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Posted by u/OJFord 3 years ago
Ask HN: Anyone else receiving unsolicited Datadog marketing spam?
I keep getting 'reaching out' and 'just following up' (because I haven't replied) spam from Craig Cummins 'DevSecOps Enablement' at Datadog.

One of them even said something like 'you may be wondering why you are getting this, do not worry, I got your email from our internal CRM' -- ..ok that's fine then?! No mention of how it got there. No idea why Cummins thinks it's how he specifically got my email address to use in a work capacity that might be a concern, or why 'from my employer' would be a useful answer.

It's incessant, and sure it has an 'unsubscribe' link but of course I never subscribed to your 'tell me how paying for Datadog might benefit me' spam, I shouldn't have to unsubscribe.

I assume many others here are getting this crap too?

If you happen to work at Datadog, I'd suggest telling the relevant teams that this sort of thing is only going to make people not use Datadog's services. (Or frankly, just tell Craig Cummins if that's a real employee's name - it's always him.) It's terrible for 'developer relations'.

hijinks · 3 years ago
My wife is friends someone a DD sales person. I had no idea what her husband did for a living since I didn't know either. So we go over to their house for dinner and he finds out I'm head of a devops/SRE team and I got a DD sales pitch for close to 2 hours.

I've never wanted to excuse myself to the bathroom and just sit in there doing nothing all night more in all my life.

pryelluw · 3 years ago
That really sucks.

Dead Comment

chenmike · 3 years ago
Lots of comments here saying "it's just marketing". I agree to some extent, but Datadog is easily the worst offender I've ever seen.

I work on a small engineering team and more than half the team got calls to their personal numbers and emails from Datadog. They are relentless. It's a huge turn-off, and I hope companies like this get named-and-shamed more often.

flippinbits · 3 years ago
Yes - pretty much every our engineer with “lead” in title was persietently attacked by them. They were so persistent that we needed to implement a company-wide block on their email domain. After that calls to personal numbers began. It went so far at one point we needed to make threats with legal action.

At one point we were on a market for solutin like theirs and we talked with their engineering (we temporarily lifted the block) and I have to say the product is solid (though not suitable for our needs, due to some specifics). We still use Vector. Soon after we needed to enable the block again.

anotherhue · 3 years ago
I spoke to them and didn't follow up. They called at least five of our engineers (on the telephone) to try and get in touch with me.

What can we do to make this less acceptable?

bri3d · 3 years ago
Do Datadog really see returns on this? They are absolutely head and shoulders worse than the rest of the industry when it comes to aggressive "business development" / cold calling behavior.

My experience with Datadog has been that the product is pretty good (unbelievably expensive, like all monitoring solutions, but good), but the business development / marketing culture is a huge drawback to the deal.

At a previous employer, we actually had to get a special exemption from our engineering president when we felt Datadog was a good choice for our organization's needs. He was so upset with Datadog's incessant marketing that he would regularly make "you can buy whatever you want as long as it's not Datadog" jokes on calls.

cuu508 · 3 years ago
Not all monitoring solutions are unbelievably expensive. For example, netdata is excellent and is free.
lupimiguel · 3 years ago
Comparative to DD, Netdata doesn't have logs and traces (yet), but metrics are the best monitoring fidelity in the market. And any sales emails are hidden in the middle of all those alerts notifications, so you're good.
Jamie9912 · 3 years ago
I don't think you can compare netdata to Datadog
WrtCdEvrydy · 3 years ago
[Self-plug] After building poachme.dev with a friend, I have personally found that a lot of people who spam really do it because it's low cost and wasting your time costs them nothing so I personally grab the standard reply message template and hit them with a

"Great. Please book a slot on my calendar and we can chat more about this: https://bk.poachme.dev/Lazaro"

I know they didn't "read my profile" or "find me to be the best candidate" so I just respond in kind... you wanna waste my time? Fine, I'll sit through your shpeill for $100 and if I'm so important to you, you'll pay it, if not, well, that's fine too.

6stringmerc · 3 years ago
Is this side hustle approved and sanctioned by your employer the FAA, or have you gone and created something possibly on company (taxpayer) time which means the FAA actually has an ownership interest in poachme.dev?
WrtCdEvrydy · 3 years ago
> Is this side hustle approved and sanctioned by your employer the FAA, or have you gone and created something possibly on company (taxpayer) time which means the FAA actually has an ownership interest in poachme.dev?

Not employed by the FAA... I've created something on my own personal time and you seem to be upset, you should take something to help you.

dhr · 3 years ago
ha this is really cool - has anyone paid the $100 for a call with you, with regard to recruiting or sales spam?
WrtCdEvrydy · 3 years ago
Yes, and those people get my full priority.
joelres · 3 years ago
Off-topic, tried to sign up on mobile - some strange auto scroll meant I couldn’t get past filling in my name! Happy to provide more info if you can’t repro.
WrtCdEvrydy · 3 years ago
That's kinda weird, I will tell you that signups are kinda limited right now since we're slowly rolling out features since we want to offer value to people.

Try the sign-up link with the referral code (https://bk.poachme.dev/PayMeToo)

cameronh90 · 3 years ago
I get a lot of Datadog spam, but was amusingly unable to actually convert a trial account into a paying account. I emailed multiple addresses multiple times, including the support email, the trial onboarding contact and the addresses that were spamming me, and nobody ever replied.

Found an alternative and haven't looked at them since.

EDIT: I had a similar but different experience with Google, where their sales were trying to convince me to switch to them from AWS. On the third call they arranged when we were going to talk about moving some ML workloads over, they just didn't show up and the 3 Googlers they invited to the meeting never contacted us again.

marviel · 3 years ago
What alternative did you find? Their product has always seemed nice in demos, but the aggressive marketing has made it hard for me to look at getting more involved.
time0ut · 3 years ago
It really depends on what you are trying to do and what you are willing to spend.

If you are looking for APM, take a look at New Relic. I've used both in production at similar (~1m requests/hour (DD) and ~10m requests/hour (NR)) scales. They are both good and expensive.

If you just want logs, metrics, dashboards, and alerts, there are tons of alternatives that are cheaper and better.

shyn3 · 3 years ago
If you are a windows shop avoid DD like the plague. If you don't have Pwsh devs avoid new relic for windows.
SteveNuts · 3 years ago
Between the two, I prefer Dynatrace. Just a bit simpler user interface
ChrisMarshallNY · 3 years ago
As an owner of a couple of companies, I get almost constant unsolicited spam, SMS, and calls.

I generally ignore most. Occasionally, if I feel confident it will be honored, I unsub.

I just feel that it is corrosive, professionally, to complain about/attack others in a professional fora.

For example, LinkedIn often has stuff posted that could be used as a powerful emetic. I just ignore it. I may take note of the author, for consideration in professional relationships, but I won't usually say anything about their posting.

There are a number of subreddits, dedicated to sneering at others; I am aware of ones dedicated to sneering at programmers (having been honored by their attention).

While these may be de rigueur, while in high school or early college, I believe that it's a bad idea to continue participating in these types of things, once we start earning a paycheck. Often, the people we slag, can end up in a position to do us favors, hire us, or fire us. Some corporations simply won't even consider us, if our name shows up in these places (I know that the one I worked for was obsessed with brand protection, and would not consider folks that they believed would not reflect well on their brand).

That also goes for posting attacks; no matter how "genteel," in places like this very forum. I generally avoid getting into pissing matches with folks, hereabouts.

As George Bernard Shaw said:

Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

richardknop · 3 years ago
I agree, this is pretty normal across the industry. Sales people just trying to do their job and sell their product. Sometimes they are quite persistent but why complain, if you are not interested in the product they are selling, just ignore their emails.
deezleguy · 3 years ago
I wish you could just ignore emails. If you don’t respond they’ll call your personal cellphone.

Deleted Comment

kmarc · 3 years ago
Yes, and yes they also reached out to me on my personal cell phone and on my work email. I blocked the gentleman, Philippe literally everywhere because I got so annoyed by him.

I also tweeted @datadoghq publicly to finally stop bothering me. No calls / emails / LinkedIn requests since then.