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Apollo Layoffs

158 points by adamkl 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rubyist5eva 4y ago
> 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.
- celtain 4y ago
  What would you prefer that they say instead? "I made no wrong decisions, I have no regrets leaving all of you unemployed."?
  - sidfthec 4y ago
    "I'll be resigning when [the board/leadership] finds a replacement." I always get massive push back when I suggest this, but it's the only remedy that makes sense. If you have to layoff 15% of the workforce when the growth was under your command, and you want to take responsibility, then step down. Own your mistake.
    - nkohari 4y ago
      That's only true if the company is better-suited to be run by someone else. CEOs are prominent, but they're still just people. A person can make mistakes and still be the best person for the job.
    - quonn 4y ago
      For startups such a step is likely to ruin the company. And in any case that founder would keep their stake in the company while not being able to influence it anymore. Doesn‘t make sense.
    - tshaddox 4y ago
      What if the board doesn't want you to quit? Surely it's better to do what's best for the company going forward rather than to broadcast your self-flagellation.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      If they're the best person to lead the company, that's what should continue to happen for the benefit of the other 85% of employees.
    - yCombLinks 4y ago
      The goal of the business isn't to maximize employment. It's to maximize profits. Getting rid of employees doesn't mean the CEO did a bad job of maximizing profits.
  - quonn 4y ago
    Perhaps instead of „responsibility“ they should said „we are to blame“ or „it is our fault“.
  - pastor_bob 4y ago
    "Have no illusions. This is a business. Somebody has to take a fall, and it's you. Best of luck, and don't buy the Koolaid at your next job."
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    “Some of you will be fired, but it’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make.”
- throwaway5752 4y ago
  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.
- Rooster61 4y ago
  > 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.
- dnissley 4y ago
  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.
  - pcurve 4y ago
    Yep. This is a strike 1 for the CEO and everyone knows it. Unless there is someone else who can do better job, it doesn't make sense for him to step down. However, I do wonder if it would appeasing to take voluntary pay cut as a more visible form of taking responsibility. Just a thought.
- bberenberg 4y ago
  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?
  - jonathankoren 4y ago
    To paraphrase Don Draper, that's what the insane CEO and founder stock grant is for!
  - throwaway98797 4y ago
    unreasonable people are unreasonable it’s clear they want people in charge to suffer, because some other powerful person hurt them in the past sad. start up founder have a lot of benefits but it comes with pain. pick your poison
  - no_wizard 4y ago
    I think this comes from the broader general fact that we have all lived through recessions (e.g. 2008 housing crisis) very differently with very different outcomes. I often view these statements with knee jerk cynicism (though I recognize it as such) because too often you read about layoffs while executives get golden parachutes. Why should the CEO get the 30 million payout to leave the failing company while everyone else gets comparative peanuts and loses their job. I can sympathize a bit with why people feel bitter about these things. I also know some business owners and people who run start ups, those who do it with integrity do have genuine feelings they have to process around this. I try to also remember that not everyone is Jack Welch.
- ibejoeb 4y ago
  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.
  - amrocha 4y ago
    "Institutions that can weather the storm" like Google? Like Facebook? Amazon? The entire industry has had layoffs, regardless of size. In fact, in my experience there's plenty of startups that are still growing and hiring the laid off talent from the big institutions. Apollo was not one of those companies, but it doesn't seem like it being a startup had any impact.
    - ibejoeb 4y ago
      Yeah. I figured an obligate contrarian was gonna gotcha me. Sometimes big companies do layoffs. I stand corrected. But, then again, the CEO does say: "we are not yet profitable: we’ve taken full advantage of outside capital to speed our growth. That was good stewardship in a time when interest rates were low and venture capital was widely available on good terms. But economic conditions have changed and we believe that it’s no longer prudent to rely on outside capital to support us" I just don't know what to make of it. It was a healthy company. > it doesn't seem like it being a startup had any impact A true mystery.
      - amrocha 4y ago
        You're statistically wrong about layoffs. Big companies have had way more layoffs than startups. Pointing that out doesn't make me a contrarian. You can admit that you were wrong instead of digging your heels in.
grumple 4y ago
> 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.
- jcoder 4y ago
  Yeah I read that part and immediately thought “tell me you’ve never read a single book on tech leadership without…”
- wolpoli 4y ago
  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.
Rooster61 4y ago
Why are software companies still grappling with the mythical man month? You'd think by now we'd have learned our lesson. More hands /= more productivity, at least on a linear scale
- tshaddox 4y ago
  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."
  - Rooster61 4y ago
    I don't think I've ever worked on or even seen a software project that wasn't in some way considered behind schedule. Very, VERY rarely are the correct number of people hired at the beginning.
  - quonn 4y ago
    But of the reasons Books gives, most apply regardless of the project being late, such as the communication overhead and the fact that splitting the project neatly is difficult.
    - tylerhou 4y ago
      Apollo is a large project with many features. I’m sure they have many teams working on relatively-self contained subcomponents.
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      Modern software projects are wildly different than OS/360. The insights from 50 years ago is fine abstractly but it has its limitations. Not only are there many more roles to fill but things like translation and QA scale pretty well. It's an adage, not a hard and fast dogma. Also it was specifically limited to when in the project people are added and often gets misremembered as some linear programming inspired exercise in optimal team configuration. The latter is obvious and useful (right size the team for the job) but IIRC, Brooks doesn't actually address it in the famed literature.
jackson1442 4y ago
Layoffs are going to suck regardless, but this is one of the best severance packages I've seen in this wave: * 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
- robofanatic 4y ago
  just curious, can one collect unemployment during severance?
  - jcadam 4y ago
    I would think not. The one time I was on UE (back in 2008), you had to report any income you received. edit: apparently in some states you can - at least in Colorado in 2008, you could not. Generally your unemployment would be reduced by the amount of income you brought in. So, in any case, severance payments from a typical tech job would far exceed UE anyway...
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    Hmm, I thought this was a good question so I looked it up. At least in my state you cannot.
  - cmh89 4y ago
    It's state by state. I know you can collect unemployment while receiving severance in Washington.
  - jrib 4y ago
    not an expert, but my understanding is it depends on how the severance is paid off. If the company keeps you on payroll and pays you weekly, then you cannot collect unemployment. If the company gives you a lump sum then you may be able to. If a condition of the severance is that you sign a document saying you are quitting instead of being fired, then you cannot collect unemployment. My understanding comes from recent googling because of similar layoffs that happened at my company. I'd welcome more informed thoughts on the matter.
detaro 4y ago
For reference, according to their current team page, 246 employees (at least 246 publicly listed ones)
- gedy 4y ago
  That's a reasonable number given their usage in the industry, imho.
  - detaro 4y ago
    Of their paid products? They all seem a bit new/still in preview/...?
- bogomipz 4y ago
  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.
Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Say the truth. 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 4y ago
  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.
akudha 4y ago
Is there a reason why these big layoffs are done just before thanksgiving, Christmas etc?
- halfway_there 4y ago
  Employers can save out on paying holiday PTO
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Depending on your jurisdiction, most countries or states require companies to treat PTO as cash and pay it out upon leaving the company. One reason why unlimited PTO is so popular, no need to pay anything out at the end.
- jcadam 4y ago
  I'm assuming to get it done before the end of the fiscal year.
  - bogomipz 4y ago
    January 1st would be calendar year though and not necessarily the fiscal year. The fiscal year can start and end any month the calendar year a company chooses. The fiscal year often does not correspond to the calendar year. See: https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-different-companies-different-fiscal-161925029.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-different-companies-different...
- minsc_and_boo 4y ago
  EOY financials, usually. If you have to do layoffs, the best time is now. The second best time is a couple weeks before financial reporting ends.
- frozenlettuce 4y ago
  End of quarter, I suppose
- __s 4y ago
trollerator23 4y ago
I have no idea what Apollo Graph QL is, but it was interesting to search by URL and see the progression of related HN titles and their engagement. 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...
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Their HN may have been ignored, but both of the last two companies I've worked with have both used Apollo.
- alexchamberlain 4y ago
  Outside of Facebook, Apollo is _the_ GraphQL company, with innovations in the federation space in particular.
  - benatkin 4y ago
    Why use GraphQL? There is tRPC now.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      I use GraphQL because my clients are not all TypeScript based. Also I don't necessarily want to write my backend in TypeScript either. My stack is therefore Rust with GraphQL with clients in React for web and Flutter for mobile.
    - reducesuffering 4y ago
      tRPC is for a single team working on Typescript frontend to Typescript backend (that's niche). If you have native mobile clients (different lang) or different teams that need to agree on a contract (GraphQL schema), GraphQL is the recommendation, even from ardent tRPC supporters.
      - 4y ago
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
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.
- quonn 4y ago
  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.
  - AtNightWeCode 4y ago
    We use GraphQL a lot for static content. Most content on modern webs should be static, or at least deterministic. What I am saying is that GraphQL should not be used at runtime to do these dynamic magic queries, which is the key feature in Apollo.
    - nawgz 4y ago
      > Most content on modern webs should be static, or at least deterministic What does this even mean? > What I am saying is that GraphQL should not be used at runtime to do these dynamic magic queries, which is the key feature in Apollo. What does this even mean? How are you defining "dynamic magic" and "deterministic content"? GraphQL sends a query to a server that resolves it into the requested data. Is it not true that if you plug this into something like PostgreSQL via Hasura, you naturally have "determinism" in the same way Postgres offers it? Please, expand, I have no idea what you're saying and I'm a full time web guy
    - canadianfella 4y ago
  - Aeolun 4y ago
pcurve 4y ago
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.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  To be honest, they said “we take full responsibility” 3 times, so it got a bit old.
- andrewingram 4y ago
  They could’ve eased off on the supergraph PR message just this once, but otherwise definitely one of the better ones I’ve read.
vault 4y ago
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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
torartc 4y ago
This company has been pretty dysfunctional since the Meteor days.
- benatkin 4y ago
  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: > Modern apps are built on the supergraph
tayo42 4y ago
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?
- lyu07282 4y ago
  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.
  - andrewingram 4y ago
    It’s arguably the least sophisticated of the major clients (Apollo, Urql, Relay), but they’ve done a great job with marketing and documentation. But I’ve personally never used it in a real project because Relay has always existed and I know how to use it.
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      And for the server? What do you use instead of Apollo?
      - andrewingram 4y ago
        Depends on language, I've build GraphQL servers in a few, though mostly JavaScript and Python. For Python I used to use Graphene, these days I use Strawberry. For JavaScript, I originally used graphql-js and express-graphql, as these were the original libraries and I was a literal day 1 adopter. All the libraries are essentially just wrappers around graphql-js, so it's still viable to use directly. But for schema-building I now use Pothos (https://pothos-graphql.dev/ https://pothos-graphql.dev/), I'd probably use graphql-helix as the http layer (https://github.com/contra/graphql-helix https://github.com/contra/graphql-helix).
plondon514 4y ago
Can someone explain how Apollo makes money? GraphQL via Apollo is essentially my default API and yet I've never sent these guys a dime.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  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.
  - jerrygenser 4y ago
    In a low interest rate environment even if you were profitable, if you could get cheap money it might have been worth it to grow vs. slow down and let other competitors get market share. Many companies that could be profitable choose to invest low cost for capital in growth
- tekdude 4y ago
  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.
hintymad 4y ago
> 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.
microtherion 4y ago
I'm showing my age; my initial reaction was "I had no idea Apollo Computer had anyone left to lay off" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer
treelanko 4y ago
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
- btrfsck 4y ago
  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.)
  - monero-xmr 4y ago
    This is called networking. You have a decade of experience and some good connections. The longer you go in any career, the higher paid you are, and the more important networking is. Don't burn bridges!
Self-Perfection 4y ago
I am flabbergasted. 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-d25f1398adc12d53b5404742a0247152.png https://www.apollographql.com/blog/static/Skylark-R-1-d25f13...

158 points by adamkl 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

> 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.

celtain 4y ago
What would you prefer that they say instead? "I made no wrong decisions, I have no regrets leaving all of you unemployed."?
- sidfthec 4y ago
  "I'll be resigning when [the board/leadership] finds a replacement." I always get massive push back when I suggest this, but it's the only remedy that makes sense. If you have to layoff 15% of the workforce when the growth was under your command, and you want to take responsibility, then step down. Own your mistake.
  - nkohari 4y ago
    That's only true if the company is better-suited to be run by someone else. CEOs are prominent, but they're still just people. A person can make mistakes and still be the best person for the job.
  - quonn 4y ago
    For startups such a step is likely to ruin the company. And in any case that founder would keep their stake in the company while not being able to influence it anymore. Doesn‘t make sense.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    What if the board doesn't want you to quit? Surely it's better to do what's best for the company going forward rather than to broadcast your self-flagellation.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If they're the best person to lead the company, that's what should continue to happen for the benefit of the other 85% of employees.
  - yCombLinks 4y ago
    The goal of the business isn't to maximize employment. It's to maximize profits. Getting rid of employees doesn't mean the CEO did a bad job of maximizing profits.
- quonn 4y ago
  Perhaps instead of „responsibility“ they should said „we are to blame“ or „it is our fault“.
- pastor_bob 4y ago
  "Have no illusions. This is a business. Somebody has to take a fall, and it's you. Best of luck, and don't buy the Koolaid at your next job."
- Aeolun 4y ago
  “Some of you will be fired, but it’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make.”
throwaway5752 4y ago
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.
Rooster61 4y ago
> 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.
dnissley 4y ago
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.
- pcurve 4y ago
  Yep. This is a strike 1 for the CEO and everyone knows it. Unless there is someone else who can do better job, it doesn't make sense for him to step down. However, I do wonder if it would appeasing to take voluntary pay cut as a more visible form of taking responsibility. Just a thought.
bberenberg 4y ago
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?
- jonathankoren 4y ago
  To paraphrase Don Draper, that's what the insane CEO and founder stock grant is for!
- throwaway98797 4y ago
  unreasonable people are unreasonable it’s clear they want people in charge to suffer, because some other powerful person hurt them in the past sad. start up founder have a lot of benefits but it comes with pain. pick your poison
- no_wizard 4y ago
  I think this comes from the broader general fact that we have all lived through recessions (e.g. 2008 housing crisis) very differently with very different outcomes. I often view these statements with knee jerk cynicism (though I recognize it as such) because too often you read about layoffs while executives get golden parachutes. Why should the CEO get the 30 million payout to leave the failing company while everyone else gets comparative peanuts and loses their job. I can sympathize a bit with why people feel bitter about these things. I also know some business owners and people who run start ups, those who do it with integrity do have genuine feelings they have to process around this. I try to also remember that not everyone is Jack Welch.
ibejoeb 4y ago
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.
- amrocha 4y ago
  "Institutions that can weather the storm" like Google? Like Facebook? Amazon? The entire industry has had layoffs, regardless of size. In fact, in my experience there's plenty of startups that are still growing and hiring the laid off talent from the big institutions. Apollo was not one of those companies, but it doesn't seem like it being a startup had any impact.
  - ibejoeb 4y ago
    Yeah. I figured an obligate contrarian was gonna gotcha me. Sometimes big companies do layoffs. I stand corrected. But, then again, the CEO does say: "we are not yet profitable: we’ve taken full advantage of outside capital to speed our growth. That was good stewardship in a time when interest rates were low and venture capital was widely available on good terms. But economic conditions have changed and we believe that it’s no longer prudent to rely on outside capital to support us" I just don't know what to make of it. It was a healthy company. > it doesn't seem like it being a startup had any impact A true mystery.
    - amrocha 4y ago
      You're statistically wrong about layoffs. Big companies have had way more layoffs than startups. Pointing that out doesn't make me a contrarian. You can admit that you were wrong instead of digging your heels in.

grumple 4y ago

> 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.

jcoder 4y ago
Yeah I read that part and immediately thought “tell me you’ve never read a single book on tech leadership without…”
wolpoli 4y ago
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.

Rooster61 4y ago

Why are software companies still grappling with the mythical man month? You'd think by now we'd have learned our lesson. More hands /= more productivity, at least on a linear scale

tshaddox 4y ago
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."
- Rooster61 4y ago
  I don't think I've ever worked on or even seen a software project that wasn't in some way considered behind schedule. Very, VERY rarely are the correct number of people hired at the beginning.
- quonn 4y ago
  But of the reasons Books gives, most apply regardless of the project being late, such as the communication overhead and the fact that splitting the project neatly is difficult.
  - tylerhou 4y ago
    Apollo is a large project with many features. I’m sure they have many teams working on relatively-self contained subcomponents.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    Modern software projects are wildly different than OS/360. The insights from 50 years ago is fine abstractly but it has its limitations. Not only are there many more roles to fill but things like translation and QA scale pretty well. It's an adage, not a hard and fast dogma. Also it was specifically limited to when in the project people are added and often gets misremembered as some linear programming inspired exercise in optimal team configuration. The latter is obvious and useful (right size the team for the job) but IIRC, Brooks doesn't actually address it in the famed literature.

jackson1442 4y ago

Layoffs are going to suck regardless, but this is one of the best severance packages I've seen in this wave: * 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

robofanatic 4y ago
just curious, can one collect unemployment during severance?
- jcadam 4y ago
  I would think not. The one time I was on UE (back in 2008), you had to report any income you received. edit: apparently in some states you can - at least in Colorado in 2008, you could not. Generally your unemployment would be reduced by the amount of income you brought in. So, in any case, severance payments from a typical tech job would far exceed UE anyway...
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Hmm, I thought this was a good question so I looked it up. At least in my state you cannot.
- cmh89 4y ago
  It's state by state. I know you can collect unemployment while receiving severance in Washington.
- jrib 4y ago
  not an expert, but my understanding is it depends on how the severance is paid off. If the company keeps you on payroll and pays you weekly, then you cannot collect unemployment. If the company gives you a lump sum then you may be able to. If a condition of the severance is that you sign a document saying you are quitting instead of being fired, then you cannot collect unemployment. My understanding comes from recent googling because of similar layoffs that happened at my company. I'd welcome more informed thoughts on the matter.

detaro 4y ago

For reference, according to their current team page, 246 employees (at least 246 publicly listed ones)

gedy 4y ago
That's a reasonable number given their usage in the industry, imho.
- detaro 4y ago
  Of their paid products? They all seem a bit new/still in preview/...?
bogomipz 4y ago
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.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago

Say the truth. 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 4y ago
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.

akudha 4y ago

Is there a reason why these big layoffs are done just before thanksgiving, Christmas etc?

halfway_there 4y ago
Employers can save out on paying holiday PTO
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Depending on your jurisdiction, most countries or states require companies to treat PTO as cash and pay it out upon leaving the company. One reason why unlimited PTO is so popular, no need to pay anything out at the end.
jcadam 4y ago
I'm assuming to get it done before the end of the fiscal year.
- bogomipz 4y ago
  January 1st would be calendar year though and not necessarily the fiscal year. The fiscal year can start and end any month the calendar year a company chooses. The fiscal year often does not correspond to the calendar year. See: https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-different-companies-different-fiscal-161925029.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-different-companies-different...
minsc_and_boo 4y ago
EOY financials, usually. If you have to do layoffs, the best time is now. The second best time is a couple weeks before financial reporting ends.
frozenlettuce 4y ago
End of quarter, I suppose
__s 4y ago

trollerator23 4y ago

I have no idea what Apollo Graph QL is, but it was interesting to search by URL and see the progression of related HN titles and their engagement. 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...

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
Their HN may have been ignored, but both of the last two companies I've worked with have both used Apollo.
alexchamberlain 4y ago
Outside of Facebook, Apollo is _the_ GraphQL company, with innovations in the federation space in particular.
- benatkin 4y ago
  Why use GraphQL? There is tRPC now.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    I use GraphQL because my clients are not all TypeScript based. Also I don't necessarily want to write my backend in TypeScript either. My stack is therefore Rust with GraphQL with clients in React for web and Flutter for mobile.
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    tRPC is for a single team working on Typescript frontend to Typescript backend (that's niche). If you have native mobile clients (different lang) or different teams that need to agree on a contract (GraphQL schema), GraphQL is the recommendation, even from ardent tRPC supporters.
    - 4y ago

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

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.

quonn 4y ago
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.
- AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  We use GraphQL a lot for static content. Most content on modern webs should be static, or at least deterministic. What I am saying is that GraphQL should not be used at runtime to do these dynamic magic queries, which is the key feature in Apollo.
  - nawgz 4y ago
    > Most content on modern webs should be static, or at least deterministic What does this even mean? > What I am saying is that GraphQL should not be used at runtime to do these dynamic magic queries, which is the key feature in Apollo. What does this even mean? How are you defining "dynamic magic" and "deterministic content"? GraphQL sends a query to a server that resolves it into the requested data. Is it not true that if you plug this into something like PostgreSQL via Hasura, you naturally have "determinism" in the same way Postgres offers it? Please, expand, I have no idea what you're saying and I'm a full time web guy
  - canadianfella 4y ago
- Aeolun 4y ago

pcurve 4y ago

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.

Aeolun 4y ago
To be honest, they said “we take full responsibility” 3 times, so it got a bit old.
andrewingram 4y ago
They could’ve eased off on the supergraph PR message just this once, but otherwise definitely one of the better ones I’ve read.

vault 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

torartc 4y ago

This company has been pretty dysfunctional since the Meteor days.

benatkin 4y ago
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: > Modern apps are built on the supergraph

tayo42 4y ago

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?

lyu07282 4y ago
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.
- andrewingram 4y ago
  It’s arguably the least sophisticated of the major clients (Apollo, Urql, Relay), but they’ve done a great job with marketing and documentation. But I’ve personally never used it in a real project because Relay has always existed and I know how to use it.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    And for the server? What do you use instead of Apollo?
    - andrewingram 4y ago
      Depends on language, I've build GraphQL servers in a few, though mostly JavaScript and Python. For Python I used to use Graphene, these days I use Strawberry. For JavaScript, I originally used graphql-js and express-graphql, as these were the original libraries and I was a literal day 1 adopter. All the libraries are essentially just wrappers around graphql-js, so it's still viable to use directly. But for schema-building I now use Pothos (https://pothos-graphql.dev/ https://pothos-graphql.dev/), I'd probably use graphql-helix as the http layer (https://github.com/contra/graphql-helix https://github.com/contra/graphql-helix).

plondon514 4y ago

Can someone explain how Apollo makes money? GraphQL via Apollo is essentially my default API and yet I've never sent these guys a dime.

satvikpendem 4y ago
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.
- jerrygenser 4y ago
  In a low interest rate environment even if you were profitable, if you could get cheap money it might have been worth it to grow vs. slow down and let other competitors get market share. Many companies that could be profitable choose to invest low cost for capital in growth
tekdude 4y ago
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.

hintymad 4y ago

> 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.

microtherion 4y ago

I'm showing my age; my initial reaction was "I had no idea Apollo Computer had anyone left to lay off" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer

treelanko 4y ago

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

btrfsck 4y ago
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.)
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  This is called networking. You have a decade of experience and some good connections. The longer you go in any career, the higher paid you are, and the more important networking is. Don't burn bridges!

Self-Perfection 4y ago

I am flabbergasted. 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-d25f1398adc12d53b5404742a0247152.png https://www.apollographql.com/blog/static/Skylark-R-1-d25f13...