CircleCI Layoffs • Hacker News Board

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#21

Post by calrueb » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

With these non-IPO companies doing layoffs is the correct way to read these announcements "we are letting people go to lower expenses because we are not profitable and are actually at risk of running out of money" or is it more "we are letting people go to lower expenses because our investors are asking that we look better on paper because they would like us to have a liquidity exit event (acquisition, private equity, IPO)"?

I suppose my larger question is if a private company is break-even/profitable would the investors/board ever ask management to make these cuts? If so, why?

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#22

Post by echelon » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:09 PM UTC

ZeKK14 wrote: post #9

The list is already updated here: https://layoffs.fyi/

It would be really great if this broke out engineering from support and other roles.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#23

Post by nerdjon » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

I feel bad for the employees.

Does anyone... actually like CircleCI?

Last time I used it, it just felt way too opinionated. Then they introduced their way of standardizing jobs with templates or something (it has been a while) and for some reason made the decision that any templates had to be public instead of private for the first version (which was completely backwards).

Personally for me I always lean towards Jenkins just because I can do whatever I want with it. But baring that I feel like I would end up either going with something my git hosted provides (like GitHub actions) or something my cloud provider has (like AWS CodeBuild).

Is there something I am missing? Looking at the pricing it isn't exactly cheap either.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#24

Post by FlyingSnake » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #6

What's the context behind this? I've used CircleCI at many jobs, and I guess people must have moved on to some better tool? What's the better tool?

CircleCI has gone the same way as Docker. They pioneered a paradigm but late entrants like GitHub/GitLab/Bitrise etc stole the show with their offerings. Most teams I’ve seen use either of these instead of CircleCI

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#25

Post by wongarsu » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:12 PM UTC

simplotek wrote: post #11

jrockway wrote: post #6

What's the context behind this? I've used CircleCI at many jobs, and I guess people must have moved on to some better tool? What's the better tool?

> What's the context behind this? From the article: > Right now, however, there is a ripple effect of uncertainty in our sector. Since the start of Q4, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in how every company’s performance is evaluated. Companies were once praised for growth at all costs. Very rapidly, market expectations have shifted. The emphasis now is on maximizing efficiency. It sounds like they are cowardly using the G…

I find their explanation pretty reasonable. In 2020 and 2021 money used to be close to free, with interest rates near zero and VCs throwing money at anyone with a growth story. Now both of these are no longer true, VCs are much more reserved and bank loans much more expensive. And with money being more expensive to acquire, everyone is more considerate about spending money (and thus manpower).

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#26

Post by hoherd » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:13 PM UTC

aftbit wrote: post #15

I feel for all the engineers impacted by this layoff, but I do not agree that they are "the best CI/CD platform on the market". Our small team has moved away from CircleCI for all new projects. We are mostly using Github Actions these days. The major driver was not cost, which was minimal for our team, but the fact that CircleCI keeps breaking our build. In the ~5 years that we have used them, we have experienced at…

I guess this is a good place to remind folks that scheduled workflows will probably stop working soon

> The scheduled workflows feature is set to be deprecated. Using scheduled pipelines rather than scheduled workflows offers several benefits. Visit the scheduled pipelines migration guide to find out how to migrate existing scheduled workflows to scheduled pipelines.

https://circleci.com/docs/configuration-reference/#schedule

One more thing to migrate out of the config file in the repo and off behind some API call or pointy-clicky UX.

Edit: it looks like they've postponed the deprecation, which was originally planned for 2022-06-03 https://discuss.circleci.com/t/scheduled-pipelines-are-here/...

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#27

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

nerdjon wrote: post #23

I feel bad for the employees. Does anyone... actually like CircleCI? Last time I used it, it just felt way too opinionated. Then they introduced their way of standardizing jobs with templates or something (it has been a while) and for some reason made the decision that any templates had to be public instead of private for the first version (which was completely backwards). Personally for me I always lean towards Jenk…

[deleted]

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#28

Post by the_mitsuhiko » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

edaemon wrote: post #16

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure about "better" but a lot of people who previously used Travis and Circle use GitHub Actions these days (and maybe azure in the meantime).

It does seem like CI/CD turned out to be less of a product and more of a feature.

I think CI in particular turned out to be something that people really, really don't like being unreliable and it's incredibly challenging to operate reliably and cost effective. For Microsoft providing that service is somewhat possible because they have the warchest and operation teams.

I think there is a different world where Travis (and Circle) could have been built differently and maybe with a slightly different operating model (eg: easier to operate self hosted runners) where they could have made it harder for GitHub to compete in the beginning. But not sure if that would have delayed the inevitable.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#29

Post by timtom39 » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

nerdjon wrote: post #23

I feel bad for the employees. Does anyone... actually like CircleCI? Last time I used it, it just felt way too opinionated. Then they introduced their way of standardizing jobs with templates or something (it has been a while) and for some reason made the decision that any templates had to be public instead of private for the first version (which was completely backwards). Personally for me I always lean towards Jenk…

I used to love CircleCI then they broke all my CI jobs when they deprecated their "Convenience image". Rather than continue to maintain CircleCI jobs and pay them for the pleasure I am just migrating to GH actions. It is painful. They have good lock in.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#30

Post by 015a » Wed, Dec 07, 2022, 10:16 PM UTC

I don't want to turn a discussion surrounding layoffs into a lens about the business itself; it sucks to be laid off, and I wish everyone who was impacted great expediency in finding a new role.

But I'm going to anyway: I genuinely don't understand how CircleCI is still a business. Every major code repository provider has CI built in. All of the ones I've interacted with (Github Actions & Gitlab) are just as good as CircleCI and in some ways far better (e.g. there's a stellar community of Actions builders on GHA, that can be included with one line; CCI Orbs don't have nearly the same uptake). Pricing is all pretty similar. Some companies want to self-host stuff: JetBrains & Atlassian still own this.

Ultimately we left CCI because their stability was unacceptable. While its been quite a few months, their status page history even today showcases this well [1]; they legitimately have partial or full outages once every two or so weeks (and those are just the ones they tell people about; we regularly, weekly, saw build failures that could only be explained by "freakin circleci, just re-run it").

[1] https://status.circleci.com/