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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

#61

Post by jackhack »

adityab wrote: post #35
jackhack wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the childish names are artifact of the immaturity of the codebro culture overall. I realize that's not a popular opinion. Not everything has to emulate the old-fashioned, Buttoned-Down, "3-piece business suit + briefcase" IBM Circa 1972, but the silliness that passes for modern IT has gone much too far the other way, IMO. I think it's an insight into the mentality of the builders, and it doesn't speak well fo…

This is nonsense; Travis employees are the polar opposite of "codebros". Lighthearted team profiles are absolutely not an insight into the employees' "mentality". If anything, your insinuations are in extremely bad faith and you should know better than to slander people you don't know, especially those whose livelihoods got snatched away. Very lazy and bad stereotyping, 0/10 points, try again.

I was referring to codebros, and this practice, industrywide. But you're quite right, I don't know anyone at Travis CI personally. But in a way that makes it worse. I can't even give the benefit of the doubt based on firsthand knowledge of the people involved. I must judge based on what I see (from the GP example: "Sausage Dog Wrangler", "Customer Avocado") is just kind of stupid and childish. It's all over the industry.

I'm not slandering anyone, I'm relating my experience and displeasure dealing with goofy (at best) product names. It's tough to ask for investor money, grant funding, or a timeline extension for "sausage dog wrangler" without looking like a fool. To a third party not in the IT industry, to hear IT "professionals" speak it sounds less like technical jargon and more like preschool babble. Other industries don't work like this, and it wasn't always this way.

I'm sorry for the Travis CI folks who are being let go.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#62

Post by rmrfrmrf »

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…

Is Idera basically the Valeant pharma of software?

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#63

Post by opportune »

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.

As a developer this obviously sucks but this seems to be pretty efficient from a high level view. If all the low hanging fruit is done and all future development is just adding features with continually diminishing returns, it makes sense to just go into maintenance mode, extract your profits, and let your developers go work on something else

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#64

Post by joshdick »

hatchnyc wrote: post #57

I would guess that this strategy would be more effective in an industry where the people with the most influence over vendor selection were not seeing this story at the top of all their news feeds.

Yeah, it's hard to imagine myself ever recommending my company buy TravisCI now.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#65

Post by devhead »

I've been using travis Enterprise for over two years and what has kept that going has been the amazing support and development team at Travis who have always helped us during an emergency, been very responsive and informative in all our interactions. They are the reasons I have backlogged the project to migrate.

Keys issues i've seen in our Enterprise install... * Upgrades can go bad, very quickly and very silently. * Build images are out-dated, missing security patches, bloated, and not easily provisioned with custom features to integrate our tools with theirs. * no tooling for docker builds/deployments * long start up time on the build images. * Enterprise documentation (though it's been improved a lot recently)

Best of luck to #travisAlums, I hope you get picked up quickly.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#66

Post by pietroalbini »

gm3dmo wrote: post #54
bluedino wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on the complexity of your CI. Big projects might take days to migrate, or even more.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#67

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

urda wrote: post #48
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have already been doing this, before the acquisition. It felt like Travis had been on auto-pilot for a long time. It was painfully obvious to me and our team that Circle is actually hungry and constantly innovating and wanted our business. We moved one project to Circle, waited a bit, and then moved everything away from Travis. Don't regret it one bit.

Hard to want to keep updating your working CI solution for your open source stuff while holding down a job and life and everything else. :)

Hah agreed :) We had one project that kept breaking in Travis, and we started to realize that starting over in Circle was easier than the troubleshooting / feedback loop in Travis.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#68

Post by u801e »

opportune wrote: post #63
treis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As a developer this obviously sucks but this seems to be pretty efficient from a high level view. If all the low hanging fruit is done and all future development is just adding features with continually diminishing returns, it makes sense to just go into maintenance mode, extract your profits, and let your developers go work on something else

And, then, after years have passed and the hardware it's running on starts failing, developers have to scramble to update components to a version that's actually supported.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#70

Post by hombre_fatal »

jackhack wrote: post #26
maccio92 wrote: post #10

maybe they wouldn't have been laid off if they took themselves and their work more seriously? I mean honestly, looking at the team page at https://about.travis-ci.com/team/ , we have titles such as Mermaid on board, Tyranjasaurus Specs, Tortilla Builder, Sausage Dog Wrangler, Customer Avocado, Head Catwoman, and Conjurer of Avocado Patronuses

I think the childish names are artifact of the immaturity of the codebro culture overall. I realize that's not a popular opinion. Not everything has to emulate the old-fashioned, Buttoned-Down, "3-piece business suit + briefcase" IBM Circa 1972, but the silliness that passes for modern IT has gone much too far the other way, IMO. I think it's an insight into the mentality of the builders, and it doesn't speak well fo…

This weird judginess in this thread is something I hate about tech culture.

I don't know what a codebro is, but I'd be wary of casting too many stones in a thread where you are going out of your way to shit on something as inconsequential as some lighthearted job titles on an /about page and suggesting that it's a symptom of their failure.

Reminds me of observing my friend's kids' social group where everything was "literally cringe." I was walking with them in the mall and they spent the whole time gossiping about how "cringe" everything was. Didn't have a single interesting conversation the whole time because they were too busy judging everyone for superficial things.

What's interesting to me is that the comments here think they're revealing something about the victim of their judgments, painting this whole bizarre narrative about them, when they're really exposing themselves as, frankly, insufferable.

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