You can't post like this here, regardless of who you're attacking. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You may not feel that you owe $UnhingedPatheticIgnorantFuck better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
Since this isn't just a matter of one topic—that is, since you've been breaking the rules badly in other contexts as well (e.g. attacking other users - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33938700), I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with—it will eventually get your main account banned as well.
Also, using multiple accounts to upvote yourself is a bannable abuse in its own right, so please don't do that*.
Since someone is now going to respond with "you're just protecting $BillionaireCeo" I suppose I need to add: no, there is plenty of criticism getting posted, as anyone who looks at any thread on the topic can see. This is about protecting HN. The rules don't stop applying just because a bunch of people are mad. Actually, these are the situations in which they matter most.
* Edit: actually, the multiple-account manipulation you've been doing is egregious, so I've banned a bunch of your accounts. Please don't do that again. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
"unhinged pathetic ignorant fuck" doesn't seem accurate, nor fit for a comment on HN, no matter how much you may dislike him or think his actions are deplorable.
Seems 100% accurate and fit for the situation to me.
You don't tank a company and your reputation like this if you're not unhinged.
You don't ban people linking to a competitor if you're not pathetic.
You don't fire the entire engineering team only to roll out a half baked checkmark, only to have to remove it a couple weeks later if you're not ignorant.
Anyone that treats other people, and especially their own coworkers, with as much contempt and cruelty as Elon has is absolutely a fuck.
"unhinged": Elon Musk's actions for the past few months have been intensely erratic. He clearly meets the definition of "unhinged".
"pathetic": can either be interpreted as "pitiable" or "inadequate/disappointing". Watching his descent into madness is certainly capable of eliciting pity. As for the second definition, everyone who is now being disabused of their formerly high opinion of him could call him inadequate or disappointing.
"ignorant": this is the easiest one, Elon Musk has repeatedly (some might say incessantly) expressed beliefs that belie a complete lack of understanding of the topics at hand (made all the more frustrating by his extreme arrogance and overconfidence). Whether he is doing it deliberately for attention or whether he is truly as gormless as he appears to be, this description is accurate.
"fuck": sadly, this is one of the most flexible words in the English language, so it will be difficult to ascertain its descriptive veracity.
You're right, we should all emulate PG and just assume Musk is right instead of having the intestinal fortitude to call out grifters and stop encouraging idolatry of these pieces of shit.
TL;DR: Info gleaned from just about any source other than company statements and market data, used to guide investment choices. This includes stuff like satellite imagery, which has been used for a long time for these sorts of purposes, but also e.g. social media trends. I guess the news is that there's more of it happening now, because the practice itself isn't new.
Some tangible examples are: credit card transaction data, individual geolocation or foot-traffic data from mobile phone sdks or carriers themselves, receipts scraped/exfiltrated from email inboxes, individual browsing history, or highly targeted web scraped data.
Drivetime is a privately held subprime used dealer group that lists their inventory on Carvana, which is a public spinoff of Drivetime. The CEO of Carvana is the son of the Drivetime owner. Plenty of room to launder profits via wholesale prices.
In October 1990, García, then a Tucson-based real estate developer pleaded guilty to a felony bank fraud charge for his role as a straw borrower in the collapse of Charles Keating's Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.[4][5] Garcia "fraudulently obtained a $30-million line of credit in a series of transactions that also helped Lincoln hide its ownership in risky desert Arizona land from regulators."[4] Garcia spent three years on probation, and he and his firm filed for bankruptcy.[5]
In 1991, García bought Ugly Duckling, a bankrupt rent-a-car franchise, for under $1 million and merged it with his own fledgling finance company, and turned it into a company selling and financing used cars for sub-prime buyers with poor credit history.[5] Garcia took the company public on the NASDAQ exchange in 1996, trading under the ticker "UGLY".[6] In 1999, Garcia was involved in six lawsuits alleging he had "abused his position to profit" from a real estate deal where he ultimately acquired 17 company properties at a 10% discount.[5] In 2002, Garcia and the former Ugly Duckling CEO, Gregory Sullivan, took the company private and renamed it DriveTime.[7]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/ 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
This research helps you form a more informed opinion, but it doesn't make you any more qualified at predicting the companies future success potential. The people running these companies are barely in such a position, nonetheless the average person who thinks they're privy to prescient insight.
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.
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.
Instead of just giving up that you are not qualified to do so, you can at least do a preliminary analysis.
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.
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
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
