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CircleCI Layoffs

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Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#111

Post by wfleming »

saxonww wrote: post #93
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.

I think the point is more that there's increasingly no reason for CircleCI to exist. All your major code hosting players have a CI tool and the various accessories you'd want to attach to it. I think CircleCI has a niche in orgs that self-host code in e.g. phabricator or gerrit, and want a cadillac CI experience without building it themselves in jenkins or similar. I'd argue that niche is shrinking, and as a CCI empl…

Even that niche has better competitors, I think. I haven't used on-prem CCI, but I used hosted CCI for several years and when my team switched to https://buildkite.com/ it was a huge breath of fresh air. I think BuildKite is the only CI system I've used I thought was actually worth paying for, and I bet it works out cheaper than self-hosted CCI in most cases as well.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#112

Post by smeagull »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #96
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…

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…

I wish it was a commodity, but here I am forced to use Azure CI

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#113

Post by klooney »

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…

Atlassian's bamboo has a terrible reputation

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#114

Post by smeagull »

meta2023 wrote: post #35
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…

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.

No, I think this is short sighted management not realising how hard this will be for them to recover. Hiring is a hard, slow process - they won't recover this scale quickly.

Not being able to find work for engineers is a failure of imagination - again a failure of management.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#115

Post by bfung »

joshgachnang wrote: post #83
bfung wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The context to my post are the reliability issues that def. can be instrumented and fixed.

Business and pricing model not so much unless the engineer is willing to add the Sales prefix to their engineer role ;)

But even the pricing model - measure and compare the costs, competitors, and value derived (ok, commodity now vs 5yrs ago) and work with people pitching prices.

That’s still designing, analyzing, measuring systems - prices instead of code - definition of engineering.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#116

Post by csomar »

twelve40 wrote: post #64
wongarsu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's still money and money is like sterile water. If the 0 risk interest rate is 4% and your little project will yield 1%, you are much better parking the money at the bank. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that; and people like to do projects and build stuff.

But I have seen this in a construction company when interest rates were high (different country, not US). "Big Boss" was always "uncertain" about any new construction work and the bank paid him around 7% to park his money. Come the time when inflation started rising fast (that was 2018, pre-pandemic); and suddenly all that capital was deployed without an after-thought.

So yeah, these interest rates number have real effects.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#117

Post by jrockway »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #109
FlyingSnake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Too many engineers getting caught up in the engineering of it and not the problem solving of it. 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.

I don't know what language you use, but I figured out the success of Docker. I use Go, so my entire program is just one statically-linked binary. I can //go:embed any non-code files that I need at runtime. So I am naturally annoyed at the overhead Docker introduces with builds (throwing away my beloved and reliable ~/.cache for no reason), but I realize I'm not the target market, because most people don't program in a language with a build system. The target market is Python and Javascript programmers. Those languages can't even compute what modules you depend on without running arbitrary code from the Internet, much less produce a single file that will run on any reasonable Linux box. ("Hi! I got drunk and ran someone over with my motorcycle, but I'm out of jail and I need a job. Click here to give me one!" is an actual message that NPM will print in any large project, though it omits some details about the whole killing someone thing.)

Docker is a system for shipping your laptop to production, and because of the inadequacies in the tooling of those popular languages, it's in high demand.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#118

Post by SkyPuncher »

jrockway wrote: post #117
SkyPuncher wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many engineers getting caught up in the engineering of it and not the problem solving of it. 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.

I don't know what language you use, but I figured out the success of Docker. I use Go, so my entire program is just one statically-linked binary. I can //go:embed any non-code files that I need at runtime. So I am naturally annoyed at the overhead Docker introduces with builds (throwing away my beloved and reliable ~/.cache for no reason), but I realize I'm not the target market, because most people don't program in…

> Docker is a system for shipping your laptop to production, and because of the inadequacies in the tooling of those popular languages, it's in high demand.

I know this is in jest, but I don't agree with this. Docker is a way to run code in an environment you fully control without knowing exactly what it will be running on.

Many of the popular tools can generate a single file, but they'll be built for a specific architecture or require a certain run time.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#119

Post by jrockway »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #118
jrockway wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what language you use, but I figured out the success of Docker. I use Go, so my entire program is just one statically-linked binary. I can //go:embed any non-code files that I need at runtime. So I am naturally annoyed at the overhead Docker introduces with builds (throwing away my beloved and reliable ~/.cache for no reason), but I realize I'm not the target market, because most people don't program in…

> Docker is a system for shipping your laptop to production, and because of the inadequacies in the tooling of those popular languages, it's in high demand. I know this is in jest, but I don't agree with this. Docker is a way to run code in an environment you fully control without knowing exactly what it will be running on. Many of the popular tools can generate a single file, but they'll be built for a specific arch…

Yeah, that's a very fair interpretation. Honestly, a lot of programming languages need a lot of files to be in exactly the right place or your code will blow up. I like minimizing the number of files you need around, but making sure that you can have all of those files you need in production is a good strategy as well.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#120

Post by culi »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #103
culi wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from another comment here by someone who was part of these layoffs it doesn't seem like they're being wiped

Can you link to that comment? It seems the person's statement I've found is not incongruent with the company also wiping it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33901808

Implication seems to be that they'd have to wipe it themselves

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