* 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
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?
When I worked in the US, my health plans had pretty good mental health coverage. You could spend 1,000s of USD per year for psychotherapy / counseling with zero-to-minor co-pays. If you required medication (prescribed by a psychiatrist), that was also well-covered with zero-to-minor co-pays. I remember specifically that mental health care had "higher coverage" because therapists were rarely part of the insurance company's network. You paid the health professional directly, then require reimbursement from health plan. (Yes, I know this isn't true for all health plans.)
To hire an experienced mental health professional in SF Bay Area, I guess the rate is 100 to 200 USD/hour. Most will have sliding scales, but that will not apply to well-paid engineers.
I see it as a coupon to try it out.
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.
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...
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.
More hands /= more productivity, at least on a linear scale
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.
I have my own distaste of "MBA Culture" but one thing I would not say is that they teach people to ignore the business and not learn it. From what I've learned, is completely orthogonal to what they teach you in any regionally accredited business school what you are asserting here.
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.
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.
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.
"Twitter 2.0 or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved the Mythical Man Month"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
If you need you consume a Graphql API you most certainly reach out for Apollo on the clientside to query data.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been assessing whether to use Apollo in a Swift iOS application. If your backend is using GraphQL then it’s almost impossible to find even a StackOverflow answer from anyone not using Apollo.
But when I tried it out, I found the package was cumbersome to use, and the generated code was over-dimensioned and inelegant, and the dependency itself pulled in other dependencies.
With bitter experience of using other packages in the past, which start out as helpful, but which end up a burden to the codebase, I decided to write some queries and mutations by hand. And it was super-simple.
I’ve personally never used Apollo stuff in prod —- there’s always been a more suitable alternative, but I’ve always appreciated their code for being quite clean. Federation is an interesting technology, but I haven’t had cause to use it yet.
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.
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...
Architecturally it seems to be adding a massive hop to requests made, but its not clear to me what the benefit is?
They also provide libraries for both the client and server so they can tell you what versions of your client are using specific data.
Also personally, I think I'd rather know about being laid off before going into the new year.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-different-companies-different...
Doing layoff before that is beneficial for employer to save on labor cost (not paying low productivity time), and employee (allows better planning)
If you have to do layoffs, the best time is now. The second best time is a couple weeks before financial reporting ends.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-companies-do-layoffs-around...
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.
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.
> Modern apps are built on the supergraph
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.
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.)
