Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 105 posts

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#71

Post by rleigh »

mikepurvis wrote: post #56
lostapathy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

This was concerning for several years now. Who knows when 18.04 will make an appearance. 2021? Never?

I appreciate what they were trying to do with their multiple versions of every language in their stock images. But, in practice there were numerous compatibility problems. If you look at the C++ tickets, you can see how utterly unusable their offering was for this language. From the outside, it looks like they painted themselves into a corner and are mired in technical debt. Quite why it took two and half years to support 16.04 is a question I'd be very interested to know more about.

One solution is to use custom docker images. But that negates any advantages Travis might have had. I can run a docker image anywhere. So when I switched over to GitLab, I use GitLab CI with docker images and custom runners to do fairly comprehensive platform coverage. Something Travis will never do.

They also made a questionable business decision in tying themselves to GitHub. Why no integrations with BitBucket, GitLab, Jenkins, and all the other hosting and automation solutions out there? I had to write Travis off purely because of its lack of availability. The above problems were also an issue, but if it doesn't integrate with your hosting solution, it's a non-starter.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#72

Post by iosonofuturista »

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.

So why bother having a team page then? If want to contact someone in sales, do I go for the mermaid or the avocado? A technical question, the hot dog or the tortilla?

So the only purpose of that page seems to be to prove that the company employs actual humans? As opposed to all those AI run software companies?

I know, I'll use the contacts page. If there was any. Which there isn't. Just a twitter handle at the footer, which would be insane to conduct any sort of serious business, and a generic support email.

I have nothing, absolutely nothing against any of the Travis employees or the company. I never used their product. But in all honesty this does strike me as unprofessional.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#73

Post by hnzix »

mbrumlow wrote: post #11
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of problems to go around. If you're a founder, you're usually going to cash out for the right price. Everyone has their price. No one wants to grind forever. This isn't a problem if you're profitable enough that you can hold forever (Basecamp). If you're an investor, you're struggling for returns right now (to your point about interest rates and the Fed). You're going to squeeze whatever you can get you…

This is not a investment. It is a tool for leverage. The goal is not to grow the company it's to get as many contracts as they can and lower the ebita. Once they do this they will take out huge loans for the next company to destroy. I don't blame the founders. But at the same time I think if enough of these deals for bad these types of investors will stop their bad practices. This sort of move not only hurts employee…

It sounds like a new spin on 1980s-style corporate raiding? Pillaging a company then moving on, leaving behind the carcass. I can't see how this behavior helps us as a society, it's legal but unethical.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#74

Post by rleigh »

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…

Swapping out Travis for something else takes a few minutes. If you have a lot of repositories and very complicated scripts, it might take a day or so. But ultimately, the lock-in for CI solutions is minimal. The effort to migrate is very small.

Over the last few years, I've transitioned projects between Jenkins, Travis, AppVeyor, CircleCI, GitLab and others. In most cases, the logic had mostly been factored out in to shell scripts and batch files. Telling one CI system to set up the build/test environment and run that script is pretty much the same as any other.

And this might be the reason why this layoff has happened. What future did Travis have as a business? What was its growth potential? How many paying customers did it have? When everything you offer is done better, often for free, by your competitors and customers can easily set up their own self-hosted replacement if they choose, I'm a bit skeptical that the business was worth that much in the first place.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#75

Post by jsmeaton »

jsmeaton wrote: post #69

Has anyone got a link to a decent migration guide from Travis to circleci? And I’d Circle don’t have one they’re leaving lots of money on the table.

https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/migrating-from-travis/ has a basic migration guide, but doesn't discuss services like databases or caches.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#76

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #42
jrochkind1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"comparable UX to travis" is enticing to me, as I am fond of travis. Where do I find pricing information? (Was hoping for the standard "Pricing" link). Does it require a repo hosted on sourehut too, or can the CI be used independently?

There's an open todo ticket to add a public pricing breakdown - right now you only see it after signup. This is what the page looks like: https://sr.ht/lS5M.png I'll see if I can't get public pricing info up later today. >Does it require a repo hosted on sourehut too, or can the CI be used independently? You can use the CI independently. Right now there's a GitHub integration and I'm open to adding more :)

Update: pricing page is now shown here:

https://sourcehut.org/pricing/

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#77

Post by tomc1985 »

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.

Last company I was at, our ERP transition took years

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#78

Post by rleigh »

guitarbill wrote: post #15
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

Because everything business has to have a super serious appearance, and we should judge people on image, and not actions or the output of their work? Or because a bit of whimsy is too much for miserable people?

It's not about whimsy being "too much". It's that it conveys an unprofessional and immature image, which may result in people taking their business elsewhere.

I too looked at this page a few years back. And I was not impressed. I wouldn't find it appropriate for e.g. a medical company which does "serious" stuff to very rigourous levels of quality controlled design and verification. But equally I don't think it's appropriate for this company either. Maybe a games company which is focussed upon making things which are fun. I think we will have to agree to disagree on its appropriateness.

As for judging people based on their actions and output. It took them over two and a half years to update their images for Ubuntu 16.04. Where are the Ubuntu 18.04 images? It's nearly a year already. Maybe I'd have a better impression if they could maintain their service to an acceptable standard. As it is, this lack of timeliness was a huge letdown, and cause endless frustration and setbacks on the teams I worked on who depended upon these images being up to date and not full of incompatible language and tool versions.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#79

Post by lostapathy »

mikepurvis wrote: post #56
lostapathy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

On top of how late "new stuff" often was, I never understood why they kept out of date, unsupported stuff running for so long - especially for free, open source projects.

http://rubies.travis-ci.org/ They support ruby 1.8.7 and ree. ree went unsupported in 2013 (https://www.infoq.com/news/2012/02/ruby-eee-eol)

If anything, I feel like they are actually doing the open source community a disservice by supporting build environments that are no longer supported by the upstream community. They legitimize testing against ancient, unsupported environments, rather than moving forward deliberately to stay on a supported stack.

I understand there is a burden on updating software, but given all the trouble we have with breaches in old software, we need to bias the world toward staying on stacks that get security updates rather than sitting stagnant.

Re: Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff

#80

Post by Rychard »

rightbyte wrote: post #59
YawningAngel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've worked at companies of all sizes, and at every one of those jobs, I've had some form of MSDN access.

I've never ran into the issues you're referring to. Microsoft makes it both easy and cheap to obtain development licenses for their software.

Post reply on HN