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CircleCI Layoffs

circleci.com

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Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#51

Post by acdha »

urbandw311er wrote: post #18
jrockway wrote: post #6

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?

Just because this comment and/or like of discussion could be perceived as insensitive on a day when people are getting tough news, can I jump in to say that I think it’s more likely to be symptomatic of the general global downturn and current wave of cost-cutting than it is any particular issue with product fit or competitors.

I’d also add something along the line of SaaS fatigue. The costs of managing vendors, securing & monitoring, etc. add up and it’s not uncommon for the overhead cost of another service to be more than the benefits of using it. CI falls into that category since there’s an upper bound to how much a dedicated service can give you, especially when the competition like GitHub or GitLab gives you a bunch of other features for the same price.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#52

Post by brianwawok »

nerdjon wrote: post #23

I 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…

No not really.

I think it is one of the few providers that offers Apple runners. Not much else besides that. We switched to self hosted teamcity and 1/3 our build time with a 6 month payback.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#53

Post by icedchai »

pitched wrote: post #49
icedchai wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I've worked for founders at small companies ( not want to listen to advice or suggestions. It would be almost impossible to change anything at a larger firm. Let's just keep doing the same old thing that isn't working.

I think the saying is “vote with your feet”. There’s always at least one thing you can change. Your time is worth more than your salary, otherwise they wouldn’t pay it. If you don’t think a business will survive, stop investing into them with your time.

Definitely. And I did exactly that, eventually. (I waited too long!)

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#55

Post by prepend »

trynewideas wrote: post #36
indigodaddy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#56

Post by LunaSea »

zamalek wrote: post #33
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 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.

I'd love for self-hosted GitHub Actions runners to work in ECS Fargate.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#57

Post by jsmeaton »

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…

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.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#58

Post by solidr53 »

idoh wrote: post #46

I was one of the 17% laid off from CircleCI today. It's true, we did get to keep our laptops :) As for reasons, it doesn't seem to be from any current woes in the numbers (or at least from the stats I saw). So, um, anyone looking for a PM with experience in security or data privacy? Hit me up! I'm happy to answer any questions I can, and good luck to all those who've been laid off recently (at Circle or otherwise).

What kind of computers did you get to keep? M-based Mac’s?

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#59

Post by idoh »

solidr53 wrote: post #58
idoh wrote: post #46

I was one of the 17% laid off from CircleCI today. It's true, we did get to keep our laptops :) As for reasons, it doesn't seem to be from any current woes in the numbers (or at least from the stats I saw). So, um, anyone looking for a PM with experience in security or data privacy? Hit me up! I'm happy to answer any questions I can, and good luck to all those who've been laid off recently (at Circle or otherwise).

What kind of computers did you get to keep? M-based Mac’s?

Yup, a nice MacBook Pro. I have no use for it though, I'm probably just going to wipe it and sell it or give it to someone that needs it.

Re: CircleCI Layoffs

#60

Post by tootie »

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…

There doesn't need to be any external pressure. Companies can and do layoffs even when they're doing well. If a line of business just isn't profitable or they this they can be just as effective with fewer staff or they want to outsource headcount. Happens all the time it just doesn't get headlines.
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