Pretty good severance terms all things considered.
CircleCI Layoffs
31–40 of 145 posts
Re: CircleCI Layoffs
#32I 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…
> Last time I used it, it just felt way too opinionated.
That's exactly what I like about it.
Re: CircleCI Layoffs
#33I 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…
We also recently left them for self-hosted GHA runners. The other problem is that their pricing is insane - we're building exactly the same code for ~20% of the cost.
Re: CircleCI Layoffs
#34With 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…
For all companies, public or private, they need to grow their gross margins if they want to survive. The last 5-10 years was inappropriately focused on revenue and headcount growth and the tide has very abruptly shifted.
Re: CircleCI Layoffs
#35I 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…
You're being downvoted for telling people exactly why they got laid off. It's time to wake the fuck up engineers. When you complacently don't pay attention to your business and core offering, this is what happens.
Re: CircleCI Layoffs
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
but hey, they get to keep their laptops
They don’t want to pony up $ for the prepaid labels I’m guessing? The laptops are sunk cost anyway and then there’s also the additional overhead of processing the returned laptops with their IT? Man things must be really bad if that’s the case..
Are there tax implications? Do the laptops count as losses CircleCI can write off, and compensation the ex-employee has to report?
Re: CircleCI Layoffs
#37I 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…
> Does anyone... actually like CircleCI?
It's a weird feeling where they once felt like a reprieve from all the PITA "enterprise" stuff, but now they're that PITA kinda-poorly-minded "SaaS" stuff, which sucks compared to... a Microsoft product?
It's kinda obvious in retrospect. Enterprise became SaaS faster than SaaS could become enterprise.
Re: CircleCI Layoffs
#38With 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…
I suspect it has a lot to do with the rate at which companies can borrow money.
Re: CircleCI Layoffs
#39With 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…
All of the above.
Suppose you have a company with no money, but with a bank willing to loan you money at market rate. You can do three projects, one costs $1 mil, and after a year brings you $1.5 mil in profit, the second costs $1 mil and brings $1.05 mil after a year, and the third costs $1 mil and brings $1.01 mil.
In 2021 interest rates were near zero, so all three projects would have given you a profit. The worst of the bunch only $10,000, but that's still nice. So you hire people to do all of them. But now at the end of 2022 interest rates are about 4% and climbing. The loan for each project now costs $40,000, making the last project unprofitable, and the second project will only be profitable for a couple more months at best. So you cut projects 2 and 3, laying off everyone working on them.
That's how a healthy company would end up with layoffs. A less healthy company might only have projects like the second and third one, and is now running around trying to improve efficiency. And some companies don't make profit at all, being afloat on the hope of eventually making some, and slowly sinking as that money becomes more and more expensive.
Re: CircleCI Layoffs
#40With 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…
I don't know about CircleCI specifically, but generally, pre-IPO companies are pushed to reinvest profits in favor of aggressive/continued growth, instead of profit. Most companies intentionally overspend, but now that the investments are drying out, they are changing their posture. So, I would guess it's the former, i.e., letting people go to reduce the risk of running out of money.
At the same time, depending on how the business is doing, some investors might look for exits too instead of plateau or later raising another round. So, it could be both.