See Y'all Later

Hi all,

Some of you may not know me, some of you may. I’m Pete, I’m a senior frontend engineer on the growth activation team and I’ve been with Apollo for a little over two years. I’ve had the extreme pleasure to get to work with the best teammates I’ve ever worked with.

With that being said, I shared in my last letter where I shared that I am leaving Apollo. I knew that it would get around but I really didn’t understand how much it would resonate with people. My intentions were so that once I left Apollo, people wouldn’t try to send me a DM and realize that I was gone. I have learned coworkers were gone that way and it truly is a horrible feeling, I wanted to give some pre-emptive closure.

Truthfully, I stopped writing code the week that I put in my notice because I knew that code was the least valuable thing I could do with my final time. I set out on a journey to invest in the people I knew would take what I had to say to heart. In these past 3 weeks, I have talked more than I have in the past 3 months. I actually had to go to the doctor because my chest was hurting and she said “Peter, the diagnosis is you talk too much”. Well, good thing I still have health insurance cause I already knew that.

After 40+ hours of conversations with people, I can surmise my advice into 10 bullets:

1. Trust your instinct and your conviction
2. Don’t be afraid to go against the grain
3. The most effective way to make change is through incrementality
4. Consider that the metrics you are tracking may end up be harmful even if it’s not immediately apparent
5. AI is a company-wide effort because by default, AI looks at all context given to us and as such, be very considerate of the foundation that you set. Invest in quality early on or you’ll never be able to clean up the mess.
6. Don’t be afraid to try out things that aren’t on your team’s roadmap
7. Performance based incentive structures don’t always account for the inherent human self-serving bias
8. You don’t have to be a robot at work - I built my reputation at Apollo through emojis
9. You’ll never be satisfied with your work if you need external validation to feel good about it
10. Nothing worth having comes easy

I’ll always be thankful for my time at Apollo, it was without a doubt the most transformative time of not only my career but my life. The real growth engineering I did at Apollo was learning how to lead, how to delegate, how to be selfless, how to follow my gut, find what is important in my life and most importantly what happens when you don’t put yourself first.

Y’all got this.

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See y’all later,

Peter Kincaid