Readit NewsCulture. The fact that it doesn't matter what the company says their culture is and that their culture is defined by the behaviors that they do and don't allow in the workplace. Culture can vary from team to team and department to department.
Deadweight. The organization is going to be full of dead weight.
Get ready to feel under-appreciated and under-valued.
Cofounder of DigitalOcean here.
Letting people go is always a complicated matter at any scale. Whether you are a ten person company and firing one employee or you are 500 people and firing a larger number.
Wanted to address a few statements from the hackernews community here.
We are not prepping the company for sale.
As unfortunate as the layoffs are they were really due to two CEO changes in the past 18 months and leadership changes that created competing directions in the business, which Yancey our new CEO, is now addressing.
We are not running out of money, nor do we have an immediate need to raise capital, and the lay-offs aren't related to any sort of "cost-cutting".
We last raised an equity round in the summer of 2015 and haven't had a need to raise capital since. This is because we are very capital efficient and have been since our founding.
There are no profitability issues with $5/mo customers as the unit economics are the same as larger accounts. As we have grown we have added more products and features so that scaling teams and companies can also be successful on DigitalOcean, but we are not changing our commitment to the individual developer and those who are just getting started.
Lastly, it pains me to see people let go, having been on both sides of the table, it honestly just really sucks.
When a company becomes a certain size, it's inevitable that you will hire people looking for a job.
Firing people sucks. Yes, it affects their livelihood, but having warm bodies on your roster affects your business.
The problem with people who have a job is that they affect company culture as they set the tone for acceptable and unacceptable behaviors in the workplace. It spreads like a disease and the effect can cripple those who show up to work.
Sometimes, this can lead to confusion as people who have a job might think, "I was doing what I was told. I don't understand why." Creating value is much more than simply following orders.
I use vim with a couple dozen plugins as my main text editor every day.
No matter which route you decide to go, work on some hard skills. Something. Anything. Whether or not you think you're going to use what you learn, what's important is that you're learning. If you start interviewing, you're going to eventually be asked, "What is something new you have learned?" It would be a great chance to pull out your computer and show them. Even if you land another role as a PM, it's going to be important to be relevant.
On a related note, someone I know was an IT Director. On the side, he started tinkering with Android development. I helped him learn how to use git. Eventually, he was laid off. The skills he learned helped him land a job at a decent sized company that I'm pretty sure you've heard of.
What makes python a good choice is that you don't have to spend too much overhead learning language syntax in order to implement concepts, and you'll easily be able to keep the learning of those two items separate.
Once you have a strong foundation in concepts, you can much more easily pick up a different language. The biggest downfall there is that if you decide to later learn Ruby or JavaScript, you might approach a solution as, "This is how I would do it in Python." Don't fall into that trap. Learn the features each language provides and how to use them.
Since you mentioned games, there's a couple of books on the topic that are free: http://inventwithpython.com/
- bash + GNU coreutils; seriously, take the time to be able to write helpful bash scripts which can run basically anywhere.
- git; use it even when you're not pushing to a remote. Add helpful aliases for everyday commands. Build a good mental model of commits and branches to help you through tough merges. ( my ~/.gitconfig: https://gist.github.com/jeaye/950300ff8120950814879a46b796b3... )
- Regex; combined with bash and your GNU tools, a lot can be done.
- Vim; modal editing and vi-like navigation can blow open your mind. Explore the existing plugins to accomplish everything you want to be able to do. It's all there. ( my ~/.vimrc: https://github.com/jeaye/vimrc )
- Functional programming; if you're new to this, start with Clojure, not one of the less-practical languages. This has made such a huge impact on the way I think about code, write code, and design code that it's possibly the biggest one here for me.