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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 y

by meta2023 4y 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 4y 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.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Exactly this. I've worked for founders at small companies (<20 people) who just did 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.
  - pitched 4y ago
    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.
    - icedchai 4y ago
      Definitely. And I did exactly that, eventually. (I waited too long!)
- prepend 4y ago
  Engineers choose who to work for. 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.
  - TheDong 4y ago
    > 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.
    - jamesfinlayson 4y ago
      I do agree, though I think on the CircleCI front at least, it's had some not positive press on Hacker News this year (big price rises and or cutting the free tier from memory, plus the launch of GitHub actions). But yeah, for industries we don't understand... hope it's publicly listed and has some insightful annual reports is probably the only option.
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      Engineers should be domain experts. This isn’t the case now but I imagine as more people become engineers, and more stuff leans towards automation, this will end up being the case
    - prepend 4y ago
      > For many companies, you cannot be qualified to make this determination. 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.
- bfung 4y ago
  > Engineers aren't generally setting the priorities on what gets fixed 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)
  - joshgachnang 4y ago
    I'm not sure how an engineer could be like "f--k it, I fixed it" to the company's business and pricing model.
    - otikik 4y ago
      By being 10x, full-stack, and a ninja rockstar.
    - spoils19 4y ago
      I've done this multiple times in my career.
    - bfung 4y ago
      The context to my post are the reliability issues that def. can be instrumented and fixed. 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.
- saxonww 4y ago
  I think the point is more that there's increasingly no reason for CircleCI to exist. All your major code hosting players have a CI tool and the various accessories you'd want to attach to it. 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.
  - wfleming 4y ago
    Even that niche has better competitors, I think. I haven't used on-prem CCI, but I used hosted CCI for several years and when my team switched to https://buildkite.com/ https://buildkite.com/ it was a huge breath of fresh air. I think BuildKite is the only CI system I've used I thought was actually worth paying for, and I bet it works out cheaper than self-hosted CCI in most cases as well.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    I never used CircleCI so I can't speak to it specifically, but there's tons to improve on GitHub actions. 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.
- SkyPuncher 4y ago
  We intentionally involve our engineers in product decisions and customer discovery. 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.
twelve40 4y 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.
smeagull 4y 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.

Tao3300 4y 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.

icedchai 4y ago
Exactly this. I've worked for founders at small companies (<20 people) who just did 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.
- pitched 4y ago
  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.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Definitely. And I did exactly that, eventually. (I waited too long!)
prepend 4y ago
Engineers choose who to work for. 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.
- TheDong 4y ago
  > 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.
  - jamesfinlayson 4y ago
    I do agree, though I think on the CircleCI front at least, it's had some not positive press on Hacker News this year (big price rises and or cutting the free tier from memory, plus the launch of GitHub actions). But yeah, for industries we don't understand... hope it's publicly listed and has some insightful annual reports is probably the only option.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Engineers should be domain experts. This isn’t the case now but I imagine as more people become engineers, and more stuff leans towards automation, this will end up being the case
  - prepend 4y ago
    > For many companies, you cannot be qualified to make this determination. 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.
bfung 4y ago
> Engineers aren't generally setting the priorities on what gets fixed 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)
- joshgachnang 4y ago
  I'm not sure how an engineer could be like "f--k it, I fixed it" to the company's business and pricing model.
  - otikik 4y ago
    By being 10x, full-stack, and a ninja rockstar.
  - spoils19 4y ago
    I've done this multiple times in my career.
  - bfung 4y ago
    The context to my post are the reliability issues that def. can be instrumented and fixed. 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.
saxonww 4y ago
I think the point is more that there's increasingly no reason for CircleCI to exist. All your major code hosting players have a CI tool and the various accessories you'd want to attach to it. 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.
- wfleming 4y ago
  Even that niche has better competitors, I think. I haven't used on-prem CCI, but I used hosted CCI for several years and when my team switched to https://buildkite.com/ https://buildkite.com/ it was a huge breath of fresh air. I think BuildKite is the only CI system I've used I thought was actually worth paying for, and I bet it works out cheaper than self-hosted CCI in most cases as well.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I never used CircleCI so I can't speak to it specifically, but there's tons to improve on GitHub actions. 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.
SkyPuncher 4y ago
We intentionally involve our engineers in product decisions and customer discovery. 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.

twelve40 4y 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.

smeagull 4y 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.