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CircleCI Layoffs

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Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#81

Post by lovich »

twelve40 wrote: post #74
lmeyerov wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VC $ works out the same. 18-24mo, with an even higher burn than a bank would accept, and the assumption that you can raise a 2X+ bigger round at the end of it to pay for the previous staff + next round of hires.

VC $ works the same as short-term bank loans? how? in any case, all of this interest rate "math" the parent wrote is only applicable to short-term loans. This is math for a shawarma stand, not a company that raised 300 mil of non-borrowed money.

aren't these companies continually raising funds to stay in operation, which would mean they would be looking out as far as their next anticipated investment and those rates? Looking up CircleCI in particular on crunchbase it looks like they've raised an investment in all but 2 years of the last decade. Last one was two years ago and presumably they'll need more soon if they aren't profitable.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#82

Post by twelve40 »

dilyevsky wrote: post #80
twelve40 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did circleci borrow any money? I know they raised $315mil, and none of the smaller companies I've ever worked for have ever borrowed anything.

Corporate debt is pretty common financing mechanism

Common with tech startups like CircleCI? really?

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#83

Post by joshgachnang »

bfung wrote: post #62
Tao3300 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers aren't generally setting the priorities on what gets fixed when or what the business is actually offering. The complacency problem is usually in management. Can't speak for how CCI is run, but that's how it is at most places with more than 10 people.

> Engineers aren't generally setting the priorities on what gets fixed A good engineer would be like: “f—k it, I fixed it.” And the priorities would then get shifted around it. Identifying when this is the right time to act and fixing it often makes the engineer gain seniority. (Yes, it only works when both business and tech are broken. If it’s just the tech broken, then engineer will probably get pipped for working…

I'm not sure how an engineer could be like "f--k it, I fixed it" to the company's business and pricing model.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#84

Post by jsmeaton »

015a wrote: post #65
jsmeaton wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When GHA has decent instance sizes I imagine they'll eat a lot of CCIs lunches. The automatic test splitting is also a god send for parallelising builds.

Github Actions now has up-to 64-core Linux and Windows instances.

Thanks for pointing that out. Are these large runners somewhat new? I feel like I check every few months and I hadn't seen them before.

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runne...

4 core | 16gb RAM | 150gb SSD is the next size up which is just about what I need.

Edit: September 1 was the announcement, so I was probably due to check back in: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-09-01-github-actions-larg...

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#85

Post by twelve40 »

lovich wrote: post #81
twelve40 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VC $ works the same as short-term bank loans? how? in any case, all of this interest rate "math" the parent wrote is only applicable to short-term loans. This is math for a shawarma stand, not a company that raised 300 mil of non-borrowed money.

aren't these companies continually raising funds to stay in operation, which would mean they would be looking out as far as their next anticipated investment and those rates? Looking up CircleCI in particular on crunchbase it looks like they've raised an investment in all but 2 years of the last decade. Last one was two years ago and presumably they'll need more soon if they aren't profitable.

> anticipated investment and those rates

Sorry, what rates are you talking about? VC investment doesn't have any rates, at least not to the startup.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#86

Post by juanbyrge »

015a wrote: post #30

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…

We used to pay CircleCI $200/month to run CI on a widely-used open-source project, which was set up before GHA was available. Around one year ago we switched to GHA, which was significantly better, and cost $0.

At around the same time we made the switch, we got an opaque email from CircleCI about their new `performance plan` which would have increased the cost to $300/mo. This was more metered pricing.

Anyway GHA has been a breath of fresh air and I have convinced several open-source maintainers do dump CircleCI in favor of GHA.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#87

Post by jamesfinlayson »

TheDong wrote: post #61
prepend wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers choose who to work for. We go through these cycles where “I have no idea how they make money but they keep paying me” stops working. There’s only so long you can work for a company that doesn’t have a viable business strategy. I don’t expect engineers to fix the business strategy, but I expect them to consider it when choosing to join a company or to stay.

> I don’t expect engineers to fix the business strategy, but I expect them to consider it when choosing to join a company or to stay. For many companies, you cannot be qualified to make this determination. Let's say I interview at a farming tech startup. They tell me that there are X million farms in america, and Y million have told them they want the crop software they're building. How do I make that determination o…

I do agree, though I think on the CircleCI front at least, it's had some not positive press on Hacker News this year (big price rises and or cutting the free tier from memory, plus the launch of GitHub actions).

But yeah, for industries we don't understand... hope it's publicly listed and has some insightful annual reports is probably the only option.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#88

Post by lovich »

twelve40 wrote: post #85
lovich wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aren't these companies continually raising funds to stay in operation, which would mean they would be looking out as far as their next anticipated investment and those rates? Looking up CircleCI in particular on crunchbase it looks like they've raised an investment in all but 2 years of the last decade. Last one was two years ago and presumably they'll need more soon if they aren't profitable.

> anticipated investment and those rates Sorry, what rates are you talking about? VC investment doesn't have any rates, at least not to the startup.

VC funds are not directly controlled by the federal interest rates but their ability to get _their_ investors to invest in the VC is affected. VC funds tend to get less investment when the return on cash becomes much higher. If the VCs cant get enough funding then they are going to turn around to their investments and either whip them to make more money or start giving worse terms to companies looking to raise another round

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#89

Post by bink »

prepend wrote: post #55
trynewideas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there tax implications? Do the laptops count as losses CircleCI can write off, and compensation the ex-employee has to report?

Laptops aren’t typically amortized and are immediately written off and depreciated the year of purchase. So it’s probably not a tax write off but is a loss of whatever the laptops would get in bankruptcy liquidation.

Probably has to be treated as income by the employee as well.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#90

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

calrueb wrote: post #21

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…

A down-round is basically death for a startup.

The easiest way to avoid a down-round is to layoff a big portion of your company, and hope investors believe it won't impact your future revenue.

Unless we get back to ZIRP, pretty much every startup in existence is going to down-round on their next raise.

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