Apollo Graph Reviews
48% would recommend to a friend
(49 total reviews)
Geoff Schmidt
46% approve of CEO
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Found 49 of over 51 reviews
Updated Sep 13, 2023
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Top Review Highlights by Sentiment
Excerpts from user reviews, not authored by Glassdoor
- "Great people to work with, all really smart and driven not to mention humble and nice" (in 12 reviews)
- "This is to offset the potential curse of 'unlimited time off' resulting in folks not taking any time off" (in 3 reviews)
Ratings by Demographics
This rating reflects the overall rating of Apollo Graph and is not affected by filters.
- 5.0Jun 2, 2023Engineering ManagerCurrent Employee
Pros
* Growth mindset: company processes and comms are always being refined by upper management in response to feedback * Highly transparent: financial numbers and AMAs with the founders are done regularly * Exciting tech: Apollo is solving heretofore unsolved problems for developers and platform owners * My colleagues are extremely talented and extremely nice. This is a rare combination
Cons
* Company is still iterating on key aspects of its commercial strategy and product approach, which is a source of uncertainty
1 - 2.0Aug 31, 2023Customer Success EngineerFormer Employee, more than 1 year
Pros
Great people Decent pay WFH Good product
Cons
Being a Startup is not an excuse for lack of leadership. Lying to employees (a capital sin) Managers do not listen, mentor or provide any useful guidance, they come up with new processes they can't even do or understand themselves Mid management and upper management are not on the same page and tend to argue on team calls. The workload I ended up handling was 2x what was discussed when I joined The promotion process is dependent on perception and not on KPIs nor job description/expectations
7 - 3.0Aug 3, 2023Senior Software EngineerCurrent Employee, less than 1 year
Pros
Lot of smart kind people to work with, flexible work schedule and time off. The folks here are passionate about what they do.
Cons
Culture comes from the top, but for a 200+ company there seems to be a lack of that. The culture is just emphasis on sale sale, sale, which I get as a saas company that would be the focus, but makes us feel like soulless robots. Leadership is consistently reactive in their company strategy vs building a strategic roadmap so the teams feel the whiplash. There is still an issue with collaboration even at a company at this scale.
2 - 2.0Jan 28, 2023Anonymous EmployeeFormer Employee, less than 1 year
Pros
- GraphQL solves a lot of fundamental problems - but you can also use it all for free if you want to make the effort yourself and not pay Apollo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ - There are many very amazing and talented people that still work here even after the layoffs - The HR team seems to really care and is doing their best to mitigate the lack of executive leadership experience - The pay was competitive but the overall benefits package for a company of this size is pretty poor. - They interview very well, almost too well, as they laid off ~50 people in December due to over staffing.
Cons
- Founder Syndrome + Floundering on product strategy = a bad case of Flounders Syndrome which made it very hard to understand the direction of the company. - The executive leadership team lacks the experience to scale a company to this size. - They also unfortunately lack the humility to realize their limitations. - There is a ton of micro management and mitigations in place as Apollo's executive leadership lacks trust in their employees. - It's hard to believe the executive leadership team thought it was a good idea to scale the company 2.5x in 2023 then brag about, then layoff 50 people, claiming the macro economy as the problem. It just show the lack of experience in scaling a startup.
8 - 5.0Mar 14, 2023SalesCurrent Employee, more than 1 year
Pros
The company has a bold vision, which, if executed, has the potential to meaningfully transform and industry and make everyone very successful along the way. Early growth is promising and the road map and vision feel aligned to continue the current success. The remote work culture is great. I feel connected to my team, yet enabled to do my work in the way I am most effective; lots of flexibility.
Cons
Typical startup growing pains. Some gaps in key leadership roles. Turnover in existing leadership (most healthy). Beyond that, The macro environment is hard, that's led to some tough pivots. Some previous hypotheses on who our buyers are and what they care about were either wrong or have since evolved. The silver lining is I have been impressed with the company's ability to pivot and align on effective new directions.
3 - 5.0May 19, 2023Enterprise AECurrent Employee, more than 1 year
Pros
-Sales leadership is the best you will find anywhere -Product is world-class and you will work with incredible companies -Licensing strategy and ability to retain customers YoY makes for large upside in year 2 -Ability to course correct. We neglected the commercial offering and suffered churn and layoffs as a result. Leadership has been working tirelessly to understand what customers want to see in our Enterprise offering and have refocused our entire org, roadmap, and strategy to improve GTM motion. The impact has been immediate and churn is starting to stabilize.
Cons
-The open source to enterprise motion is a difficult one. Frontline managers have carried a bag at Apollo and will get you through it, but don't expect to blow out your W2 until Year 2 or beyond
1 - 1.0Sep 13, 2023Sales ExecutiveFormer Employee, more than 1 year
Pros
Liked selling the product and the problems it solved.
Cons
Terrible Exec Management from the top down. Especially Sales Management. They have created a toxic sales environment.
4 - 1.0Jan 17, 2023Senior Software EngineerCurrent Employee, more than 1 year
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.
12 - 1.0Aug 5, 2023SalesFormer Employee, less than 1 year
Pros
Some of the people made working here bearable
Cons
Worst career move I had ever made. The culture is toxic and it comes from the top. The GTM strategy has failed and they are still trying to sort that out. None of the sales people are hitting quota. GraphQL has a strong following but the product differentiation from open source to the enterprise product is muddy. Stay away.
3 - 1.0Jul 12, 2023GTMCurrent Employee, less than 1 year
Pros
Scaled the GTM team way to fast without understanding the actual territories/product market fit - nowhere near enough customers to keep the sales team healthy and most can get away with leveraging how much has been open-sourced Leadership fails to realize the situation and most of the sales org has been set up to fail
Cons
Biggest mistake that I have made in my career
2
Apollo Graph Reviews FAQs
Apollo Graph has an overall rating of 3.0 out of 5, based on over 51 reviews left anonymously by employees. 48% of employees would recommend working at Apollo Graph to a friend and 39% have a positive outlook for the business. This rating has decreased by -37% over the last 12 months.
48% of Apollo Graph employees would recommend working there to a friend based on Glassdoor reviews. Employees also rated Apollo Graph 3.1 out of 5 for work life balance, 3.0 for culture and values and 3.1 for career opportunities.
According to reviews on Glassdoor, employees commonly mention the pros of working at Apollo Graph to be career development, senior leadership, benefits and the cons to be compensation, management.
