
Travis CI Is Laying Off Senior Engineer Staff - kaycebasques
https://twitter.com/alicegoldfuss/status/1098604563664420865
======
jrochkind1
Not too shocking, unfortunately, from discussion when the acquisition was
annoucned
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251)),
we knew that this was the kind of private equity firm that makes money by
buying products with existing revenue streams, and then _not_ investing in
them. (And the corollary, laying off staff you don't need if you're not going
to be investing in it, obviously helps your profit margin).

This is kind of how private equity works.

It is sad, I had really liked travis as a product, I don't expect I will be
able to continue to.

Travis is just _so easy_ to set up for my basic ruby gem and Rails app
projects (I don't want to spend time on setting up CI, I just want it to be
done), as well as free for open source -- none of it's competitors have seemed
to give me that when I looked before.

Travis, by offering an absolutely brain-dead setup, and giving it away free to
open source, really created a revolution in actually doing CI for open source,
at least in ruby. Everyone's doing CI now, when few open source projects were
before in ruby. That anyone offers free CI for open source at all is probably
due to the need to compete with travis. I wonder if it'll stick around.

~~~
simonbyrne
Agree 100%. Free CI really did provide a massive boost to collaborative open
source projects.

As a user, it did a lot to increase software quality: not just catching
inadvertent bugs, but also ensuring that there was at least some reproducible
way to get the code working, that didn't depend on some implicit configuration
of the authors system.

As a maintainer, accepting simple pull requests becomes much easier when you
can quickly look over the code and check the CI status, and not have to try it
out locally yourself. It was certainly critical to the "social coding" idea
behind GitHub.

So thanks to the team that put it together. Even if the product you built
doesn't live on in the way you hoped, it has certainly had a lasting impact
for the better on the open source world.

------
garblegarble
Previous discussion of the acquisition on HN, complete with a prediction of
just this happening can be found at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978251)

------
mbrumlow
I called it. The money men have praises Idera for their new and innovative
approach to software development. Also know has fixed cost devlopement to the
lowest bider.

If you want stop this type of practice please don't sign multi year contracts.
That is stage two. This is where they get their value.

Without the contracts they can't use it as leverage to take out huge debts --
where they get their value from.

If the fed raised the rates this practice would also end.

~~~
toomuchtodo
There's a lot of problems to go around.

If you're a founder, you're usually going to cash out for the right price.
Everyone has their price. No one wants to grind forever. This isn't a problem
if you're profitable enough that you can hold forever (Basecamp).

If you're an investor, you're struggling for returns right now (to your point
about interest rates and the Fed). You're going to squeeze whatever you can
get your hands on as hard as possible (as an investor myself in real estate
and small SaaS companies I've bought, I try very hard to not do this, but
you're hedging against a multiple you paid for the asset; you don't want the
asset's cashflow to disappear and watch your capital evaporate).

Interest rates rising would help, but so would orgs more tilted towards
employee ownership. You have to align incentives. Are you happy with a
lifestyle business? (Not derogatory! I'd take a lifestyle business any day
over any sort of possible unicorn status) Are your coworkers/shareholders?
Would you customers be willing to be shareholders thereby becoming
stakeholders? These problems are solvable with corporate structures and
governance.

Such a shame to see this happen. Great opportunity for GitLab and their CICD
team though.

~~~
mbrumlow
This is not a investment. It is a tool for leverage. The goal is not to grow
the company it's to get as many contracts as they can and lower the ebita.
Once they do this they will take out huge loans for the next company to
destroy.

I don't blame the founders. But at the same time I think if enough of these
deals for bad these types of investors will stop their bad practices.

This sort of move not only hurts employees. It hurts those who use the product
too. It's a net bad for everybody but a few.

I am still digging into how these things work and how the money gets out. But
I would not be surprised if sometime in the future this sort of business
engineering would be made illegal.

Look what PE did to solar winds and general dollar. Both had huge piles of
cash and were drained and put back on the market for the general public to pay
the debt.

~~~
hnzix
It sounds like a new spin on 1980s-style corporate raiding? Pillaging a
company then moving on, leaving behind the carcass. I can't see how this
behavior helps us as a society, it's legal but unethical.

~~~
pas
I don't know if it's good or bad, but we like to think that vultures fill a
niche, make ecosystems richer.

Sure, our economies and ecosystem of firms doesn't necessarily have to look
like a full out evolutionary war for resources, but .. it sort of does, and
it's not going to change any time soon.

So, im that sense if we want stable and nice companies, we have to care for
them. Sort of like we do with pandas, rhinos, and so on.

One possibility is doing pledge, using corporate bylaws to try to guarantee
some of that niceness. Do it through IT (and startup, and VC and so)
communities' wall of fame/shame.

~~~
mbrumlow
The problem is these vultures tend to swoop in while the company is still
alive and kicking. Everybody expects their company to do amazing in 3 to 5
years and if does not they kick it to the curb.

The problem is if you look at all the amazing companies that are doing really
well. The majority of them took near 10 years to come to their own. Half the
amazing companies in SV if ran buy these PE guys would not exist if they were
given to them at year 5 of their life.

~~~
pas
If it was that alive and kicking founders wouldn't have sold it off to the
vultures. :/

There's difference between PE and PE. Look at SoftBank's Vision fund, they
want to invest still more than 100B USD (it's already at around a 100), they
want to fuel growth of sectors, etc. And then there's "company turnaround
management", where the employee count chart gets turned around, and cashflow
becomes king.

------
xtreak29
From the tweet [0] it seems there is going to be a huge tech debt. I don't
know how Idera is planning to expand upon the acquisition after letting go
people like this.

> Some know the skinny on dozens of different open source projects and
> ecosystems, others understand run time and dep mgmt for like 17 languages
> and even more tooling, and automated image mastering to handle it all. >
> Others are rewriting what it means to manage communities in this era. They
> had to garden github issue repos with 1000s of tickets and find the
> patterns, and know a wide swath of the open source community in ways most
> people will never get to again

[0]
[https://mobile.twitter.com/carmatrocity/status/1098538650525...](https://mobile.twitter.com/carmatrocity/status/1098538650525188096)

~~~
lostapathy
To (sadly) be fair, Travis has already been struggling mightily with tech debt
the last few years. There have been a lot of issues surface and re-surface
that sure seem like they shouldn't be a big deal.

For example, setting a build to use ruby 2.4 is supposed to run the latest
ruby 2.4.x, but would frequently build against ancient, unsupported rubies for
a while, before being silently fixed.

~~~
mikepurvis
They've also been very slow to ship updated machine images— Ubuntu 14.04
wasn't available until late 2015, and 16.04 wasn't until Nov 2018:

[https://blog.travis-ci.com/2015-10-14-opening-up-ubuntu-
trus...](https://blog.travis-ci.com/2015-10-14-opening-up-ubuntu-trusty-beta)

[https://blog.travis-ci.com/2018-11-08-xenial-release](https://blog.travis-
ci.com/2018-11-08-xenial-release)

The extremely long lag combined with some communications from Travis
developers on related Github issues strongly implied that shipping these was a
highly manual process, not just a matter of updating a few Packer configs and
calling it a day. I'm not arguing that it's trivial, but it should have been a
week or two of effort at most.

Now, lots of their userbase could be covered by using docker environments, or
by the natural isolation supplied by the language platform (virtualenv, rbenv,
etc), but at the end of the day, it's frustrating if your CI environment is
drifting away from what developers are actually using themselves.

~~~
rleigh
This was concerning for several years now. Who knows when 18.04 will make an
appearance. 2021? Never?

I appreciate what they were trying to do with their multiple versions of every
language in their stock images. But, in practice there were numerous
compatibility problems. If you look at the C++ tickets, you can see how
utterly unusable their offering was for this language. From the outside, it
looks like they painted themselves into a corner and are mired in technical
debt. Quite why it took two and half years to support 16.04 is a question I'd
be very interested to know more about.

One solution is to use custom docker images. But that negates any advantages
Travis might have had. I can run a docker image anywhere. So when I switched
over to GitLab, I use GitLab CI with docker images and custom runners to do
fairly comprehensive platform coverage. Something Travis will never do.

They also made a questionable business decision in tying themselves to GitHub.
Why no integrations with BitBucket, GitLab, Jenkins, and all the other hosting
and automation solutions out there? I had to write Travis off purely because
of its lack of availability. The above problems were also an issue, but if it
doesn't integrate with your hosting solution, it's a non-starter.

------
fortytw2
Also relevant -
[https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/at3oyq/it_looks_lik...](https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/at3oyq/it_looks_like_ibera_is_gutting_travis_ci_just_a/egyh156/)

"Yep. We were terminated by Idera without even our managers knowing."

in wake of travis being acquired last month. [https://blog.travis-
ci.com/2019-01-23-travis-ci-joins-idera-...](https://blog.travis-
ci.com/2019-01-23-travis-ci-joins-idera-inc)

~~~
michaelt
In the blog about the private equity acquisition, the CTO says "With the
support from our new partners, we will be able to invest in expanding and
improving our core product"

I wonder if he believed that, even as he wrote it?

~~~
coldcode
It's complete BS, but for some reason C* people often don't understand how
dumb this is, but for them it might mean a big payday so they don't care. The
inherent knowledge walks out the door with the engineers, and all that is left
is code and no knowledge. Hire cheap devs and before you realize it it becomes
a write-off for the acquirer. Everyone wins except the people who worked hard
to build it in the first place.

~~~
xsmasher
> all that is left is code and no knowledge

The irony is that the better the engineering staff was, the better this works
out for the firing company.

If some newbies can pick up the code and quickly become productive, that's to
the credit to the staff that was fired.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
I hope no one minds a quick plug... sourcehut has a build service with a
comparible UX to Travis CI, but more powerful in some respects.
[https://sourcehut.org](https://sourcehut.org) Get in touch if you want some
tips on moving from Travis to builds.sr.ht.

I wish I could hire some of the recently unemployed, but I just don't have the
budget. If you want me to circulate your resumes in Philly, feel free to email
them to me. Best of luck.

~~~
myWindoonn
This is a bait-and-switch for most of us who are used to free Travis service,
as your offering is not free.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Well, during the alpha it's free, but you're right that it will eventually
require payment. But the incentives are better this way anyway: if it were
free then in a few years we could very well be having this conversation in the
wake of layoffs at sourcehut following an aquisition. Sourcehut isn't based on
the VC grow-until-you-burst model. If you pay for your account, you can be
confident it's sustainable and aligned with your interests.

Also, if anyone has trouble affording an account, please send me an email. I
don't want anyone to be left out because they can't afford the subscription
fee, we'll sort something out.

------
venantius
Honestly I'm astonished at the speed with which this happened, given the
recency of their acquisition. Seems amazingly cynical of their new parent
company.

~~~
brianwawok
PE firms are there for profit. To make profit you cut costs or raise revenue.
Guess which is faster?

~~~
Rapzid
I worked at a company that was completely turned around by PE. Improved
culture, employee happiness, expanded business, etc.

They were in it for the flip sure, but there are different models for
achieving this. It's not _always_ a chop shop job.

------
hatchnyc
I would guess that this strategy would be more effective in an industry where
the people with the most influence over vendor selection were not seeing this
story at the top of all their news feeds.

~~~
joshdick
Yeah, it's hard to imagine myself ever recommending my company buy TravisCI
now.

------
westoque
There was a time when I wanted to use Travis CI but the pricing was too much.
Then, CircleCI came along with a free plan, and when the time came to upgrade,
we did it so easily since we’re already invested in the platform.

I wish Travis CI they did this from the start since I like their platform and
had some open source projects there and again could have easily upgraded. This
is where the fremium model would have worked.

~~~
lmm
Huh? Travis has had a free level for a while (I've been using it for my
libraries on github).

~~~
penagwin
Only for open source repo's. For those who have to choose a CI for business
use that may not be usable.

~~~
YawningAngel
In what sane business is 50$ a month over a free tier the deciding factor in
choosing a CI system?

~~~
rightbyte
Most (?) developers can't even buy a mouse without prior permission.

"Free" is more convient at work than at home. If I need something at home I
just pay. At work ...

Compare the hazzle of getting a Win10 VM up and running compared to a Ubuntu
one with licensing issues. A Win10 image is like 3 days away. An Ubuntu 30
min. The slower alternative also happens to cost money.

~~~
walesmd
And making it free, at least initially, for businesses removes the requirement
of having to have a conversation about it or get permission. It's the same way
Dropbox gained so much traction (arguably, the first to execute this model).

You let all of the employees use something for free, come to rely on it, and
then all of a sudden it's become entrenched in the workflow/culture/whatever.
At that point, it's easier to just pay for the service than to switch.

See Slack.

------
endymi0n
Sorry to the Travis engineers, in case you don‘t have any other plans already,
at JustWatch, we‘re hiring just around the corner :)

------
devhead
I've been using travis Enterprise for over two years and what has kept that
going has been the amazing support and development team at Travis who have
always helped us during an emergency, been very responsive and informative in
all our interactions. They are the reasons I have backlogged the project to
migrate.

Keys issues i've seen in our Enterprise install... * Upgrades can go bad, very
quickly and very silently. * Build images are out-dated, missing security
patches, bloated, and not easily provisioned with custom features to integrate
our tools with theirs. * no tooling for docker builds/deployments * long start
up time on the build images. * Enterprise documentation (though it's been
improved a lot recently)

Best of luck to #travisAlums, I hope you get picked up quickly.

~~~
nojvek
We’re on a custom plan and pay them quite a bit every month. However after
their acquisition, their support is basically non-existent in responses.

We’re migrating to in-house Jenkins now. Can’t trust third parties to handle
critical infra.

I was a big pusher for Travis, but they’ve lost my trust.

I would advice everyone else to migrate off and mitigate their risk.

------
urda
Whelp, I might be looking at CircleCI vs TravisCI again.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
You should have already been doing this, before the acquisition. It felt like
Travis had been on auto-pilot for a long time. It was painfully obvious to me
and our team that Circle is actually hungry and constantly innovating and
wanted our business. We moved one project to Circle, waited a bit, and then
moved everything away from Travis. Don't regret it one bit.

~~~
urda
Hard to want to keep updating your _working_ CI solution for your open source
stuff while holding down a job and life and everything else. :)

~~~
bd82
I kept putting of switching from Travis to Circle-CI in one of my open source
projects, But when I did get around to it the whole thing went pretty smoothly
and easily and I regret not doing it earlier.

1.The builds are much faster now. 2\. The configuration has virtually no hacks
anymore as I'm using Circle-CI own docker images (including browsers). 3\. And
the UI/UX is superior as well.

------
Waterluvian
I've worked somewhere where it was taking so much effort getting Jenkins set
up. In the long run it would be better, but I couldn't wait months and months
for the stuff that I got working in maybe 20 minutes with a .travis.yml file.

Disappointing to see this happen. I like devops stuff that covers 80% of your
need with 20% of the work.

------
yakdriver
More background on Idera: [https://medium.com/@dirk.avery/r-i-p-travis-
ci-347753c73775](https://medium.com/@dirk.avery/r-i-p-travis-ci-347753c73775)

------
alper
I’ve reluctantly used Travis for the last years and hardly seen new features
or long standing open bugs being fixed.

Not sure what the people were doing but this seems typical for a Ruby project.

------
jsmeaton
Has anyone got a link to a decent migration guide from Travis to circleci? And
I’d Circle don’t have one they’re leaving lots of money on the table.

~~~
jsmeaton
[https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/migrating-from-
travis/](https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/migrating-from-travis/) has a basic
migration guide, but doesn't discuss services like databases or caches.

