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
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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-d25f13...
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?
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.
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.
Is there a reason why these big layoffs are done just before thanksgiving, Christmas etc?
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
For reference, according to their current team page, 246 employees (at least 246 publicly listed ones)
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.
This company has been pretty dysfunctional since the Meteor days.
> 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
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