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 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").
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 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.
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 been a breath of fresh air and I have convinced several open-source maintainers do dump CircleCI in favor of GHA.
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 genuinely don't understand how CircleCI is still a business.
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.
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.
This was my exact reaction to. I was a customer for CircleCI for years and it was my go to choice and introduced it to countless companies, they were clearly at first an engineering led company that obsessed about functional programming.
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.
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.
I don't know how bad CircleCI is, but if it is worse than GH Actions, then that's quite an achievement ;) GH Actions kinda works, but I don't know who it has been designed for (especially compared to much more mature solutions like Gitlab CI). On top of that, GH Actions VMs seem to be extremely performance-throttled, and it can take forever to get a free Mac runner. It's hard to imagine how another CI service can be any worse TBH.
Agreed on their stability. For a period of time earlier this year it felt like CircleCI went down every other day, and since we require checks before deployment it was a pain constantly having to deal with outages.
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.
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 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.
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).
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, IPO)"?
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.
I don't know about CircleCI specifically, but generally, pre-IPO companies are pushed to reinvest profits in favor of aggressive/continued growth, instead of profit. Most companies intentionally overspend, but now that the investments are drying out, they are changing their posture. So, I would guess it's the former, i.e., letting people go to reduce the risk of running out of money.
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.
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.
For all companies, public or private, they need to grow their gross margins if they want to survive. The last 5-10 years was inappropriately focused on revenue and headcount growth and the tide has very abruptly shifted.
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.
I'm a former CircleCI employee (I left the company almost a year ago), and I generally really liked the product.
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.
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 would rather cut off a finger than ever use Jenkins again. What a piece of shit. Design from the 90s, maintained by people who can't code and don't care about users, trying to turd-polish it into new tech stacks to justify themselves to the sad old enterprises invested in them.
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.
I used to love CircleCI then they broke all my CI jobs when they deprecated their "Convenience image". Rather than continue to maintain CircleCI jobs and pay them for the pleasure I am just migrating to GH actions. It is painful. They have good lock in.
I set up CircleCI at a previous company because it was "easy" and neither GitHub Actions nor AWS CodeBuild existed yet. Eventually, we outgrew it (memory issues, I think?) and set up our own Jenkins instance. This would've been back in 2016, so I'm sure it's better now.
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.
Circle was the first CI/CD tool I used and opened my eyes up to a whole new way of deploying. I haven’t used it for a few years but hope they can find a space.
> Despite today’s news, we’re confident in our business. I believe we have the right strategy to succeed in the long term. We have the best CI/CD platform on the market by leaps and bounds. We see that success reflected in the continued growth of our business, adding thousands of high-performing engineering teams to our platform over the past 12 months.
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 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.
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.
Over the course of 2017-2018 we did a trial run of Circle CI and they promised it could work on-prem or at least in govcloud over and over again, and then just didn't. So we reverted back to using Jenkins.
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.
[+] [-] 015a|3 years ago|reply
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").
[1] https://status.circleci.com/
[+] [-] SkyPuncher|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] juanbyrge|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zamalek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intelVISA|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] willcipriano|3 years ago|reply
Why start a new project with CircleCI? That I don't have a clue.
[+] [-] jsmeaton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thirdusername|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rustd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flohofwoe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tppiotrowski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Syntaf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klooney|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meta2023|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway5959|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aftbit|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] idoh|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] solidr53|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calrueb|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] wongarsu|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thebitguru|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tootie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xedrac|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datalopers|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdjon|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] epgui|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ftlio|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] throwawaaarrgh|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] timtom39|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icedchai|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianwawok|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ch4s3|3 years ago|reply
That's exactly what I like about it.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] siquick|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeKK14|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] candiddevmike|3 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] nickelcitymario|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nrb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spamizbad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fasgano|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bikezen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vander_elst|3 years ago|reply
The terms seem above average, I hope something like this will become the standard.
[+] [-] 1-12-2022-hn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WirelessGigabit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hericium|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] youdad101|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] youdad101|3 years ago|reply
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.