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Apollo Layoffs

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Re: Apollo Layoffs

#161

Post by bruce511 »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #105
johnvanommen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got hired by a place, and my first paycheck bounced. The owners are now billionaires. (They sold the company to a Fortune 100 about 18 months later.)

Employers are by dollar amount the biggest actual thieves by far in the US. Business owners ought to generally receive more scorn and critical evaluation than common property thieves who represent a thin fragment, if we really care about theft

Doubtless for some cohort of employers you are correct.

Unfortunately your statement is painted with a wide brush, covering everyone from Jeff at Amazon to the owner of a corner grocery store. Everything from profitable FAANGs, to VC funded startups with hypergrowth ambitions, to small, finally profitable, boot-strapped endeavours.

Clearly among that group there are some who have embraced late-stage capitalism, who are milking their custoners and employees at every turn.

However, I would suggest, that many more have spent a life-time working harder, with less income security, doing what it takes in good times and bad. Looking after employees, treating them, and customers, fairly.

If after all this time they become well compensated, perhaps even rich, calling them "theives" belies the effort, and sacrifice, to reach that place.

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#162

Post by mardifoufs »

satvikpendem wrote: post #118
carrja99 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Elon is about to drop his next banger, New York Times Best Seller: "Twitter 2.0 or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved the Mythical Man Month"

But...he's doing the opposite, he laid everyone off. If anything I think that should be encouraged, I remember Whatsapp had less than a hundred employees when they were bought for billions, same as Instagram. I feel like we should encourage embracing the maximum productivity per person rather than throwing more people, since as they said, it doesn't necessarily work.

Why should layoffs be encouraged though? Even if a corporation is bloated, I don't see why we should care if we aren't investors. It can even lead to cool stuff for everyone else, such as more open source tools and software that can usually be contributed by those "bloat" teams

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#163

Post by wahnfrieden »

bruce511 wrote: post #161
wahnfrieden wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employers are by dollar amount the biggest actual thieves by far in the US. Business owners ought to generally receive more scorn and critical evaluation than common property thieves who represent a thin fragment, if we really care about theft

Doubtless for some cohort of employers you are correct. Unfortunately your statement is painted with a wide brush, covering everyone from Jeff at Amazon to the owner of a corner grocery store. Everything from profitable FAANGs, to VC funded startups with hypergrowth ambitions, to small, finally profitable, boot-strapped endeavours. Clearly among that group there are some who have embraced late-stage capitalism, who a…

To respond briefly, [Jeff at] Amazon has been convicted of being one of the leading wage thieves, and small business owners like the corner grocery store are also frequently accused and caught for wage theft. It is a pretty wide brush that's needed to evaluate the majority category of theft in the US.

I haven't mentioned anything about the effort or value employers provide. I don't think hard work from owners is relevant to the amount they thieve. And I wonder why you don't mention anything about the hard work provided by the labor who are victims to the largest category of theft, who by definition do the majority of the work obligated in business to begin with.

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#164

Post by amrocha »

ibejoeb wrote: post #95
amrocha wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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 th…

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.

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#165

Post by userbinator »

jackson1442 wrote: post #8

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

you can keep all your equipment

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.

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#166

Post by dymk »

userbinator wrote: post #165
jackson1442 wrote: post #8

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

you can keep all your equipment 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.

Obviously they’re going to wipe the laptops

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#167

Post by suchire »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #139
lfittl wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "$300 mental health" seems odd - for any kind of counseling/therapy/etc sessions this is a drop in the bucket in terms of cost. It will easily cost 10x to work with a mental health professional (and insurance companies sadly pay a very small amount of it). So why add this to an otherwise reasonable package?

Why was this downvoted? You raised an important issue. Does this mean the health plan has terrible mental health coverage? I guess so. (It would be great if someone who works for Apollo care share details about your mental health coverage.) 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.…

At least for Kaiser Permanente in the SF Bay Area, which is one of the biggest healthcare providers, they are notoriously bad at covering and providing mental health services

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#168

Post by voidfunc »

dymk wrote: post #166
userbinator wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can keep all your equipment 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.

Obviously they’re going to wipe the laptops

Hopefully their IT department does that, because if not, I wouldn't expect less technology savvy former employees to go through the trouble.

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#169

Post by treelanko »

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

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#170

Post by kristopolous »

quonn wrote: post #48
tshaddox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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.

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.

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