Can't speak for how CCI is run, but that's how it is at most places with more than 10 people.
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 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.
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.
But yeah, for industries we don't understand... hope it's publicly listed and has some insightful annual reports is probably the only option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why start a new project with CircleCI? That I don't have a clue.
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...
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.
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/