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CircleCI. 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.

CircleCI. 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...

Zenst 6y ago
Looks like their chatbot needs to sanitize input - "All set! I've sent an email confirmation to sales@circleci.com." that will be interesting.
- croon 6y ago
  Thanks for the great idea! 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.
davedx 6y ago
Crazy. They're advertising quite a lot on LinkedIn at the moment too. :(
- Tade0 6y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if this was a method of rotating staff to reduce salary spending.
  - lewisj489 6y ago
    The Met Police (London, UK) love to do this
  - jhayward 6y ago
    You mean kind of a chaos monkey, but for people?
    - beckingz 6y ago
      Stack ranking, but they save money by not sorting the stack.
sbt 6y ago
How would you characterize the quality of CircleCI? I've spent quite a few hours trying to work out mysterious bugs in a build process that runs fine locally. This morning the web ui was full of 'client error' messages.
- wlll 6y ago
  As an end user I've been pretty happy with it. I've used Jenkins, Travis, Github and Circle mostly, and of those I hope to never have to use Travis or Jenkins again, and I've only really used Github for some simple stuff, but rather enjoyed the experience. 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.
  - ciceryadam 6y ago
    Have you tried Teamcity? https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/ https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/
    - wlll 6y ago
      No, not yet.
- jmchuster 6y ago
  We've seen great results since switching from Circle to Buildkite, not the least of which is cost, but you have to be willing to do a little bit of your own IT work.
  - sylvinus 6y ago
    I second Buildkite, one of the best choices we made at my previous company.
    - sundvor 6y ago
Insanity 6y ago
Guess they might just be using Covid as an excuse to get rid of some people? Wouldn't be ethical, but wouldn't be surprised if some companies took advantage of the situation.
- raghava 6y ago
  > Wouldn't be ethical, but wouldn't be surprised if some companies took advantage of the situation. 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 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/download/16062/13461 http://www.informaticsjournals.com/index.php/dbijb/article/d...
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Our experience with Indian firms during COVID has been rocky. 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.
dkersten 6y ago
Wow that’s nasty! Will be steering clear of them for my CI needs.
halfastack 6y ago
Wow, I actually really concidered CCI. It seemed like such a great company to work for. It's good to know this.
slifin 6y ago
I don't know much about CircleCI but my understanding is that they are a Clojure shop but (one of?) their founder(s) moved on to Dark Lang 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
johnnyAghands 6y ago
Can you expand a bit more on this, how can they let go without severance? How big was the loss? Was it contractors? 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.
- anonymousci 6y ago
  Can we communicate over a private channel? Can share more. Wasn't contractors; was employees. Indeed. 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...
  - johnnyAghands 6y ago
    That would be great, email me if you can at johnnyaghands@protonmail.com. Thank you!
obfk 6y ago
There's nothing to say the two events are correlated. As far as we can tell, they could have been underperforming sales people who were let go. Hiring/firing is _not_ based off the single criteria of raising money. There are complex business decisions between events like this, regardless of the coin in the coffers.
jazzyk 6y ago
Were any execs let go? I bet they all had severance guaranteed in their contracts...
- anonymousci 6y ago
  Not recently, and not due to covid. Within the last 6 months, yes some execs were asked to leave, but no execs let go so far in 2020.
danpalmer 6y ago
I must admit, I get this feeling from using the product over the last 2 years. I moved us over from Jenkins to CircleCI and while on the whole it was positive, we’ve had a lot of issues and the product has failed to live up to some of the promises made in our trial period. 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.
vkaku 6y ago
Whoa. I was close to using their product. You just talked me out of it.

Zenst 6y ago

Looks like their chatbot needs to sanitize input - "All set! I've sent an email confirmation to sales@circleci.com." that will be interesting.

croon 6y ago
Thanks for the great idea! 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.

davedx 6y ago

Crazy. They're advertising quite a lot on LinkedIn at the moment too. :(

Tade0 6y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a method of rotating staff to reduce salary spending.
- lewisj489 6y ago
  The Met Police (London, UK) love to do this
- jhayward 6y ago
  You mean kind of a chaos monkey, but for people?
  - beckingz 6y ago
    Stack ranking, but they save money by not sorting the stack.

sbt 6y ago

How would you characterize the quality of CircleCI? I've spent quite a few hours trying to work out mysterious bugs in a build process that runs fine locally. This morning the web ui was full of 'client error' messages.

wlll 6y ago
As an end user I've been pretty happy with it. I've used Jenkins, Travis, Github and Circle mostly, and of those I hope to never have to use Travis or Jenkins again, and I've only really used Github for some simple stuff, but rather enjoyed the experience. 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.
- ciceryadam 6y ago
  Have you tried Teamcity? https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/ https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/
  - wlll 6y ago
    No, not yet.
jmchuster 6y ago
We've seen great results since switching from Circle to Buildkite, not the least of which is cost, but you have to be willing to do a little bit of your own IT work.
- sylvinus 6y ago
  I second Buildkite, one of the best choices we made at my previous company.
  - sundvor 6y ago

Insanity 6y ago

Guess they might just be using Covid as an excuse to get rid of some people? Wouldn't be ethical, but wouldn't be surprised if some companies took advantage of the situation.

raghava 6y ago
> Wouldn't be ethical, but wouldn't be surprised if some companies took advantage of the situation. 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 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/download/16062/13461 http://www.informaticsjournals.com/index.php/dbijb/article/d...
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Our experience with Indian firms during COVID has been rocky. 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.

dkersten 6y ago

Wow that’s nasty! Will be steering clear of them for my CI needs.

halfastack 6y ago

Wow, I actually really concidered CCI. It seemed like such a great company to work for. It's good to know this.

slifin 6y ago

I don't know much about CircleCI but my understanding is that they are a Clojure shop but (one of?) their founder(s) moved on to Dark Lang 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

johnnyAghands 6y ago

Can you expand a bit more on this, how can they let go without severance? How big was the loss? Was it contractors? 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.

anonymousci 6y ago
Can we communicate over a private channel? Can share more. Wasn't contractors; was employees. Indeed. 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...
- johnnyAghands 6y ago
  That would be great, email me if you can at johnnyaghands@protonmail.com. Thank you!

obfk 6y ago

There's nothing to say the two events are correlated. As far as we can tell, they could have been underperforming sales people who were let go. Hiring/firing is _not_ based off the single criteria of raising money. There are complex business decisions between events like this, regardless of the coin in the coffers.

jazzyk 6y ago

Were any execs let go? I bet they all had severance guaranteed in their contracts...

anonymousci 6y ago
Not recently, and not due to covid. Within the last 6 months, yes some execs were asked to leave, but no execs let go so far in 2020.

danpalmer 6y ago

I must admit, I get this feeling from using the product over the last 2 years. I moved us over from Jenkins to CircleCI and while on the whole it was positive, we’ve had a lot of issues and the product has failed to live up to some of the promises made in our trial period. 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.

vkaku 6y ago

Whoa. I was close to using their product. You just talked me out of it.