CircleCI Layoffs
circleci.com
circleci.com
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 CircleCI and in some ways far better (e.g. there's a stellar community of Actions builders on GHA, that can be included with one line; CCI Orbs don't have nearly the same uptake). Pricing is all pretty similar. Some companies want to self-host stuff: JetBrains & Atlassian still own this.
Ultimately we left CCI because their stability was unacceptable. While its been quite a few months, their status page history even today showcases this well [1]; they legitimately have partial or full outages once every two or so weeks (and those are just the ones they tell people about; we regularly, weekly, saw build failures that could only be explained by "freakin circleci, just re-run it").
Can't speak for how CCI is run, but that's how it is at most places with more than 10 people.
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.
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 of whether this is a viable business strategy? I'm not a farmer, I do not know enough farmers operating large farms to gather that data myself, I have to trust the company to represent this truthfully.
This even applies to things like CircleCI, where the product is something an engineer can understand well. I know what tools I as an individual developer use, but CircleCI is targeting enterprises, which I decidedly am not. I have no clue how some enterprise shop works. Again, I have to trust how the business present itself.
But yeah, for industries we don't understand... hope it's publicly listed and has some insightful annual reports is probably the only option.
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.
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.
1) Follow the money - where is it coming from ? why would it keep coming in, what is needed ? where does it go ?
2) Competitors - who are they and what are they doing.
For your hypothetical farming tech company, find out about other farm tech companies who have similar product/market segment and look at their offerings, valuations and revenue model. If one does not have this reference point and doesn't have the domain knowledge, then one should not consider said opportunity unless one wants to gamble.
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 on wrong thing)
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.
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 employee or potential job-seeker I would wonder whether CircleCI is a good place to be because of that.
The Actions web UI is so bad it's almost a parody. Debugging stuff is harder than it needs to be. No good way to manually control builds. Possible but not very easy to run stuff locally. Very limited platform support (Linux Windows, and macOS, although other platforms are possible with VirtualBox hackery but it's SLOW and pretty unreliable).
It is enough to make a viable business when GitHub actions is right there? Who knows... But there are tons of reasons for external CI tools to exist, IMO.
We don't expect them to be driving novel, new features (unless they're technical in nature), but we do expect that they call out BS and make sure what they're working on is valuable to the business. Exception is platform teams who's "customer" is other developers.
not really. A circleci pm down a few threads mentions its not caused by any available numbers. Another observation is that currently even perfectly healthy, focused and money-making businesses with solid products (e.g. stripe) also do layoffs.
As for circle, it's ok. I switched our thing to it from internal Jenkins, it has its ups and downs, not the worst in my experience.
Not being able to find work for engineers is a failure of imagination - again a failure of management.
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runne...
4 core | 16gb RAM | 150gb SSD is the next size up which is just about what I need.
Edit: September 1 was the announcement, so I was probably due to check back in: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-09-01-github-actions-larg...
Why start a new project with CircleCI? That I don't have a clue.
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 been a breath of fresh air and I have convinced several open-source maintainers do dump CircleCI in favor of GHA.
When and if they get rid of the competition, it likely won't be free aka 0 monetary costs again.
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 provider, we doubled our deployment downtime. We'd be blocked from deploying when either Travis or Github had issues. Whereas, we're only blocked now when Github has issues.
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.
In slight defense of Circle CI I think that could be applied to at least 50% of tech companies. Though CCI is perhaps more guilty than most of this transgression.
At some point after their series C they became rent-seeking, their support became increasingly distant, and the quality overall started degrading. Then I get an email that we need to pay for seats.. on top of paying for CI minutes.
It was an extra > $500 a month for no additional service, no additional usage, no nothing, and they would not budge on their new pricing plan. So I just moved all the stuff to GitHub who was barely mature enough at that point and never looked back.
Putting the finance department in charge of product decisions is a mistake with long term reproductions and CircleCI is only seeing the results of this. Treating your oldest customers like a financial liability is a mistake.
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 least 3 major breakages, including the migration from v1 to v2 yaml configs and the new docker architecture.
They have strayed far from their early value prop and cause us more headaches than delight. CircleCI, if you are listening, all I want with CI/CD is to forget about it, not have to revisit a working project every year to rearchitect it onto a new builder.
> The scheduled workflows feature is set to be deprecated. Using scheduled pipelines rather than scheduled workflows offers several benefits. Visit the scheduled pipelines migration guide to find out how to migrate existing scheduled workflows to scheduled pipelines.
https://circleci.com/docs/configuration-reference/#schedule
One more thing to migrate out of the config file in the repo and off behind some API call or pointy-clicky UX.
Edit: it looks like they've postponed the deprecation, which was originally planned for 2022-06-03 https://discuss.circleci.com/t/scheduled-pipelines-are-here/...
At least they have the advantage that they weren't a first mover so they hopefully learned from the mistakes of other companies.
Holy shit. I forgot about this. I was infuriated when I needed to waste nearly a week rewriting my config with more complexity and reduced features. I literally wasted a week of my life so a company I was paying could save costs.
I would have happily paid 50% more to not have to waste my time on that crap.
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).
I suppose my larger question is if a private company is break-even/profitable would the investors/board ever ask management to make these cuts? If so, why?
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 of the bunch only $10,000, but that's still nice. So you hire people to do all of them. But now at the end of 2022 interest rates are about 4% and climbing. The loan for each project now costs $40,000, making the last project unprofitable, and the second project will only be profitable for a couple more months at best. So you cut projects 2 and 3, laying off everyone working on them.
That's how a healthy company would end up with layoffs. A less healthy company might only have projects like the second and third one, and is now running around trying to improve efficiency. And some companies don't make profit at all, being afloat on the hope of eventually making some, and slowly sinking as that money becomes more and more expensive.
This is why jobs are not just a job but you are investing in a company so to speak because if the company is not successful your job may also not be needed any longer.
Sorry, what rates are you talking about? VC investment doesn't have any rates, at least not to the startup.
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.
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.
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.
At the same time, depending on how the business is doing, some investors might look for exits too instead of plateau or later raising another round. So, it could be both.
The easiest way to avoid a down-round is to layoff a big portion of your company, and hope investors believe it won't impact your future revenue.
Unless we get back to ZIRP, pretty much every startup in existence is going to down-round on their next raise.
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 Jenkins just because I can do whatever I want with it. But baring that I feel like I would end up either going with something my git hosted provides (like GitHub actions) or something my cloud provider has (like AWS CodeBuild).
Is there something I am missing? Looking at the pricing it isn't exactly cheap either.
That's exactly what I like about it.
It's a weird feeling where they once felt like a reprieve from all the PITA "enterprise" stuff, but now they're that PITA kinda-poorly-minded "SaaS" stuff, which sucks compared to... a Microsoft product?
It's kinda obvious in retrospect. Enterprise became SaaS faster than SaaS could become enterprise.
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.
It's probably a little overpriced, and I wish they had just focused on "doing the same thing but better" rather than spending a lot of efforts on value-add gimmicks, but I do like the core product very much.
Circle is decent. It has all the functionality you wish was built into Jenkins, but way easier and better, with no maintenance cost or insane languages to learn. It has some drawbacks but nothing you can't work around. Orbs work fine, they also can be private. Circle's self hosted functionality is... bizarrely stupidly designed, but essentially works.
I would much rather use Drone.io for any new paid CI project. The best functionality, literally as simple as possible, with cloud native design. Extensible, flawless as self-hosted, does everything you need.
Clearly that's not the case if you're doing layoffs, no? Wouldn't you want to keep those folks around so you can do that bit at the bottom: "Our customers are some of the most innovative, engineering-centric businesses on the planet, and helping them do great work will continue to be our focus."
I'm sure they would if they felt they could, 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."
Meaning, this is (as I read it) largely a response to investor pressure to right-size.
This is why the standard economics policy is to try to grow slowly and smoothly rather than have big boom and bust cycles. As the saying goes, the Fed's job is to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets started.
But unfortunately, everybody loves punch, and boos when the Fed takes measures to rein in the economy. The last recession in the US ended in 2009, but the central bankers treated it as a crisis until... until it became a different crisis.
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.
So it’s probably not a tax write off but is a loss of whatever the laptops would get in bankruptcy liquidation.
It seems the person's statement I've found is not incongruent with the company also wiping it.
Implication seems to be that they'd have to wipe it themselves
It's simply stating he plans to have it wiped. It does not make any statement about the companies plans.
IMO, even if my company wiped a laptop they gave to me, I'd do another wipe just to make sure it's perfectly fresh and clean. It's way easier to transfer to a pristine Mac than one that's had all of the initial setup skipped to validate a wipe.
If you can’t manage devices in a way which makes it possible to give them away to staff on separation, you can’t manage devices in a way which effectively protects against the risk of theft or loss.
I think there is a different world where Travis (and Circle) could have been built differently and maybe with a slightly different operating model (eg: easier to operate self hosted runners) where they could have made it harder for GitHub to compete in the beginning. But not sure if that would have delayed the inevitable.
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 Google/Amazon/Twitter workforce decimation campaign as a scapegoat to fire people.
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.
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.
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.
The terms seem above average, I hope something like this will become the standard.
Maybe it would be good to have this as a built in feature but it can get complicated quickly, I actually prefer doing it manually.
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.
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.