I explained the other day to a friend how Prisma looks great but it's very unresponsive on Github [1], specially surprising since they raised a lot of money so I thought they'd have more resources. So he introduced me to the concept of FOSS-washing (in relation to greenwashing). Launch a cool open source piece of software, get big clients and funding thanks to it and then basically ignore Github or just dedicate enough resources to it so that it doesn't seem "dead".<p>I had seen and complained about this before here in HN, how when Github said they were sunsetting Atom for lack of engagement I pointed out that the lack of engagement was... by them, not a single commit in few years so of course there was no activity [2]<p>Edit: looking at the Github tracker now, it seems that now they use Github as the main tracking software? So there's a bunch of new issues by internal contributors with "bad description" (meaning it's probably the tip of the iceberg of an internal issue just for tracking, not the typical issue someone finds and reports), but the old ones sit there unanswered.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues/4433">https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues/4433</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31670443" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31670443</a>
I think all these layoffs really come down to haves and have nots. You don’t need prisma, to be completely honest. You do need a lot of other software, otherwise some companies that depend on it cannot operate.<p>I have tried my best over my short (just six years so far in swe, and a few years in a non tech role) career to be on teams where our work is basically in the top 1-3 annual initiatives. It guarantees I keep my job 99% because I work on the things that make money for the company. It’s not my company, so that’s my terms of employment I set for myself. Don’t work on things that push the envelope too far (moonshot), if things don’t work out you lose as an employee (granted if you’re at a big tech company layoffs don’t really mean much with 3+ month severance packages and cozy amounts of additional support).<p>If I’m on an employee vesting schedule I’m gonna make sure I win as much as I can.
Yesterday I stumbled upon this: <a href="https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/" rel="nofollow">https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-la...</a><p>Interesting read if you're recently reading about a lot of "layoffs".
It gets to the point where it's hard to even know what to say about the nth tech layoff announcement.<p>It's a good reminder, if we needed one, of how fragile the good times are, for anyone who is an ordinary professional working in an economy like this. I wish there were something more concrete we could do to support each other - like something more concrete than "sure I would recommend people from my network for jobs once we aren't in a hiring freeze."
Does this company make any money? Any at all?<p>They have burned so much cash making an average ORM. First in Scala. Then in Rust. For what benefit over just TypeScript? None.<p>Just impossible to debug and a total pain to contribute to for JS devs.<p>When this company dies so to will the ORM. No one else is going to maintain this thing.
I defaulted to Prisma for edge apps I'm experimenting with (supabase db). Given it's not possible to connect via TCP to a database and I'm stuck with JS/TS for the edge, I opted for Prisma's data proxy and henceforth Prisma.<p>Using the ORM means I'm tied to this mess of an abstraction, migrations and scripts that require so many workarounds and experimentation to make it worthwhile when your app is not a simple CRUD or you want performance optimizations without ending up writing your own queries yet again. The generated TS API is the only pleasant feature, but doing things the Prisma way I noticed my app is now tied to this ecosystem and its quirks and I dread it. Being unable to check generated queries' SQL beforehand is also a huge issue that is not getting solved any time soon from what I've gathered on their github.<p>You could also use Prisma as a SQL client and leverage their data proxy, without needing to use the ORM and execute SQL migrations and queries directly, which is what I intend to do from now on. Please do let me know if there are any other generic alternatives database-wise (for "the edge"), I miss raw [Postgre]SQL. Supabase's client is the closest I can think of and it also generates types from your db, but it's obviously not a generic solution.<p>Lastly, one particular thing that disgusts me (I believe it's not on Prisma but due to how the edge works) is that you cannot use a local database for development. Perhaps ngrok will work, but then you'd need to constantly update your data proxy project settings manually - I need to experiment more on that.
Damn, I use Prisma, it's a good way to have a unified database schema for which you can generate code in any language you want. It was very useful for converting a TypeScript project to a Rust one, I use prisma-client-rust in particular.<p><a href="https://github.com/Brendonovich/prisma-client-rust">https://github.com/Brendonovich/prisma-client-rust</a>
I'd be interested to know the age (or any other) demographic of HN'ers commenting on posts like these. Lot of people sounding very personally slighted by companies trying to remain profitable (or just in business).
I’m curious. These lay-off were inevitable… however what are people predicting will happen in 3-4 years time? Back to hiring frenzy?<p>> Severance pay: All departing team members will receive one month of additional pay per year of service, plus the payout of any accrued PTO.<p>Compared to other companies. This is worst I’ve seen
Ugg the whole node stack ecosystem is so good, but so shakey. It makes me nervous building on these foundations managed by relatively small companies - Vercel and Prisma. Who knows if one day they’ll just collapse. Also React, is Meta really committed to it?<p>This is why we gravitate towards more stable platforms like .Net for big important projects, but their current client/server stack is not very good (Blazor)
Funny timing. 3 days before this they had a major product release[0].<p>One wonders how related those are.<p>At a minimum, I suspect there were some GTM folks working pretty hard on the launch the last few weeks who 3 days later are out of a job…<p>[0] <a href="https://www.prisma.io/data-platform/accelerate" rel="nofollow">https://www.prisma.io/data-platform/accelerate</a>
The issues with "enterprise offerings", is that they never tell about their "weakness, shorcomings or disadvantages" comparing to other tools. Why ?<p>I found it's kinda like an "asshole" behaviour, because it tricks people into illusion of a "one tool to do it all". The reality is not, far from truth.
There's many comments about what does "I the take full responsibility mean" in these threads about layoffs. I'm curious - what do you think it means and should mean? I take that a company offering better severance than required by law is taking at least some responsibility.
Isn't giving only a month of severance terrible for morale of remaining team members?<p>I suspect I'd be looking for another job if this was me.<p>Or conversely, why is every other company giving a minimum of 2 months of severance?
Is the word “impact” the latest way of saying “fired” without saying it? We are seeing that particular word in nearly every note regarding these types of action.<p>Why this word and why is everyone using it? It’s not only CEOs and HR but on LinkedIn I see many people referring to themselves as “impacted” and open to word, etc.<p>Is there a word for this type of memetic term suddenly being used everywhere as a substitute for previous words? Wasn’t “downsized” the word like 20 years ago?
We're quickly approaching a tipping-point, where the now-traditional promises of wealth (or at least, wealth's <i>possibility</i>) are less plausible, and meanwhile, the inequality between winners and losers is skyrocketing.<p>I'm excited to see what contributions the tech industry's workers wind up making to the union movement. That's a whole lot of big, juicy, pissed-off brains, and a whole lotta matches.
> “those affected have already been notified via personal and work email”<p>Even for remote staff, there are many more human ways of informing someone they are out of a job than shooting an email. Am I the only one who feels that way? Is it actually better to get an email an process the blow in async? Genuinely curious as I didn’t see this comment yet.
I've used Prisma before, and I will note that there pace of feature development seemed mind numbingly slow for a company as large as they were. Entirely possible I'm missing a lot of things, but it was just a big disappointment overall.
Is there a communication strategy that recommends that the heads of companies state that they “take full responsibility”? This seems to be a common statement in the recent layoff memos, but it doesn’t appear that the C-suite ever faces substantial consequences.
Everyone wants to dog on these companies but it was just the natural result of loose monetary policy.<p>When money was cheap, you basically had to outgrow your competitors and take on as much as possible or get beat.<p>That rapidly reversed with inflation and now the game is efficiency
If I ever had to layoff a double digit number of employees, I would also layoff myself. I couldn’t in good conscience externalize the impact of my bad decisions on employees whilst leaving myself unaffected.
I don’t want to be another HN commenter saying I could build Prisma in a weekend, because I can’t. I couldn’t build Prisma in a year, in five years, in large part because I’m not smart enough.<p>But bloody hell, VC backing and that many employees? I happened to recently give Prisma a whirl, and even for my simple toy project, the holes in the client functionality do not feel consistent with my understanding of what that many people can do, even taking to account a large percentage of non-eng roles.<p>The JS ecosystem seems particularly tolerant of VC funded for-profit efforts (try saying that five times fast) holding this sort of prominence. Who remembers all the drama at npm before Microsoft bought it? The whole thing puts me into a deeply cynical, judgemental headspace. The JS ecosystem feels way more enamoured with branding, celebrity, and money, than what I am personally used to. I’m no old-timer either by any measure. There’s certainly more effort put into marketing to developers, and there’s much less of a sense of collaborative goodwill because everyone wants their piece. Either money, or this new higher standard of tech micro-celebrity.<p>Say what you want about the massive shortcomings of the previous generation/s of tech culture but at least we had a pretty good run of not letting this happen.<p>I’m too tired and worn out to have this sort of boom and bust cycle so directly implicate tooling that can have so many points of interaction with something I’m building.
> Upholding Prisma’s culture of openness and transparency<p>We will disclose the bare minimum amount that we can get away with, plus things that would end up biting us in the ass if we didn’t.