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CircleCI Layoffs

circleci.com

131–140 of 145 posts

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#131
It baffles me that in the US you can throw an employee out on a day-to-day basis and there's so little job security. In EU countries I know, this can only happen with some out-of-the-books cheap labor employment. Stronger laws protect employees, not businesses.

US? Little job security, hospitals you want to stay out of due to life-destroying costs, ultra high homelessness, little safety overall and the "American Dream" being reserved for sociopaths with no empathy nor morals.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#132
Lol. A bunch of needs pretending to understand business. Yiu'vw never run point on 6-7 figure procurement, nor will you ever.

CCI has the most resources classes and highest concurrency of any cloud solution.

Put the pipe back in.

CCI over expanded when money was cheap and is contracting because their customers, who you mongs mostly work for did even worse.

Real culprit is fiat money and the fed without which 50 percent of tech would not exist.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For many companies, you cannot be qualified to make this determination. 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), talk…

This research helps you form a more informed opinion, but it doesn't make you any more qualified at predicting the companies future success potential. The people running these companies are barely in such a position, nonetheless the average person who thinks they're privy to prescient insight.

I’m not sure what you mean by qualified.

The research makes you more able to make an accurate decision. It helps improve your outcome.

I don’t think being qualified is important here. I think the important piece is to make a good decision to join a firm, or leave a firm.

There’s no perfect information, but every potential employee has the ability to improve their chances by researching important decisions like this.

I think a good litmus test is if I can’t answer “how do they make money” or “how will they make money” or “how do they create value,” then I don’t want to work for them.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#134
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…

When I read this, not judging or anything, no ulterior motive, I'm reminded Microsoft and embrace, extend, extinguish.

When and if they get rid of the competition, it likely won't be free aka 0 monetary costs again.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#135
I don't know if I'm shocked or impressed at how directly he states that the reason for the change is the stock market.

Basically, if I'm reading this right: "Our business is doing great! We're going to keep doing great! But the stock market doesn't agree. So even though the stock market has zero impact on our revenues or expenses, I want to keep my board happy. So we're letting you go. But it has nothing to do with the company, my leadership, or your performance. Just whiny stockholders."

I know companies do this all the time, but this seems as cold as liquid helium to me.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#136

I don't know if I'm shocked or impressed at how directly he states that the reason for the change is the stock market. Basically, if I'm reading this right: "Our business is doing great! We're going to keep doing great! But the stock market doesn't agree. So even though the stock market has zero impact on our revenues or expenses, I want to keep my board happy. So we're letting you go. But it has nothing to do with t…

The stock market has every impact on a potential IPO next year though. I imagine their thinking is that they can get an immediate boost to gross margin by making this move without raising any alarms since they have cover by much of the sector right now, without sacrificing much in terms of delivery.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

> 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.

You're trying to put words in their mouth. Nowhere in their rationale they mention funding or money or interest rates or revenue or results. They only argue that they decided to base their HR policies on a fad. To me this looks like an awfully cowardly way to justify their own decisions on a pseudo-force majeure. Bullshit through and through.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#138
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…

I agree this is really sad and I also hope everyone affected finds a new opportunity quickly. CI is a commodity so it's hard for CircleCI to sustain as a stand-alone business. I found DroneCI to be simplest and fastest CI tool I have used. In fact just recently Harness published some bold claims of being 4x faster than leading CI vendors(https://harness.io/blog/fastest-ci-tool). I have been using it myself and it's faster. The benefit of having CI, CD, Security testing and governance features makes it a compelling platform offering similar to GitHub & Gitlab.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#139

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.

The interesting difference, and current problem, is VCs expect raised funds to be spent as burn on hiring more people despite existing people already being paid from VC capital instead of revenue. And they expect that to keep happening: each next round will be bigger and cover even bigger payrolls. If the next round doesn't happen, layoffs, and if flat (ex: bc markups are down 3x), dilution & quitting by the best - either way, downward spiral that is hard to return from. The gamble is nothing breaks while this happens -- doubling down the bet.

With interest loans based on revenue, it's fine to stop whenever bc you have revenue for (most of) payroll.

Operationally, that expectation is now worse than interest. In the good times, it was free money for free growth, but with fewer and marked down rounds, a killer. Some founders value efficiency, which avoids this issue, but in the last few years, VC boards certainly were encouraging inefficient growth, meaning bad times for such VC-dependent companies.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#140
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…

Honestly, we have run into similar issues with GHA as well. I recently heard about Drone/Harness CI. I tried it last week and it is holy shit fast. Not sure how they do they do it without charging an arm and a leg. We are probably going to go with Harness. They are the only other platform other than Gitlab and GHA. Some competition is good.
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