CircleCI Layoffs

https://circleci.com/blog/ceo-jim-rose-email-to-circleci-employees/

by fasgano • 4 years ago

179 141 4 years ago

circleci.com

fasgano• 4 years ago

CircleCI lets go of 17% of their workforce today.

nocobot• 4 years ago

but hey, they get to keep their laptops

raymondh• 4 years ago

For those of you unfamiliar with layoff practices in most other industries, this is as good as it gets. The terms enumerated in the note are generous. Also, the value of the job placement support should not be underestimated.

indigodaddy2• 4 years ago

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..

johnrob• 4 years ago

Surprised that is possible in the age of compliance for certifications (PCI, HIPPA, SOC2, etc).

candiddevmike• 4 years ago

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."

CharlesW• 4 years ago

Wouldn't you want to keep those folks around…

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.

jfengel• 4 years ago

This is how the business cycle works. Companies expand during the booms, so that they can prepare to take on more business than they are currently doing. Eventually somebody realizes that it has all been irrationally exuberant, and a bunch of them get laid off.

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.

jrockway3• 4 years ago

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?

the_mitsuhiko2• 4 years ago

I am not sure about "better" but a lot of people who previously used Travis and Circle use GitHub Actions these days (and maybe azure in the meantime).

edaemon• 4 years ago

It does seem like CI/CD turned out to be less of a product and more of a feature.

acdha2• 4 years ago

I would assume some combination of “VC funding is no longer raining from the sky” and “GitHub Actions are good enough for enough teams not to want a second procurement”.

simplotek2• 4 years ago

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 Google/Amazon/Twitter workforce decimation campaign as a scapegoat to fire people.

wongarsu3• 4 years ago

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).

vander_elst2• 4 years ago

I've heard about Twitter and Amazon campaigns, but not Google's yet. Would it be possible to provide a link for that?

ghaff• 4 years ago

Just about everyone is being more cautious about headcount and even if they're not net shrinking their workforce, they're looking harder at what people are working on.

urbandw311er• 4 years ago

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.

acdha2• 4 years ago

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.

FlyingSnake• 4 years ago

CircleCI has gone the same way as Docker. They pioneered a paradigm but late entrants like GitHub/GitLab/Bitrise etc stole the show with their offerings. Most teams I’ve seen use either of these instead of CircleCI

SkyPuncher7• 4 years ago

Too many engineers getting caught up in the engineering of it and not the problem solving of it.

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.

ZeKK14• 4 years ago

The list is already updated here: https://layoffs.fyi/

echelon• 4 years ago

It would be really great if this broke out engineering from support and other roles.

siquick• 4 years ago

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.

aftbit• 4 years ago

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.

hoherd• 4 years ago

I guess this is a good place to remind folks that scheduled workflows will probably stop working soon

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/...

parkerhiggins2• 4 years ago

Also moved off CircleCI to GitHub Actions for similar reasons.

aeyes2• 4 years ago

It is going to be interesting to see how many breaking changes GitHub Actions will have in the next 5 years.

At least they have the advantage that they weren't a first mover so they hopefully learned from the mistakes of other companies.

SkyPuncher7• 4 years ago

including the migration from v1 to v2 yaml configs

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.

stairlane• 4 years ago

We also made the same switch for the same reasons. Outages were so common this past year (particularly on Wednesdays for some reason), that it's become a meme of being an indicator for if it's Wednesday at our company or not.

nfx_dev• 4 years ago

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.

calrueb• 4 years ago

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?

datalopers• 4 years ago

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.

xedrac• 4 years ago

I suspect it has a lot to do with the rate at which companies can borrow money.

twelve406• 4 years ago

did circleci borrow any money? I know they raised $315mil, and none of the smaller companies I've ever worked for have ever borrowed anything.

wongarsu3• 4 years ago

All of the above.

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.

notyourwork• 4 years ago

Really good summary of how different economic times are handled differently at a business strategy level. It's worth noting as an engineer because risky startups 2 years ago are not carrying the same level of risk for you as an IC to contribute to today. It could be case that a startup closes doors way faster/quicker today whereas a few years back they'd continue burning cash.

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.

twelve406• 4 years ago

so you make this assumption that these companies laying off mostly fund their business with short-term bank loans? really?

thebitguru• 4 years ago

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.

tootie• 4 years ago

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.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

A down-round is basically death for a startup.

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.

nerdjon• 4 years ago

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 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.

timtom39• 4 years ago

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.

ch4s3• 4 years ago

Last time I used it, it just felt way too opinionated.

That's exactly what I like about it.

ftlio• 4 years ago

Does anyone... actually like CircleCI?

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.

icedchai3• 4 years ago

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.

brianwawok• 4 years ago

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.

epgui2• 4 years ago

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.

throwawaaarrgh• 4 years ago

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.

015a2• 4 years ago

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").

[1] https://status.circleci.com/

zamalek• 4 years ago

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.

mousetree• 4 years ago

I could never understand their bills. I seemed to get dozens of small invoices throughout the month. Their whole concept of credits was completely puzzling too. Left to GHA.

LunaSea• 4 years ago

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

martinald• 4 years ago

Agreed, the pricing is all wrong. That's the #1 reason I know people have actively moved off. Not competitive esp as all source control services have it included now.

meta2023• 4 years ago

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.

Tao3300• 4 years ago

Engineers aren't generally setting the priorities on what gets fixed when or what the business is actually offering. The complacency problem is usually in management.

Can't speak for how CCI is run, but that's how it is at most places with more than 10 people.

twelve406• 4 years ago

exactly why they got laid off

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.

smeagull2• 4 years ago

No, I think this is short sighted management not realising how hard this will be for them to recover. Hiring is a hard, slow process - they won't recover this scale quickly.

Not being able to find work for engineers is a failure of imagination - again a failure of management.

jsmeaton2• 4 years ago

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.

015a2• 4 years ago

Github Actions now has up-to 64-core Linux and Windows instances.

tppiotrowski• 4 years ago

I thought CircleCI offered iOS builds which neither Github or Bitbucket did in the past (maybe they do now?)

parkerhiggins2• 4 years ago

GitHub Actions definitely offers iOS builds.

willcipriano• 4 years ago

A lot of places probably set up CircleCI and don't want to invest into switching since the value add between services is so minimal.

Why start a new project with CircleCI? That I don't have a clue.

juanbyrge• 4 years ago

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.

lakomen• 4 years ago

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.

Syntaf• 4 years ago

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.

SkyPuncher7• 4 years ago

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.

yla92• 4 years ago

100% can back the claim about Travis. It is awful and very buggy.

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.

smeagull2• 4 years ago

I wish it was a commodity, but here I am forced to use Azure CI

intelVISA• 4 years ago

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.

klooney• 4 years ago

Atlassian's bamboo has a terrible reputation

flohofwoe• 4 years ago

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.

rustd• 4 years ago

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.

thirdusername• 4 years ago

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.

spamizbad• 4 years ago

Pretty good severance terms all things considered.

vander_elst2• 4 years ago

Best of luck to all impacted employees!

The terms seem above average, I hope something like this will become the standard.

idoh2• 4 years ago

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).

solidr53• 4 years ago

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

idoh2• 4 years ago

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.

WirelessGigabit• 4 years ago

To this date I cannot build the hypothetical result of a PR with CircleCI. Number 1 reason not to use it.

epgui2• 4 years ago

What? Sounds like user error to me.

rsylvian• 4 years ago

it has to be

aeyes2• 4 years ago

What hinders you from doing a rebase onto the base branch after the initial code checkout of the PR branch?

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.

bikezen• 4 years ago

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.

1-12-2022-hn• 4 years ago

https://www.corporatefluff.com/

youdad1012• 4 years ago

Lol. Engineers pretending to unders6sales and business. That's why you make 250k tops and we make 400k

hericium• 4 years ago

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.

youdad1012• 4 years ago

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.

nickelcitymario• 4 years ago

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.

nrb• 4 years ago

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.

CircleCI Layoffs

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