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If they are using Mobile Device Management (MDM), they can remotely wipe all the laptops before allowing departing staff to keep them.
from another comment here by someone who was part of these layoffs it doesn't seem like they're being wiped
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…
CI has essentially become a commodity with a need for reliability. For us, we moved from Travis to Github because Travis just wasn't reliable enough (and had terrible security). We'd be blocked from deploying for hours at a time because Travis had a random outage. I know it's way more complex than "boxes that run some stuff", but CI/CD isn't exactly rocket science. We also noticed that by using a dedicated CI provide…
For our case, we are migrating to the Google Cloud Build. More stable and features but also some things are still lacking. Nonetheless, a big step up from Travis.
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If they are using Mobile Device Management (MDM), they can remotely wipe all the laptops before allowing departing staff to keep them.
from another comment here by someone who was part of these layoffs it doesn't seem like they're being wiped
It seems the person's statement I've found is not incongruent with the company also wiping it.
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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.
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> 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.
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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…
It’s hard but useful. If you know this, you will be more successful whether you’re in engineering or sales or whatever.
I research every business and organization I do business with. It’s not perfect, but it’s part of my decision making process.
In CircleCI’s case, this would be me looking at the financials (hard because they are private), talking to some friends who use them, and, since I know some tech, trying the product.
It’s not wise to trust every business as every business has people thinking and saying they are great. It’s wise for an individual to assess these for themself. Companies success isn’t entirely random.
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> 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.
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
I love the concept of Docker, but I hate working with it any time I need to work with it. It's extremely opaque and unnecessarily hard to do basic things.
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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…
so you make this assumption that these companies laying off mostly fund their business with short-term bank loans? really?
If you do have three million sitting around, you still have to consider if you can invest it somewhere else for more money. Why do a low-return project if you get more from investing into bonds?
And of course VCs don't get their money out of thing air, they also have to compete with all other forms of investments for money. So if short term bonds become more attractive while capital is harder to get for potential investors that puts pressure on VCs, who will pass it on.
Of course the actual dynamics are complicated and could fill books. But in the end if you are loaning money you have to do better than the cost of capital, and if you have money your own profit margin still has to outcompete other potential investments.