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.
As someone fairly new to Clojure I agree entirely. There's a freshness about the language that has brought a new sense of joy and curiosity back into the programming world. The language forces you to rethink, relearn, and reevaluate the way you fundamentally understand programming. I think for the better.
Agree with the notion that turning standup into a static status meeting is a poor use of time. If you're blocked you should speak up. If the team wants to know the state of your work, they should defer to project management tool. That said, "standup" is less to do with what you did or immediate blockers. It's about planning for the day. "Here's what's going to get done today, and here's the relevant information for my team." It's a tool for synchronizing, getting on the same page, setting you and your team up for success on a daily basis.
If you don't feel like that's the case, you're probably right in that going async would be a better use of your time. I suspect this is a process dysfunction that has less to do with standup and more to do with a misunderstanding of the value proposition associated with a properly executed standup.
Edit: not everything is an immediate "oh sh*t" type of blocker. If you're working in a collaborative organization, you most like have "low tier" blockers or knowledge that can and should be shared with the team. Face to face makes this easy.
Agree that support is hard, especially when dealing with a very technical product, with very technical users. As far as fixes/enhancements go: every company has to prioritize somewhere. That means not everything gets done. Limited time, limited resources.
I completely understand the limited time and resources, I can really empathise with that. However I think there are 2 ways in which they could handle this issue better:
1) It's a feature that is fundamental to continuous delivery that is missing, yet CircleCI market themselves as a CI and CD product. I think they need to be more realistic in conversations with customers, in their documentation, in their marketing material, etc, and give significant time in their documentation to workarounds and discussion of the issue.
2) They need to seriously work on their customer communication about the prioritisation system they use. Being constantly told to vote on "ideas" (when they are essentially bug fixes) is quite insulting, and as a customer makes me feel like my input is trivial, it's "nice to haves", rather than being something that genuinely matters to me. They need to have some empathy! Communicating more about the roadmap would be great. Maybe even communicating about all the things from the community site that they are doing each month would be an improvement. Right now it feels like being told our input doesn't matter.
