Last week during covid crisis, all while announcing a $100m Series E round of financing, they let some employees go and did not offer any severance.
Disorganized management, and with some teams, passive-aggressive management style.
Would not recommend joining...
They're replacing their ClojureScript mishmash of libraries with a React action team because they couldn't onboard effectively
As a customer, I can see I'm being pushed into this new UI that I'm indifferent to but moving between the options is difficult
As a Clojurian & customer, I'm not sure any of this bodes well
I know for the fact that few US, Indian firms with offices in India are just using this as an excuse to trim their workforce, enforce paycuts (upto 50%), hold back increments for the year (and even next) and restructure salaries drastically - by moving almost 60% to vaiable pay(which typically never gets paid).
Such a list is live at https://careervscovid19.com/insights
Traditional BigCo ITeS/outsourcing shops are using this as a great opportunity to trim the flab in the middle (claiming as "a dire measure to sustain shareholder value") while it was always about . These are the same bunch in middle-management whom they would pamper regularly by giving quarterly/monthly awards (quarterly Gem, Spot awards, Player of the month, etc bullshit accolades)
And the markets also work that way. On a regular day, if there's firing, stocks of a BigCo go wonky sensing something is amiss. During a crisis, if they do not fire people by the thousands, markets deem it as lack of financial prudence and stocks go down.
Everything (and anything) in the name of profits and shareholder value. There's a saying dated thousands of years, goes like "vyaparam droha chintanam” meaning "Business is all about profits most often via undue advantages".
Related article - http://www.informaticsjournals.com/index.php/dbijb/article/d...
Most of the big firms (Tata, CTS, CapGemini) have big offices or call centers, with VPNs or private connections to western infrastructure -- otherwise you would have random Indian IPs logging into your systems, and that would make my security team lose their minds.
But with COVID they can't congregate in those offices, and the logistics of getting additional VPNs, working around geo-fencing, and the fact that some of the admins don't have internet at home means they're not able to support anything.
The handful of Filipino and Mexican offshore talent has been more successful in that regard. Mexican talent in particular has been pretty good -- more expensive than Indian hires, but generally more qualified with overlap of US timezones.
Yes, this is the reality. Most of these shops do not believe in issuing a laptop along with a secure connectivity option, simply because they deem all of that as a sap on procurements.
And they still use shitty 2005 era desktop since work gets done on VDIs (citing info sec and DLP) and desktops are mere dumb terminals. But even to operate those dumb terminals, they are ready to spend cost on electricity and logistics but will actively avoid issuing good equipment just to avoid cost on licenses and manageability.
Bunch of old coots that do not ever learn.
Living in Singapore, I met some people who trained India and then used their own good equipment and their productivity was on par with US or EU employees. I was also unfortunate enough to manage some people using '95 equipment, and they were basically dead weights for the project.
I used to work on a product with a web console. One of the things we designed and planned for was a login storm around 9-10 AM on Monday in pick-a-timezone where 200 users log in from the same IP. If you ignore the seasonality, it looks a bit like an attack.
We basically just hit hard edges and missing features very quickly, and what’s there is good, but not great.
Each bit of the product feels good, but it feels like there’s a lack of direction, product thinking, understanding users, or something at a fundamental level that is causing friction.
I have a friend who worked there a few years ago and from her experience it sounds like there are some good engineers, but some careless decisions being made.
I'm in the final stages interviews and up until now have generally been looking forward to the prospect of working there. This is troubling. Thanks in advance.
If we can't, my advice to you is to backchannel. See if you have a friend of a friend's who works there, reach out to people via LinkedIn whom you didn't interview with, or find former employees, they will tell you the real story...
Circle however I've used with some fairly lengthy and complex build processes involving multiple parallel builds of Rails apps during upgrades and it's handled the workflow well.
I think they've improved the UI a bit recently, but it's still pretty complex though.
Coupled with Terraform for us.
edit: I'll also add that in terms of time, I feel like most of the time in build pipelines is actually spent in tweaking, adding, and modifying the build configs, as opposed to the servers themselves (and you might also value developer time differently from devops time). I have found Buildkite easier to work with than CircleCI in this regard, and thus saved much more time overall.
The motivation for this was exactly this problem. With Box CI your local build is your CI build because it runs jobs via agents on your own hardware so you can very easily debug / understand what is going on.
The thing I'm concerned about that doesn't seem addressed on your home page is security : by installing your agent on my machine, I'm basically giving you access to my machine non-stop, no ? What guarantees do I have that your agent can't be used as a backdoor ?
Firstly, and very importantly, the agent is open source (https://github.com/boxci/boxci) so you can see exactly what it does and even build it from source if you want. I should mention Box CI isn't launched yet, everything is still in beta including the agent.
The Box CI service doesn't have any way to send requests to or send commands to agents - the requests are one-way, agent to service only, with agents polling the service for build jobs to run, running them, and sending logs and results to the service.
Build scripts and configuration are all in your source code. This is a tradeoff, because it definitely means you have to trust your source (and everyone committing to it) if you're going to be running agents on your dev machine for instance.
There are obviously mitigations to this though, like running the agents on a dedicated Cloud VM with nothing on the filesystem and internet access locked down to package manager and cloud provider hosts. A future plan is to provide pre-configured VMs for various cloud providers so this can be set up in a few clicks for low cost ($20 a month or whatever a reasonable build machine VM would cost).
The real security point of the the agents though, the other side of these tradeoffs, is that your code and your production secrets never leave hardware you control - the CI service never has access to them. That's a massive security advantage Vs centralised CI services which do have full read access to your source and effectively full write access to your production infrastructure via keys you give them - compared to what I've described above this is a massively bigger and more dangerous potential security hole.
You can probably tell by the length of this comment I'm super interested in this aspect (along with dev experience I see it as the key advantage of the model and one of the reasons I'm building it) there's a lot more depth to this and if you'd like to discuss further, I'd love to :-) Email's in my profile.
It's quite spartan, but it gets the job done, and I love that a) it's fast, b) I can see exactly what happened, down to ssh'ing into the build directory and poking around, and c) If there's a feature I want, I can just add it!
Here's my bot in action: https://github.com/lukechampine/us/pull/37#issuecomment-5936...
When something fails it makes the debug and retry loop just as simple and fast as when you're developing, and there's really nothing like watching a production build run and ship in literally like a minute, just as fast as if you're building and starting your local dev server :-)
I bet they all had severance guaranteed in their contracts...
I have a fairly rare surname, but have {surname} at gmail, so I get a lot of "spam" from companies that sign me up before verifying if the user inputting my email is the person owning the email.
In the most egregious/spammy cases I'm gonna find some higher-up emails and sign them up for their own services in hopes that the practice will stop.
TL;DR: email confirmation or get egged.