The "$300 mental health" seems odd - for any kind of counseling/therapy/etc sessions this is a drop in the bucket in terms of cost.
It will easily cost 10x to work with a mental health professional (and insurance companies sadly pay a very small amount of it). So why add this to an otherwise reasonable package?
Including laptops with likely the customary IT spyware as well as confidential company data? If I were in this situation, I would at the very least wipe the drive completely, and probably reflash the BIOS too before actually considering it safe for personal use.
If you're talking about Brooks's law, that's a pretty specific observation that doesn't seem like it applies here. It's very specifically about adding workers to a project that is already behind schedule. It doesn't certainly doesn't mean anything as broad as "a company cannot do more things by increasing its employee count."
Large software orgs get around this by having multiple projects that are either loosely coupled or completely separate. Otherwise there’s be no point in hiring more than 10 engineers at any point.
I’ve actually spent a long time working at engineering orgs that run super lean. On the upside there are never layoffs, on the downside you’re really constrained on what problems you can tackle - and that can have some major (negative) business implications.
Anyway I can’t help but feel we are slowly reverting back to the aughts where people thought you could clone Google or whatever with like 5 engineers and didn’t understand why nobody took them seriously.
Headcount is a good way to justify a valuation given an investment round - and you have to spend the money chasing growth anyway whether it makes sense or not.
Too many business schools teach classes that claim that managers don't need to know the business that they're in. They just need to know the math. Then apply what comes out of "organizational psychology/sociology" courses to the remaining staff. And when a new CxO takes over, he brings in his cronies who puffed him up at the last place (aka "the new broom sweeps clean"). This is why software companies end up with mismanagers who don't know beans about programming.
Not all of that is dev. After a certain point, a lot of growth comes from marketing, sales, sales engineering, consulting, support, customer success, etc.
I'd wager most core engineering teams in a co like Apollo are probably quite small and focused. I'd guess the cuts are coming from the ancillary teams.
Far too often people are added to existing teams, as if they didn't believe Brooks' observations about communication.
Less often, but much better, are people being hired and put onto new teams, focused on new projects and products. Developers can scale horizontally, but not vertically.
There's a post-dotcom-bubble VC delusion that says that "growth" is the most important thing for an investor. Companies that can show growth, like Uber, are used as an example of "success," and "unicorn" becomes a thing that companies strive for.
So, companies did anything to show growth, which means marketing and incentives to acquire users, to adjacent services, to hiring more staff. I'm sure leadership either knew that this is what needed to be done to get more funding, or they actually drank the cool aid.
this seems more like a systems problem with a reinforcing and a balancing feedback loop: you're hiring for the future based on current demand, but there's a delay between the syncs of supplying capacity (hiring) and demand.
> Thanks to an incredible performance by our Talent Acquisition team, one of the best in the industry, we grew headcount 2.5x in about a year. But the problem is that growing the company 2.5x didn’t make us 2.5x more productive. It got harder to get things done because we didn’t add the right mix of skills and seniority levels to our team.
From The Mythical Man-Month: "If there are n workers on a project, there are (n^2 - n) / 2 interfaces across which there may be communication... The purpose of organization is to reduce the amount of of communication and coordination necessary". I doubt anybody would ever expect adding large numbers of employees to have a linear effect on productivity, especially if they aren't well coordinated. More people usually means more meetings and more communications costs, as well as more bureaucracy in the way. I find it hard to believe that a leader in software would expect otherwise.
Perhaps management sees tech work in the way they see assembly line workers - they believe that doubling the number of teams will double the ticket throughput.
> I am very sad to make this decision. It’s a consequence of the approach that Matt and I took in scaling the company over the last year, and we take full responsibility for the impact that will have on the lives of our departing team members.
Why do CEO's always say this empty nonsense. If you accept responsibility, you accept consequences - what consequences is Geoff Schmidt going to be facing? Hurt feelings? Give me a break.
This comes up every thread about layoffs -- accepting responsibility means not passing the buck and saying "it was out of our control!" or "this was due to outside circumstance X".
The explicit consequences are up to the owners of the company, not the court of public opinion. The owners wouldn't be beyond their rights to demand the CEO's resignation, although neither are they obligated to do that either since everyone makes mistakes. And as others have pointed out there are implicit consequences as well -- less trust from remaining employees, etc.
The business they built is failing. The emotional toll is extreme. Founders I know are either in poor health due to stress, or place an outsized emphasis on staying healthy. You and others who post this every time seem to be saying "Ah yes, you're not suffering enough in my eyes". How much suffering is enough? Should your degree of blood thirst be applied to employee actions? Are blameless retrospectives a mistake and we should start firing people for making mistakes?
At the same time, everyone in the startup game needs to know that this is a fairly likely outcome. It's just not as safe as being at an institution that can weather the storm.
I tell potential hires explicitly that this can fail, and that there's a runway, and that it's uncertain. I've seen so many places try to sell people that it's just kicking ass all the way to the bank.
So, when a CEO makes this kind of statement, I would refer back to the initial messaging before getting out my coals and rake. Nobody made anyone sign on to a nascent software company. It absolutely sucks to find yourself without income, but you've got to know your risk tolerance. And, by that, I mean you need to know how well you tolerate risk, and you need to know your exposure. If management wasn't forthright, well, that's really shitty.
It is humblebragging and getting ahead of rumors. "We are growing strongly, but" followed by the usual platitudes about funding, taking ownership without consequences by leadership, and showing how great the severance is. There is no good reason this should be a public communication.
> what consequences is Geoff Schmidt going to be facing?
Loss in confidence of his employees, fear of mass exodus, pressure from stakeholders, etc...
I don't usually defend CEO's, and it sounds like this one has committed some pretty serious errors, but I certainly would not want to be sending that email out.
The expected growth of revenue by growing our workforce did not happen. Together with the tough economic climate, we came to the conclusion that letting 15% of our workforce go will put the company in a better position to survive and navigate the future. Hopefully there will be future opportunities that allow us to grow again.
We are all very sorry for this. Personally, I can barely sleep thinking about the stress and troubles my former colleagues will face having lost their job. We feel it‘s our duty to provide a fair severance package with at least x more months of pay, y months of health insurance, etc.
I am not a writer! Others could do this much better!
At least pretend to be a fucking human and don‘t write disgusting copy-paste trash that sounds like it came from a lobotomized HR junior like Mr. Schmidt did.
Nobody ever likes these announcements. Half the comment thread would rule at your “can barely sleep” comment. They’re too human or too detached, too brief or too prescriptive. At the end of the day, there are fewer things that matter to a firm than the text of their lay-off announcement.
Article starts with a title on gradient background and company logo. This is implemented as an almost 3 MB png file [1] How come?! Why not a simple text and couple of CSS tricks? Why not an SVG? Don't they notice it takes ages to load?
I have pretty limited experience with graphql. Why is apollos offering interesting to people? A hosted graphql proxy? You still need to write your own servers(but theres a ton of good libraries in multiple languages for this?)
Architecturally it seems to be adding a massive hop to requests made, but its not clear to me what the benefit is?
I don't know about the company or how they make money with it (support?), but Apollo is pretty much the standard GraphQL client for frontends. It has pretty sophisticated cache and state management, type generation for typescript, etc.
What these companies offer (another one I am using is "The Guild") is mostly tooling and DEX. GraphQL is a specification. The implementation will depend on the tools/infra you'll use. That's what these guys offer.
In addition to the other comments, their APM platform is built specifically for graphql so it includes things like query performance on the field level. Existing tools don’t always play nicely since a graphql server is usually just one endpoint and doesn’t use normal status codes.
They also provide libraries for both the client and server so they can tell you what versions of your client are using specific data.
I'm not the one at my company closest to the situation, but my understanding is that even though our federated gateway is self hosted, we still pay to use Apollo's proprietary schema verification and compatibility check service. I think our front end team also uses Apollo Studio a lot for building queries, which I'm assuming costs something.
One reason why they're laying everyone off. Lots of VC money sloshed around the past 15 years but now it's time to actually turn a profit for most of these companies. This will show whether their business models are actually viable or not.
This is one of the more straightforward announcements with minimal sugarcoating. Letting employees keep the equipment is a nice touch, since honestly they're not worth much to the company anyway. Wish those impacted best of luck.
It's near the end of the quarter and holidays tends to be less productive time for employees with many taking extra time off anyway. Even with the very generous severance is still makes sense to announce these layoffs before some of the least productive times.
Also personally, I think I'd rather know about being laid off before going into the new year.
As soon as the economy recovers, doing these kinds of layoffs will be terrible for the companies reputation. Right now, it’s more like “who can blame them, everyone is doing it”.
So they were basically a 100 person company before the pandemic if they grew up 2.5X. I feel like a 100 person company it's still possible to be familiar with most names and maybe even have interacted with all of them at one time or another. Especially if you've been there for any length of time. 246 people is a different beast altogether though.
Apollo should cease to exist. It is a terrible product and basically designed for being a DDOS attack vector. Never design things like this. They are on the opposite track to the entire web industry.
Can you expand on this? Is this a generic criticism of GraphQL? Apollo server? Client? And what do you mean by opposite track?
I really like GraphQL but agree that it‘s not trivial to implement well.
I also think it recently became a bit less relevant for web applications (React server components come to mind) but it‘s still very useful for some web apps, mobile apps and generally for designing nice APIs.
Apollo is literally build on top of REST. It adds types and clarify the dependencies between the types. It enhances an existing protocol by adding features.
It is not a silver bullets but it has advantages like self-documenting (Playground), ease of discovery on big API (generated documentation with types) and can have TypeScript type generated for your (reduce the number of interfaces/types to maintain).
Federation is also a good concept if you have many teams that need to converge into a cohesive API gateway.
Overall, if you use it properly it can be a great tool.
I can't speak to dysfunctional, but I can speak to hype. Both just had too much of it and it made me not so interested in them. Apollo is still trying to use hype as its main weapon – here's what its homepage says:
> we’ve taken full advantage of outside capital to speed our growth...But economic conditions have changed and we believe that it’s no longer prudent to rely on outside capital to support us
Lots of companies have been hiring for growth or for investment. What the companies should have done, though, is hiring to unblock. A couple of engineers build a product that turns out to be generating amazing growth, and then hire a team to polish the system.
I'm curious to know from some (ex?) employee how badly this was managed. In my experience it's really hard to fire 15% of employees by personally talk to each of them, without massive delays (e.g. one is on holiday, different timezones, etc). The first 2 or 3 that get their accounts deactivated, usually trigger mass panic in the company.
As someone affected by layoffs earlier last month, I can say this market is not looking great. With hiring frozen everywhere I'm afraid there probably won't be hope until Q2 2023
I was also laid off earlier last month. Comments like yours would scare me.
So I hope I don't come across as rude or anything, but I want to provide a counter-anecdote.
I was laid off in very early November. I took about 2 weeks just to get over about 80% of my saltiness at what I considered to be a betrayal. (I won't go into detail, forgive me, I'm still not able to talk about it without being salty yet.)
I then asked my two best tech friends (1 from college, 1 from my first job) for referrals to the companies they worked at. I did 2 interview loops, got 2 offers, and picked one. I got a ~10k raise over my last position in the process, though mostly out of region arbitrage (last job was geo-adjusting me down ~10% whereas my new job was not, but it's a smaller company and an earlier stage company, so less cash to sling around, but more equity).
(for the record, I have 9 years of experience and the position is "senior software engineer" which was the same as the job I got laid off from).
So - to all you fellow laid off peoples - don't rely on anecdotes from strangers on the internet. I wouldn't have ever made this post as a top-level post, but I hope my 2c calms folks a bit.
(And for the record... I was intending/expecting to apply to more than 2 companies, but I was a bit sick of applying to companies where I didn't have an inside opinion on the culture bc I felt like I got burned by tha tlast time, so I gave these 2 companies (where I did have that inside opinion) the benefit of being the only 2 companies in my first salvo of interviewing, so I could give them extra attention. And I happened to get an offer I really liked at a company I feel good about, so I took it, even if I guess I probably could've optimized a few more k of base pay if I'd grabbed more/bigger companies in my first round.)
jackson1442|3 years ago
* 15 weeks base pay + 1 week per year of employment
* 6 months COBRA + $300 mental health
* no 1-yr cliff, options can be exercised thru next year
* you can keep all your equipment
lfittl|3 years ago
It will easily cost 10x to work with a mental health professional (and insurance companies sadly pay a very small amount of it). So why add this to an otherwise reasonable package?
jcadam|3 years ago
robofanatic|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
userbinator|3 years ago
Including laptops with likely the customary IT spyware as well as confidential company data? If I were in this situation, I would at the very least wipe the drive completely, and probably reflash the BIOS too before actually considering it safe for personal use.
DevX101|3 years ago
Rooster61|3 years ago
More hands /= more productivity, at least on a linear scale
tshaddox|3 years ago
spamizbad|3 years ago
I’ve actually spent a long time working at engineering orgs that run super lean. On the upside there are never layoffs, on the downside you’re really constrained on what problems you can tackle - and that can have some major (negative) business implications.
Anyway I can’t help but feel we are slowly reverting back to the aughts where people thought you could clone Google or whatever with like 5 engineers and didn’t understand why nobody took them seriously.
mattbillenstein|3 years ago
Tangurena2|3 years ago
CharlieDigital|3 years ago
I'd wager most core engineering teams in a co like Apollo are probably quite small and focused. I'd guess the cuts are coming from the ancillary teams.
pwinnski|3 years ago
Less often, but much better, are people being hired and put onto new teams, focused on new projects and products. Developers can scale horizontally, but not vertically.
lxe|3 years ago
So, companies did anything to show growth, which means marketing and incentives to acquire users, to adjacent services, to hiring more staff. I'm sure leadership either knew that this is what needed to be done to get more funding, or they actually drank the cool aid.
carrja99|3 years ago
"Twitter 2.0 or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved the Mythical Man Month"
wintogreen74|3 years ago
francisofascii|3 years ago
ProZsolt|3 years ago
grumple|3 years ago
From The Mythical Man-Month: "If there are n workers on a project, there are (n^2 - n) / 2 interfaces across which there may be communication... The purpose of organization is to reduce the amount of of communication and coordination necessary". I doubt anybody would ever expect adding large numbers of employees to have a linear effect on productivity, especially if they aren't well coordinated. More people usually means more meetings and more communications costs, as well as more bureaucracy in the way. I find it hard to believe that a leader in software would expect otherwise.
wolpoli|3 years ago
jcoder|3 years ago
rubyist5eva|3 years ago
Why do CEO's always say this empty nonsense. If you accept responsibility, you accept consequences - what consequences is Geoff Schmidt going to be facing? Hurt feelings? Give me a break.
dnissley|3 years ago
The explicit consequences are up to the owners of the company, not the court of public opinion. The owners wouldn't be beyond their rights to demand the CEO's resignation, although neither are they obligated to do that either since everyone makes mistakes. And as others have pointed out there are implicit consequences as well -- less trust from remaining employees, etc.
bberenberg|3 years ago
ibejoeb|3 years ago
I tell potential hires explicitly that this can fail, and that there's a runway, and that it's uncertain. I've seen so many places try to sell people that it's just kicking ass all the way to the bank.
So, when a CEO makes this kind of statement, I would refer back to the initial messaging before getting out my coals and rake. Nobody made anyone sign on to a nascent software company. It absolutely sucks to find yourself without income, but you've got to know your risk tolerance. And, by that, I mean you need to know how well you tolerate risk, and you need to know your exposure. If management wasn't forthright, well, that's really shitty.
throwaway5752|3 years ago
celtain|3 years ago
Rooster61|3 years ago
Loss in confidence of his employees, fear of mass exodus, pressure from stakeholders, etc...
I don't usually defend CEO's, and it sounds like this one has committed some pretty serious errors, but I certainly would not want to be sending that email out.
trollerator23|3 years ago
2018 July. Apollo server 2 released woo! (mostly ignored)
2019 Feb. We switched away from Slack woo!
. . . (Some PRs everybody ignored)
2019 June. We got a $22M investment woo!
. . . (Many PRs everybody ignored)
2022 Dec. Oops, we are laying of lots of people...
alexchamberlain|3 years ago
SketchySeaBeast|3 years ago
sergiotapia|3 years ago
If you need you consume a Graphql API you most certainly reach out for Apollo on the clientside to query data.
dventimihasura|3 years ago
subpixel|3 years ago
Traubenfuchs|3 years ago
The expected growth of revenue by growing our workforce did not happen. Together with the tough economic climate, we came to the conclusion that letting 15% of our workforce go will put the company in a better position to survive and navigate the future. Hopefully there will be future opportunities that allow us to grow again.
We are all very sorry for this. Personally, I can barely sleep thinking about the stress and troubles my former colleagues will face having lost their job. We feel it‘s our duty to provide a fair severance package with at least x more months of pay, y months of health insurance, etc.
I am not a writer! Others could do this much better!
At least pretend to be a fucking human and don‘t write disgusting copy-paste trash that sounds like it came from a lobotomized HR junior like Mr. Schmidt did.
JumpCrisscross|3 years ago
Self-Perfection|3 years ago
Article starts with a title on gradient background and company logo. This is implemented as an almost 3 MB png file [1] How come?! Why not a simple text and couple of CSS tricks? Why not an SVG? Don't they notice it takes ages to load?
[1] https://www.apollographql.com/blog/static/Skylark-R-1-d25f13...
tayo42|3 years ago
Architecturally it seems to be adding a massive hop to requests made, but its not clear to me what the benefit is?
lyu07282|3 years ago
csomar|3 years ago
alexgrover|3 years ago
They also provide libraries for both the client and server so they can tell you what versions of your client are using specific data.
edude03|3 years ago
plondon514|3 years ago
tekdude|3 years ago
satvikpendem|3 years ago
pcurve|3 years ago
andrewingram|3 years ago
Aeolun|3 years ago
akudha|3 years ago
varenc|3 years ago
Also personally, I think I'd rather know about being laid off before going into the new year.
jcadam|3 years ago
__s|3 years ago
0x457|3 years ago
Doing layoff before that is beneficial for employer to save on labor cost (not paying low productivity time), and employee (allows better planning)
minsc_and_boo|3 years ago
If you have to do layoffs, the best time is now. The second best time is a couple weeks before financial reporting ends.
shagie|3 years ago
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-companies-do-layoffs-around...
VirusNewbie|3 years ago
idoh|3 years ago
frozenlettuce|3 years ago
halfway_there|3 years ago
microtherion|3 years ago
detaro|3 years ago
bogomipz|3 years ago
gedy|3 years ago
AtNightWeCode|3 years ago
quonn|3 years ago
I really like GraphQL but agree that it‘s not trivial to implement well.
I also think it recently became a bit less relevant for web applications (React server components come to mind) but it‘s still very useful for some web apps, mobile apps and generally for designing nice APIs.
daok|3 years ago
It is not a silver bullets but it has advantages like self-documenting (Playground), ease of discovery on big API (generated documentation with types) and can have TypeScript type generated for your (reduce the number of interfaces/types to maintain).
Federation is also a good concept if you have many teams that need to converge into a cohesive API gateway.
Overall, if you use it properly it can be a great tool.
torartc|3 years ago
benatkin|3 years ago
> Modern apps are built on the supergraph
hintymad|3 years ago
Lots of companies have been hiring for growth or for investment. What the companies should have done, though, is hiring to unblock. A couple of engineers build a product that turns out to be generating amazing growth, and then hire a team to polish the system.
vault|3 years ago
treelanko|3 years ago
btrfsck|3 years ago
So I hope I don't come across as rude or anything, but I want to provide a counter-anecdote.
I was laid off in very early November. I took about 2 weeks just to get over about 80% of my saltiness at what I considered to be a betrayal. (I won't go into detail, forgive me, I'm still not able to talk about it without being salty yet.)
I then asked my two best tech friends (1 from college, 1 from my first job) for referrals to the companies they worked at. I did 2 interview loops, got 2 offers, and picked one. I got a ~10k raise over my last position in the process, though mostly out of region arbitrage (last job was geo-adjusting me down ~10% whereas my new job was not, but it's a smaller company and an earlier stage company, so less cash to sling around, but more equity).
(for the record, I have 9 years of experience and the position is "senior software engineer" which was the same as the job I got laid off from).
So - to all you fellow laid off peoples - don't rely on anecdotes from strangers on the internet. I wouldn't have ever made this post as a top-level post, but I hope my 2c calms folks a bit.
(And for the record... I was intending/expecting to apply to more than 2 companies, but I was a bit sick of applying to companies where I didn't have an inside opinion on the culture bc I felt like I got burned by tha tlast time, so I gave these 2 companies (where I did have that inside opinion) the benefit of being the only 2 companies in my first salvo of interviewing, so I could give them extra attention. And I happened to get an offer I really liked at a company I feel good about, so I took it, even if I guess I probably could've optimized a few more k of base pay if I'd grabbed more/bigger companies in my first round.)
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]