Wolf in sheep’s clothing - Senior Software Engineer Apollo GraphQL Employee Review

1.0
Jan 17, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Talented engineers, great people to work with. Generally decent place to work if you choose open source tooling (rust/typescript).

Cons

Horrible engineering planning. Tackles way too many things at once and puts their best engineers on projects with incredibly tight deadlines with no thought given to longer term engineering resources. The product is incomprehensible to outsiders and impossible to onboard onto, the value the company provides is given away for free via open source and what they charge for is legitimately garbage. Re-orgs happen so fast without any thought given to the actual domains of work that need to get done that individual engineers are often left to their own devices and teams lack cohesion. This of course leads to sloppy work, a bad product, and leaves what would be stellar employees in a state of perpetual burnout. Also, they talk a big game on diversity and inclusion, but the layoffs (they promised wouldn’t happen but did the day before holiday break) disproportionately affected underrepresented groups. (9/17 employees let go in product and engineering were women, and we did not have a 50/50 gender distribution prior to the layoffs). No 401k matching, pays under market rate.

Explore other reviews about Apollo GraphQL

5.0
Sep 21, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- good work/life balance if you put boundaries in place - decent pay - high autonomy - great coworkers - interesting problems

Cons

- work/life balance can easily go awry if you're not diligent - uncertainty across the industry about AI also means directional shifts

3.0
Jun 1, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

worked with a lot of great people

Cons

No clear path for growth/advancement, at least in my position

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