Heroku | Engineering and Product Roles | Remote
We have a large number openings recently posted as we are making a big investment in Heroku. We're seeking individuals with expertise in AI, DX, Tooling, Data, Operational Excellence, Operations, and more.
When you click on the "Apply for..." button, another page appears saying it's for "Distributed Systems Software Engineer - Public Cloud (Senior/Lead/Principal)" role and mentions "Deep knowledge of programming in Java, Golang, or Python". So not only the title of the role changed, but all the requirements as well.
Is this remote worldwide or in the US only? The job ad says "employees on several continents and more than a dozen countries" which implies it's world-wide, but when I apply it says "I understand that upon employment, proof of legal right to work in the US and completion of an I-9 form will be required".
Thanks Shostack. As it happens, I don't have an MBA, but I have considered in the past as I think it is important for people who come up through the engineering ranks to GM jobs to be well rounded. Instead I've done a lot of learning on the job, which also works.
We are not shutting it down. As I said in the blog, our priority is making sure that Heroku choice is a good business decision for critical apps of all sizes. This does have tradeoffs, but getting the rug pulled out is not one of them - the opposite.
Ok, let's see how well this comment ages. I predict in 5-10 years max we will get an "Our incredibly journey" post or a "Heroku is now Salesforce Cloud" (if that name isn't already taken, I have no clue, "Safeforce" is an immediate "avoid! red flag!" for me, I don't follow that company). Heroku was amazing when it first came out but it squandered the lead it had and hasn't done anything interesting for a long time.
As with all "let's squeeze all we can out of this" you will continue to make money for a number of years no doubt but you've just destroyed a major onboarding ramp (free tier), your security appears to be a joke from the outside looking in, and your product has been effectively on life support for many years now. A public roadmap is too little, too late. You've lost the trust of developers and it's only going to be downhill from here.
> This does have tradeoffs, but getting the rug pulled out is not one of them - the opposite.
I'm sure the developers with apps on the free tier don't agree and I'd bet good money they will never touch Heroku again if they have their way. I know I won't.
"Heroku is now Salesforce Cloud" is an easy-bet prediction, just like "ExactTarget is now Marketing Cloud", or "Pardot is now Marketing Cloud Account Engagement".
When something gets the "Cloud" rename, you can bet it's on the way downhill.
I'm a grad student who used to use Heroku a lot during undergrad (multiple university projects, used to be my first place to deploy stuff). Just deleted all my apps and removed my credit card, never gonna touch Heroku again with a 10 foot pole.
It's incredibly frustrating to watch Heroku's leadership squander what they've been given stewardship of.
Heroku has a decade-plus of goodwill and developer recognition, and that is being burned to the ground rather quickly.
How about acknowledging that the Free tier is going away because Heroku is basically in keep-the-lights-on mode at this point? The number of engineers who have been laid off or quit has gutted the company, to the point that fighting abuse and spam is not possible, nor is active feature development.
I've submitted a support ticket several times and get a canned response from some poor sod in India who has no idea what is going on. Heroku's Support used to be the model of "how it's done." Now it's a joke.
And security is a joke, as demonstrated by the April "incident" that lasted two months. Reading between the lines, it seems that nobody knows what exactly happened, and the team is probably still waiting for more fallout.
I don't envy your position Bob, you've probably been told to kill Heroku by your leaders, all of whom have never used Heroku nor can explain what a dyno is.
Completely agree on their support. I used to get support from actual engineers who would resolve my issues quickly, but now I get agents who know nothing and eventually connect me to an engineer after days of back and forth “tech support.”
Nice to hear from you! We spend multiple tens of thousands of dollars every year and are on Heroku Enterprise, and have been on the platform for 10 years.
We could cut our price by about 50% moving to a competitor. We suspect AWS RDS will work very similarly to Heroku Postgres, and I have been unable to get much clarity from the teams at Heroku on precisely what Heroku Postgres is doing for me that AWS RDS would not do. Is it possible to find out precisely what Heroku Postgres is getting me that AWS RDS will not?
There's always a cost with transitioning, so if there would be some kind of price reduction possible for Heroku, that would eliminate me looking at competitors. I suspect this is out of the question, and you wouldn't want to comment publicly, but I sure would like a reply somehow indicating there may be some plans for this.
Some of the reasons I'm concerned:
* the GitHub security issue that lingered for over a month
* the DNS issue that hit the other day that resulted in our apps being only spottily available for multiple hours
Missing features, such as:
* the lack of wildcard in Heroku Automated Certificate Management
* having to share a load balancer with free dynos that might be doing suspicious things and therefore getting our apps blocked at certain customers, even when we're using Heroku Enterprise (this is one reason why I'm okay with free dynos going away, since we've been bit multiple times by this issue over the last decade)
Could you jump in on the cloud native buildpack issue above and ask for clarification? Goal of the public roadmap is to gather input and feedback and make it better.
We are doing more than keeping the lights on. Purpose of the public roadmap (which just launched, we'll need some time to really get it right, I'm sure) is to show what we are working on. Any comment on the work around github integration safety as an example?
Watching for feedback here, but it's nice to know when I'm getting reachouts on product feedback directly who is touching base. Linked-in is great for that. But also, if you want to provide feedback we launched the roadmap on github if that's your preference. Trying to cover both kinds of customers.
> it's nice to know when I'm getting reachouts on product feedback directly who is touching base. Linked-in is great for that.
It’s unclear if you are trying to be ironic here or serious, but in case you are being serious: this kind of language alienates a lot of technical people and reads like a parody. “Reach out” and “touch base” are salesperson lingo clichés that make people cringe, and using “reachouts” as a noun doubles down on that. Nobody here thinks LinkedIn is an appropriate venue for technical feedback (many people can’t stand it at all), and it’s LinkedIn, not Linked-in. I apologise if this comes across as snarky but if you want genuine communication with technical people, talking like a salesperson cliché undermines your goals. What you communicated with this announcement was “Heroku is in maintenance mode, run by non-technical people”. Your comments here are reinforcing that. If you want to connect with technical people, you have to lay off the salesperson lingo and talk like a normal person not InMail spam.
* HTTP/2 (3?) (on the roadmap)
* a refresh of the dyno line-up - at least pass on some of the cost savings of removing/supporting free tier by reducing dyno pricing or preferably bumping specs
* auto-scale for all dyno tiers
* rebuild security team with reputable lead
* edge / multi region active-active DX
* edge ssl termination
* iterate on chat ops (underrated feature)
* more metrics
* more alerting (e.g. crashed apps)
* better user/access team management (default app roles)
* enhanced secrets management in env (2 layers of env view/roles - config vs secrets)
* DDOS protection
* Treat CI env vars as secrets!
My dude, I spent many thousands of dollars on Heroku over many years. I've reported bugs to customer support and nothing changed or improved, for years. I appreciate you're reaching out, but that bridge is burnt. The trust is gone. I ran into a bit of trouble getting set up with Render and one of their PMs reached out directly to learn more. Heroku replied to virtually all of my customer support issues with messages gaslighting me that the problems were my fault or "Try debugging your application with New Relic".
Forget little bugs... the big picture is far more important. I cannot recommend anyone use this product given recent (years) inattention.
Since you work for Heroku / Salesforce, letting your users know if this is a dead product or not would be a good first step. If not dead, explain why there have been no updates and what is to be expected moving forward.
Heroku is very much alive. On your comment about what is to be expected.... stay tuned.
Given that, I also don't want to forget the little bugs, I believe they are important to a great user experience. I think this is true for any product, but especially true for Heroku.
@countspongebob, I hope you take HN's reaction back to your team & management. Not doing so, not replying, that will probably be the nail in the coffin from the HN crowd, which is highly influential in the industry.
Heroku is a remote-friendly team.
https://www.heroku.com/careers#openings