake's investment in the company, many hatchets have dropped on jobs, and it's really the only decent tech firm in Phoenix to work at.

My guess is that there is some hiney covering going on with this explanation, and the interim CEO has little cause to care too much about responsibility, since he'll likely be out before year's end anyway.

I really feel for the folks who work there. Many, many talented people who don't have an inch to make a mistake. When I was last there, they had just released an internal communication about the new company motto: "It won't fail because of me." Horrible, horrible, backward-ass culture.




Ughh. That sounds about what I expected unfortunately.

Sorry to hear this as any reasonable corporate structure understands 'shit' happens in the tech universe. Fix it as expediently as possible and move on, putting in place as much protection as possible to prevent it in the future.

Do you think we'll see a true outage report or is this unlikely?


Based on the OP's statements about the company culture, is there an incentive for employees to be honest about their role in the outage? Do you think that enough Very Good Engineers stuck around post-acquisition to perform an independent root-cause analysis?

I've never known Go Daddy to make any public statements without testing them first. Whatever story gets released will likely be the one with the highest conversion rate.


can you clarify what you mean by:

> it's really the only decent tech firm in Phoenix to work at.

and then:

> Horrible, horrible, backward-ass culture.

what part of the company is good if not the culture?


There are many tech (and non-tech) companies in the Phoenix area. Your choice, as always, is to work at a place where the importance of the technology and the talent of your engineers and designers is recognized, or work in PetSmart's IT/Web department (where you're constantly fighting budget and recognition battles).

So should you opt to go into tech, GoDaddy is the largest and best-paying, and has fairly decent benefits. Unless you were a Senior level professional elsewhere, it would likely be in your best interest to work at GD.

That said, it's also a company run by bean counters and marketing. Most (read: all) important decisions regarding what choices the company makes goes through a ringer that includes assessing how much direct money comes from an innovation or change. If test a yields or saves $1 and test b yields or saves $2, test b wins, no matter how poor a choice it is in terms of user experience, customer care or any other metrics that relate to long-term customer retention.

It's got tons of middle management, which in itself isn't a bad thing, except that everyone's fighting to own the creation a product, but no one wants to be accountable for it, should it not go well.

Essentially this creates an environment of fear against innovation, accountability and iteration.


I've only been here less than a year so I haven't been exposed to that. What I've observed is that the culture is very compartmentalized in the sense that there are lots of small teams that each have a specific product they work on. Each team basically has it's own culture and way of doing things.

That isn't good for standards/best practices, but it does mean that teams have a lot of leeway to do things pretty much however they want. My team has a ton of flexibility on how we code, test, and deploy, though we have to work within some red tape imposed by other teams that have their own way of doing their things.

In my day to day work I'm actually pretty free to work how I want without being pushed by people up the food chain. That could be because the product I work on is a supplementary product and not a 'core' product, though.


Classic engineer. I'm talking about across a product. It's true that within your core group, you are given leeway, but the buck stops there.


The fact that it is a tech company in Phoenix?


possibly the subcultures that emerge to complain about the backward-ass mainstream within the company, i.e. having something to gripe about with your coworkers is a bonding force.


> "It won't fail because of me."

Leave now. It will be a black mark on your resume if you stay.

Seriously.


> It will be a black mark on your resume if you stay.

It's funny you say this. This is exactly the reason why I left, and exactly what I told HR when I left. Unsurprisingly, they had told me that others who had recently left gave similar sentiment.


Good move. Having a nose for when an organization will work for you among good organizations. (It will work against you in bad organizations "What?! You didn't stay to help turn it around?" SLP is most likely going to strip out whatever they can and then find somebody to unload it on.)


Ex-GoDaddy employee here


I should have been more clear that I was writing to those that were not ex.




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