Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apollo Layoffs

apollographql.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 219 posts

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#191

Post by jpgvm »

satvikpendem wrote: post #186
jpgvm wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on no-code stuff at Glide. Specifically building our infrastructure to support millions of customer tables. :)

Nice. Relatedly, as someone who has a few years of experience, how does one become a principal engineer? Anything I should know or do to get to that level?

I think most important aspect is experience, the second most important would be leadership. There is little point being a principal engineer if the intuition and experience you can bring to bear aren't embraced by your team so the soft skills definitely count. The role generally encompasses tasks that go beyond writing code, architecture being the most crucial (and technical) but you will also be expected to take part in hiring, making strategical and tactical decisions, etc.

Generally you get there through a senior or staff engineering role where you can demonstrate the technical and leadership aspects. I would focus on mentoring your more junior engineers and taking part in force multiplying efforts, i.e tooling, processes etc.

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#192

Post by ngcc_hk »

shubb wrote: post #189
nonethewiser wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Severance is common in high paying tech jobs. Severance is not common in general. Almost 60% of US workers are hourly and most of them don't get severance. A lot of the other 40% dont either. https://www.workstream.us/blog/hourly-vs-salaried-jobs-benef...

Severance as in a 'voluntary' payment by employers is a US thing that I don't understand. Do you mind explaining why it gets paid at all? In the UK, it's common for employers to have contractual obligation to pay a notice period, and for longer term employees they are legally obliged to be firing them on capacity or redundancy grounds - so it is common to pay some severance in order to pay the employee to resign them…

Thought there are 0 hour job as well in Uk. But Uk at least have universal health care.

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#193

Post by SlickStef11 »

benatkin wrote: post #112
alexchamberlain wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of Facebook, Apollo is _the_ GraphQL company, with innovations in the federation space in particular.

Why use GraphQL? There is tRPC now.

Gonna put this article I read earlier this week in here to answer your question: https://wundergraph.com/blog/trpc_vs_graphql

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#194

Post by Self-Perfection »

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...

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#195

Post by dancrumb »

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.…

It's worth noting that a lot of therapists (especially solo or small-practice therapists) don't take any insurance at all, which makes visits de facto out-of-network.

Folks on an HDHP or who don't get through their deductible most years would probably end up spending most, if not all, of this out of pocket. Even if they would get something back they have to do all the dealing with the insurer.. and that's assuming that they understand superbills and all the BS that insurance companies make you wade through...

In short, $300 just clears all of this out of the way. You go; you get reimbursed for the visit; you get to decide what to do next.

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#196

Post by dventimihasura »

satvikpendem wrote: post #180
reducesuffering wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, https://github.com/urql-graphql/urql is considered the improved re-architected project that doesn't contain the legacy baggage from the beginning of GraphQL like Apollo does.

Urql client is great, however for the backend, Apollo Server really can't be beat, at least for a NodeJS backend.

Rubbish. For the backend, Apollo Server absolutely can be beat by tools that don't require you to write any code:

https://supabase.com/blog/pg-graphql

https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/

https://hasura.io/

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#197

Post by dventimihasura »

nonethewiser wrote: post #146
andrewingram wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And for the server? What do you use instead of Apollo?

https://supabase.com/blog/pg-graphql

https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/

https://hasura.io/

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#198

Post by andrewingram »

dventimihasura wrote: post #197
nonethewiser wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for the server? What do you use instead of Apollo?

https://supabase.com/blog/pg-graphql https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/ https://hasura.io/

Personally I wouldn’t advocate for these as I don’t believe it’s a good idea to automatically generate a GraphQL schema based on your database (I haven’t worked on anything in years where this would’ve been a good idea). But YMMV as always.

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#199

Post by satvikpendem »

jpgvm wrote: post #191
satvikpendem wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. Relatedly, as someone who has a few years of experience, how does one become a principal engineer? Anything I should know or do to get to that level?

I think most important aspect is experience, the second most important would be leadership. There is little point being a principal engineer if the intuition and experience you can bring to bear aren't embraced by your team so the soft skills definitely count. The role generally encompasses tasks that go beyond writing code, architecture being the most crucial (and technical) but you will also be expected to take par…

Appreciate the answer, thanks.

Re: Apollo Layoffs

#200

Post by dventimihasura »

andrewingram wrote: post #198
dventimihasura wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://supabase.com/blog/pg-graphql https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/ https://hasura.io/

Personally I wouldn’t advocate for these as I don’t believe it’s a good idea to automatically generate a GraphQL schema based on your database (I haven’t worked on anything in years where this would’ve been a good idea). But YMMV as always.

Can you give reasons for why you believe that?
Post reply on HN