How is this responsibility defined? How is this responsibility measured? What aspects of the ex-Prisma people does this responsibility cover? What measurable and practical effects does this responsibility have when measured in one week, one month, three months, one year from now? If these targets are not met, what are the consequences of that? What are the means of enforcing that responsibility?
I seriously think we need to start asking these sorts of questions and defining some sorts of standards for this "responsibility" this sentence mentions. In all other contexts, responsibility has its very tangible practical grounding and means of enforcing that grounding. In announcements like these, it reads just like a random and inconsequential "I'm sorry".
You're taking it out on a guy who graduated in 2013, managed to found a company in Europe! and have it survive long enough to make it to SF, and created ~100 jobs in the process?!?!
This behavior should be celebrated, and so should the people who supported his growth as CEO of his company.
The alternative is to install a class of professional CEO punching bags at the helm of every early-stage company. Not doing that is exactly what defined Silicon Valley post dot-com.
It's measured as I get paid a ton of money because of the responsibility I have but then nothing happens when things go to shit because well, nothing happens. BTW when's my next bonus pay day?
Based on LinkedIn they grew from 134 to 164 in the last 6 months. I get taking a bet in 2021 on the post-covid world being different but making that same bet in mid 2022 doesn't seem a good decision.
I'd be ok with this and other lies having legal (civil) consequences, i.e. CEOs who say this are personally liable. Obviously, this phrase would die and that's the point.
Really, it's not hard to remain authentic. Statements like "I feel terrible" are fine and even "we're trying to support everyone through this transition, both staff directly affected and their families, as well as the remaining staff who we realize shoulder increased burden." Without saying "we're doing everything we can" and other obvious lies.
I explained the other day to a friend how Prisma looks great but it's very unresponsive on Github [1], specially surprising since they raised a lot of money so I thought they'd have more resources. So he introduced me to the concept of FOSS-washing (in relation to greenwashing). Launch a cool open source piece of software, get big clients and funding thanks to it and then basically ignore Github or just dedicate enough resources to it so that it doesn't seem "dead".
I had seen and complained about this before here in HN, how when Github said they were sunsetting Atom for lack of engagement I pointed out that the lack of engagement was... by them, not a single commit in few years so of course there was no activity [2]
Edit: looking at the Github tracker now, it seems that now they use Github as the main tracking software? So there's a bunch of new issues by internal contributors with "bad description" (meaning it's probably the tip of the iceberg of an internal issue just for tracking, not the typical issue someone finds and reports), but the old ones sit there unanswered.
I’ve had PRs open since last March with them and have been somewhat disappointed at their response to adding features through OSS contributions. These aren’t minor contributions either.
For example, I want to add ltree support to Prisma (which could also extend to MSSQL’s Hierarchy). I’ve shepherded this whole thing through at least 4 repos, adding the necessary pieces in order to make it work.
Their communication and follow up has been generally poor. The engineers they have on staff are capable but they either don’t see the value in larger OSS contributions or don’t have the time to manage both the internal and external roadmapping?
I think all these layoffs really come down to haves and have nots. You don’t need prisma, to be completely honest. You do need a lot of other software, otherwise some companies that depend on it cannot operate.
I have tried my best over my short (just six years so far in swe, and a few years in a non tech role) career to be on teams where our work is basically in the top 1-3 annual initiatives. It guarantees I keep my job 99% because I work on the things that make money for the company. It’s not my company, so that’s my terms of employment I set for myself. Don’t work on things that push the envelope too far (moonshot), if things don’t work out you lose as an employee (granted if you’re at a big tech company layoffs don’t really mean much with 3+ month severance packages and cozy amounts of additional support).
If I’m on an employee vesting schedule I’m gonna make sure I win as much as I can.
It gets to the point where it's hard to even know what to say about the nth tech layoff announcement.
It's a good reminder, if we needed one, of how fragile the good times are, for anyone who is an ordinary professional working in an economy like this. I wish there were something more concrete we could do to support each other - like something more concrete than "sure I would recommend people from my network for jobs once we aren't in a hiring freeze."
> I wish there were something more concrete we could do to support each other
Unionisation would help. We don't do ourselves any favours by not unionising.
Almost all job security and employment rights were won by unions and strike action. No wonder unions are a dirty word—according to corporate America.
Even when the jobs can't be saved, employment rights are helpful. The Google? Microsoft? announcement basically said, we've already fired some of the American staff, but in other countries were are merely starting the statutory consultation process. That means a longer period of pay.
> It gets to the point where it's hard to even know what to say about the nth tech layoff announcement.
Investors don't get free helicopter money, thus they can't pump money into startups/tech companies thus companies have to cut the dead weight. There will be more lay offs coming - because the free money economy is currently suspended.
Like the unemployment system run by the government(s)? We all pay in, those let go get to draw on it, the government seems willing to augment and extend eligibility length
I defaulted to Prisma for edge apps I'm experimenting with (supabase db). Given it's not possible to connect via TCP to a database and I'm stuck with JS/TS for the edge, I opted for Prisma's data proxy and henceforth Prisma.
Using the ORM means I'm tied to this mess of an abstraction, migrations and scripts that require so many workarounds and experimentation to make it worthwhile when your app is not a simple CRUD or you want performance optimizations without ending up writing your own queries yet again. The generated TS API is the only pleasant feature, but doing things the Prisma way I noticed my app is now tied to this ecosystem and its quirks and I dread it. Being unable to check generated queries' SQL beforehand is also a huge issue that is not getting solved any time soon from what I've gathered on their github.
You could also use Prisma as a SQL client and leverage their data proxy, without needing to use the ORM and execute SQL migrations and queries directly, which is what I intend to do from now on. Please do let me know if there are any other generic alternatives database-wise (for "the edge"), I miss raw [Postgre]SQL. Supabase's client is the closest I can think of and it also generates types from your db, but it's obviously not a generic solution.
Lastly, one particular thing that disgusts me (I believe it's not on Prisma but due to how the edge works) is that you cannot use a local database for development. Perhaps ngrok will work, but then you'd need to constantly update your data proxy project settings manually - I need to experiment more on that.
Damn, I use Prisma, it's a good way to have a unified database schema for which you can generate code in any language you want. It was very useful for converting a TypeScript project to a Rust one, I use prisma-client-rust in particular.
I'd be interested to know the age (or any other) demographic of HN'ers commenting on posts like these. Lot of people sounding very personally slighted by companies trying to remain profitable (or just in business).
I don't think FAANG is trying to just stay in business. My point is not that they should not be laying off, is that they should not have hired this bloat in the first place, and responsibility should come from that. If you need to fire 10k people, as a CEO you should not get out unscathed from the decisions that let to having hired these people, especially if your company would remain highly profitable whether you fired them or not.
I’ve seen Zoomers think Tech is the safest, best job. They’ve only seen the 3 years of boom. I’ve been around for much longer - tech jobs are great but very much come and go.
> Lot of people sounding very personally slighted by companies trying to remain profitable (or just in business).
Do you really need to make an effort to figure out why employees feel slighted for being fired without notice, and specially by an employer whose profitability is not questioned?
You made it sound like only unreasonable people would be bothered by being forced out of a job while having rent/mortgage and bills to pay.
Not an answer to your question, but just to shed light on the framing, it's slightly more abstracted than just a Node ORM - firstly it's Javascript and you can use it with any runtime other than Node, but it currently works with Go too and I believe their goal is to offer more languages in the future.
It's also a bit more abstracted on the 'data' side too. They offer a web interface, Prisma Studio, that abstracts over the physical database actually being used to allow you to do CRUD on the data. I think this is pretty useful.
In my mind (no connection to the company or knowledge beyond being a user) the business to be found there is in being the aggregation and intermediation layer of databases of different services, accessible to people with and without technical skills, in a uniform way.
Ugg the whole node stack ecosystem is so good, but so shakey. It makes me nervous building on these foundations managed by relatively small companies - Vercel and Prisma. Who knows if one day they’ll just collapse. Also React, is Meta really committed to it?
This is why we gravitate towards more stable platforms like .Net for big important projects, but their current client/server stack is not very good (Blazor)
The issues with "enterprise offerings", is that they never tell about their "weakness, shorcomings or disadvantages" comparing to other tools. Why ?
I found it's kinda like an "asshole" behaviour, because it tricks people into illusion of a "one tool to do it all". The reality is not, far from truth.
When I evaluated the Prisma client, which I must highlight is by my estimation free, it was very apparent to me that the nature of their business affected the messaging in even their technical documentation.
I had to find the gaping holes myself in a way that a typical open-source project would tend to be more up-front about.
There's many comments about what does "I the take full responsibility mean" in these threads about layoffs. I'm curious - what do you think it means and should mean? I take that a company offering better severance than required by law is taking at least some responsibility.
Unless there's an apology and resignation It means they executed as expected when the money was pouring and not pouring. For some reason workers tend to believe that the CEO is taking responsibility for the hardships the workers will face and that's obviously not true. If the CEO was the one in fault and the workers were great talent that must be let go, then obviously the CEO should have been fired and not the workers.
When they take responsibility they don't admit wrongdoing or remorse, they simply explain what they did and probably expect a pat on the back. CEO's and workers have different responsibilities.
If you think that people shouldn't be fired in hired at whim, that's why employment are for. If you think that you are being wronged, that's why there are worker rights.
It's easy to say that Europe or UK are socialist in a booming market. As it might turn out, maybe they have a point.
Taking full responsibility should probably mean change in leadership. People are getting fired for their mistake, why should they also not step down?
I’m indifferent tbh, leadership and investors can do what they want, but “taking full responsibility” is not the same as “feeling bad about firing colleagues”
2 months of severance is to follow with state laws that require a 60 day notice or something like this. The 2 months severance works out accounting-wise to be like you are employed with no responsibilities and no access to company resources after you've been issued the 60 day notice.
Is the word “impact” the latest way of saying “fired” without saying it? We are seeing that particular word in nearly every note regarding these types of action.
Why this word and why is everyone using it? It’s not only CEOs and HR but on LinkedIn I see many people referring to themselves as “impacted” and open to word, etc.
Is there a word for this type of memetic term suddenly being used everywhere as a substitute for previous words? Wasn’t “downsized” the word like 20 years ago?
[+] [-] danjac|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phoe-krk|3 years ago|reply
I seriously think we need to start asking these sorts of questions and defining some sorts of standards for this "responsibility" this sentence mentions. In all other contexts, responsibility has its very tangible practical grounding and means of enforcing that grounding. In announcements like these, it reads just like a random and inconsequential "I'm sorry".
[+] [-] epolanski|3 years ago|reply
aka "I admit I have done a bad decision when I over hired and I'm correcting it".
It's not a "I take full responsibility" towards the employees or customers.
[+] [-] simplotek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xfaded|3 years ago|reply
This behavior should be celebrated, and so should the people who supported his growth as CEO of his company.
The alternative is to install a class of professional CEO punching bags at the helm of every early-stage company. Not doing that is exactly what defined Silicon Valley post dot-com.
[+] [-] jimnotgym|3 years ago|reply
That sounds like responsibility
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kwertyoowiyop|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xblinq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Patrol8394|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewcon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcinzm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asah|3 years ago|reply
Really, it's not hard to remain authentic. Statements like "I feel terrible" are fine and even "we're trying to support everyone through this transition, both staff directly affected and their families, as well as the remaining staff who we realize shoulder increased burden." Without saying "we're doing everything we can" and other obvious lies.
[+] [-] listless|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pxue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franciscop|3 years ago|reply
I had seen and complained about this before here in HN, how when Github said they were sunsetting Atom for lack of engagement I pointed out that the lack of engagement was... by them, not a single commit in few years so of course there was no activity [2]
Edit: looking at the Github tracker now, it seems that now they use Github as the main tracking software? So there's a bunch of new issues by internal contributors with "bad description" (meaning it's probably the tip of the iceberg of an internal issue just for tracking, not the typical issue someone finds and reports), but the old ones sit there unanswered.
[1] https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues/4433
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31670443
[+] [-] halfmatthalfcat|3 years ago|reply
For example, I want to add ltree support to Prisma (which could also extend to MSSQL’s Hierarchy). I’ve shepherded this whole thing through at least 4 repos, adding the necessary pieces in order to make it work.
Their communication and follow up has been generally poor. The engineers they have on staff are capable but they either don’t see the value in larger OSS contributions or don’t have the time to manage both the internal and external roadmapping?
Idk, I just want my PRs reviewed and merged lol
[+] [-] moomoo11|3 years ago|reply
I have tried my best over my short (just six years so far in swe, and a few years in a non tech role) career to be on teams where our work is basically in the top 1-3 annual initiatives. It guarantees I keep my job 99% because I work on the things that make money for the company. It’s not my company, so that’s my terms of employment I set for myself. Don’t work on things that push the envelope too far (moonshot), if things don’t work out you lose as an employee (granted if you’re at a big tech company layoffs don’t really mean much with 3+ month severance packages and cozy amounts of additional support).
If I’m on an employee vesting schedule I’m gonna make sure I win as much as I can.
[+] [-] rightbyte|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mk89|3 years ago|reply
Interesting read if you're recently reading about a lot of "layoffs".
[+] [-] decasia|3 years ago|reply
It's a good reminder, if we needed one, of how fragile the good times are, for anyone who is an ordinary professional working in an economy like this. I wish there were something more concrete we could do to support each other - like something more concrete than "sure I would recommend people from my network for jobs once we aren't in a hiring freeze."
[+] [-] orra|3 years ago|reply
Unionisation would help. We don't do ourselves any favours by not unionising.
Almost all job security and employment rights were won by unions and strike action. No wonder unions are a dirty word—according to corporate America.
Even when the jobs can't be saved, employment rights are helpful. The Google? Microsoft? announcement basically said, we've already fired some of the American staff, but in other countries were are merely starting the statutory consultation process. That means a longer period of pay.
[+] [-] kybernetyk|3 years ago|reply
Investors don't get free helicopter money, thus they can't pump money into startups/tech companies thus companies have to cut the dead weight. There will be more lay offs coming - because the free money economy is currently suspended.
[+] [-] verdverm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blanb|3 years ago|reply
They have burned so much cash making an average ORM. First in Scala. Then in Rust. For what benefit over just TypeScript? None.
Just impossible to debug and a total pain to contribute to for JS devs.
When this company dies so to will the ORM. No one else is going to maintain this thing.
[+] [-] puika|3 years ago|reply
Using the ORM means I'm tied to this mess of an abstraction, migrations and scripts that require so many workarounds and experimentation to make it worthwhile when your app is not a simple CRUD or you want performance optimizations without ending up writing your own queries yet again. The generated TS API is the only pleasant feature, but doing things the Prisma way I noticed my app is now tied to this ecosystem and its quirks and I dread it. Being unable to check generated queries' SQL beforehand is also a huge issue that is not getting solved any time soon from what I've gathered on their github.
You could also use Prisma as a SQL client and leverage their data proxy, without needing to use the ORM and execute SQL migrations and queries directly, which is what I intend to do from now on. Please do let me know if there are any other generic alternatives database-wise (for "the edge"), I miss raw [Postgre]SQL. Supabase's client is the closest I can think of and it also generates types from your db, but it's obviously not a generic solution.
Lastly, one particular thing that disgusts me (I believe it's not on Prisma but due to how the edge works) is that you cannot use a local database for development. Perhaps ngrok will work, but then you'd need to constantly update your data proxy project settings manually - I need to experiment more on that.
[+] [-] satvikpendem|3 years ago|reply
https://github.com/Brendonovich/prisma-client-rust
[+] [-] beardedman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] figassis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwayyy479087|3 years ago|reply
In some ways we’re all consultants
[+] [-] simplotek|3 years ago|reply
Do you really need to make an effort to figure out why employees feel slighted for being fired without notice, and specially by an employer whose profitability is not questioned?
You made it sound like only unreasonable people would be bothered by being forced out of a job while having rent/mortgage and bills to pay.
[+] [-] hsn915|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benjaminwootton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davnicwil|3 years ago|reply
It's also a bit more abstracted on the 'data' side too. They offer a web interface, Prisma Studio, that abstracts over the physical database actually being used to allow you to do CRUD on the data. I think this is pretty useful.
In my mind (no connection to the company or knowledge beyond being a user) the business to be found there is in being the aggregation and intermediation layer of databases of different services, accessible to people with and without technical skills, in a uniform way.
[+] [-] f6v|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saos|3 years ago|reply
> Severance pay: All departing team members will receive one month of additional pay per year of service, plus the payout of any accrued PTO.
Compared to other companies. This is worst I’ve seen
[+] [-] bottlepalm|3 years ago|reply
This is why we gravitate towards more stable platforms like .Net for big important projects, but their current client/server stack is not very good (Blazor)
[+] [-] throwaway230122|3 years ago|reply
One wonders how related those are.
At a minimum, I suspect there were some GTM folks working pretty hard on the launch the last few weeks who 3 days later are out of a job…
[0] https://www.prisma.io/data-platform/accelerate
[+] [-] revskill|3 years ago|reply
I found it's kinda like an "asshole" behaviour, because it tricks people into illusion of a "one tool to do it all". The reality is not, far from truth.
[+] [-] KyeRussell|3 years ago|reply
I had to find the gaping holes myself in a way that a typical open-source project would tend to be more up-front about.
[+] [-] varsketiz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|3 years ago|reply
When they take responsibility they don't admit wrongdoing or remorse, they simply explain what they did and probably expect a pat on the back. CEO's and workers have different responsibilities.
If you think that people shouldn't be fired in hired at whim, that's why employment are for. If you think that you are being wronged, that's why there are worker rights.
It's easy to say that Europe or UK are socialist in a booming market. As it might turn out, maybe they have a point.
[+] [-] qudat|3 years ago|reply
I’m indifferent tbh, leadership and investors can do what they want, but “taking full responsibility” is not the same as “feeling bad about firing colleagues”
[+] [-] pcthrowaway|3 years ago|reply
I suspect I'd be looking for another job if this was me.
Or conversely, why is every other company giving a minimum of 2 months of severance?
[+] [-] PuppyTailWags|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nemo44x|3 years ago|reply
Why this word and why is everyone using it? It’s not only CEOs and HR but on LinkedIn I see many people referring to themselves as “impacted” and open to word, etc.
Is there a word for this type of memetic term suddenly being used everywhere as a substitute for previous words? Wasn’t “downsized” the word like 20 years ago?