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Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

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Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#51

Post by oweiler »

westoque wrote: post #17

There was a time when I wanted to use Travis CI but the pricing was too much. Then, CircleCI came along with a free plan, and when the time came to upgrade, we did it so easily since we’re already invested in the platform. I wish Travis CI they did this from the start since I like their platform and had some open source projects there and again could have easily upgraded. This is where the fremium model would have wo…

CircleCI is also a superior product, especially CircleCI 2.0. Their Docker integration is top notch, and there are lots of ways to optimize build performance.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#52

Post by treis »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #30
mbrumlow wrote: post #5

I called it. The money men have praises Idera for their new and innovative approach to software development. Also know has fixed cost devlopement to the lowest bider. If you want stop this type of practice please don't sign multi year contracts. That is stage two. This is where they get their value. Without the contracts they can't use it as leverage to take out huge debts -- where they get their value from. If the f…

> The money men have praises Idera for their new and innovative approach to software development. Buying something that's already been developed and then not developing it further is a 'new and innovative approach to software development'?

You joke, but when have you ever heard of a software company calling their product complete, firing most of their developers, and moving to maintenance mode? Building a product and making money by selling it is somewhat of a novelty in the hypergrowth VC world of software.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#53

Post by FanaHOVA »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #28

Not too shocking, unfortunately, from discussion when the acquisition was annoucned ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 ), we knew that this was the kind of private equity firm that makes money by buying products with existing revenue streams, and then _not_ investing in them. (And the corollary, laying off staff you don't need if you're not going to be investing in it, obviously helps your profit margin)…

Always used Circle in my Rails app, works very nicely (even though the web experience has been going downhill a little bit lately).

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#54

Post by gm3dmo »

bluedino wrote: post #41
dtech wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the previous discussion, it seems like Idera's mode of operation is stopping active development on the product, and maintaining it more or less as-is as long as there are people using it. Then it's not necessary to reduce tech debt.

This same pattern happens with 'dying' ERP software. The users aren't going anywwhere, unless you for ce them. It takes years and millions of dollars to switch ERP platoforms. Buy the company for...what a year or two (or even less) worth of contracts equals. Fire all the developers. Keep a skeleton support staff. Fire sales/marketing. In-house everything else. Then just keep getting paid by customners until they all…

But Travis is the choice of well weapon DevOps people, they will be able to swap out to a new CI in 10 seconds flat. Hell, a dingbat like me could probably do it in a day. An ERP system, not so much.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#55

Post by dewyatt »

urda wrote: post #25

Whelp, I might be looking at CircleCI vs TravisCI again.

I would recommend considering GitLab CI as well. I started moving some projects over there a few months back and I've been quite happy with it. The transition from Travis CI was pretty smooth. There are some differences in concepts (cache vs artifacts), but the GitLab CI documentation is pretty good.

Plus you can run it all locally with a couple of docker containers (gitlab-ce/gitlab-ee & gitlab-runner).

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#56

Post by mikepurvis »

lostapathy wrote: post #16
xtreak29 wrote: post #9

From the tweet [0] it seems there is going to be a huge tech debt. I don't know how Idera is planning to expand upon the acquisition after letting go people like this. > Some know the skinny on dozens of different open source projects and ecosystems, others understand run time and dep mgmt for like 17 languages and even more tooling, and automated image mastering to handle it all. > Others are rewriting what it means…

To (sadly) be fair, Travis has already been struggling mightily with tech debt the last few years. There have been a lot of issues surface and re-surface that sure seem like they shouldn't be a big deal. For example, setting a build to use ruby 2.4 is supposed to run the latest ruby 2.4.x, but would frequently build against ancient, unsupported rubies for a while, before being silently fixed.

They've also been very slow to ship updated machine images— Ubuntu 14.04 wasn't available until late 2015, and 16.04 wasn't until Nov 2018:

https://blog.travis-ci.com/2015-10-14-opening-up-ubuntu-trus...

https://blog.travis-ci.com/2018-11-08-xenial-release

The extremely long lag combined with some communications from Travis developers on related Github issues strongly implied that shipping these was a highly manual process, not just a matter of updating a few Packer configs and calling it a day. I'm not arguing that it's trivial, but it should have been a week or two of effort at most.

Now, lots of their userbase could be covered by using docker environments, or by the natural isolation supplied by the language platform (virtualenv, rbenv, etc), but at the end of the day, it's frustrating if your CI environment is drifting away from what developers are actually using themselves.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#58

Post by jrochkind1 »

treis wrote: post #52
jrochkind1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The money men have praises Idera for their new and innovative approach to software development. Buying something that's already been developed and then not developing it further is a 'new and innovative approach to software development'?

You joke, but when have you ever heard of a software company calling their product complete, firing most of their developers, and moving to maintenance mode? Building a product and making money by selling it is somewhat of a novelty in the hypergrowth VC world of software.

I bet we could find tons of other private equity examples. It's how they do. When they aren't firing most staff to then try to re-sell the company instead.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#59

Post by rightbyte »

YawningAngel wrote: post #34
penagwin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only for open source repo's. For those who have to choose a CI for business use that may not be usable.

In what sane business is 50$ a month over a free tier the deciding factor in choosing a CI system?

Most (?) developers can't even buy a mouse without prior permission.

"Free" is more convient at work than at home. If I need something at home I just pay. At work ...

Compare the hazzle of getting a Win10 VM up and running compared to a Ubuntu one with licensing issues. A Win10 image is like 3 days away. An Ubuntu 30 min. The slower alternative also happens to cost money.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#60

Post by simonbyrne »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #28

Not too shocking, unfortunately, from discussion when the acquisition was annoucned ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251 ), we knew that this was the kind of private equity firm that makes money by buying products with existing revenue streams, and then _not_ investing in them. (And the corollary, laying off staff you don't need if you're not going to be investing in it, obviously helps your profit margin)…

Agree 100%. Free CI really did provide a massive boost to collaborative open source projects.

As a user, it did a lot to increase software quality: not just catching inadvertent bugs, but also ensuring that there was at least some reproducible way to get the code working, that didn't depend on some implicit configuration of the authors system.

As a maintainer, accepting simple pull requests becomes much easier when you can quickly look over the code and check the CI status, and not have to try it out locally yourself. It was certainly critical to the "social coding" idea behind GitHub.

So thanks to the team that put it together. Even if the product you built doesn't live on in the way you hoped, it has certainly had a lasting impact for the better on the open source world.

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