Avid Technology Reviews

Pros

Multi cultural team, highly professional individial contributors within engineering and at commercial positions. Most employees are using the products as cutter, artists. cool products, cool customers, market leader, great sales channel network

Cons

Arrogant manner of the management. No recognition of the employees' performance at all. No performance / goals reviews with the employees. "almost annual" lay offs with no clear strategy afterwards how the remaining employees to cope with the increasing scope of responsibilities. Continually wrong sales figures reporting with impact on sales commissions, partner rebate payments and so on...

Advice to Senior Management

employee retention plan needed, avid is loosing its employees.

Pros

The level of enthusiasm, commitment and knowledge of the people on the ground is truly amazing.
Great products, particularly Pro Tools and Media Composer.
Salary and benefits.

Cons

The entire Executive team.
Expected to do more and more with less and less.
Increasing lack of empowerment and control amongst staff.
Constantly changing organizational structure.

Advice to Senior Management

Shareholders - unless you intend to run this company into the ground so you can sell it off and make a tidy profit, you need to replace the Executive team.

Over the last few years there have been so many changes in leadership (particularly in Sales & Marketing) and organizational structure that the staff on the ground barely have a clue as to what their roles are and how they integrate with every other departments. New VPs will bring in their own 'people' from their previous companies who have no clue at all about the audio or video, but probably hold an MBA and did great work in an IT environment. The company is way too top heavy even after continued and repeated feedback from staff that there is too much management and not enough "real" people to do the work. Trying to get a simple answer or decision made sometime involved 10, 20 people on a call or email thread where everyone had an opinion but no-one dared stick their neck out and say "we're doing it this way" for fear of reprisals. All decision making and control on a local level was increasingly taken back to Corporate. Senior Directors and VPs would get the boot with zero announcement or communication sent even around the local offices leaving staff wondering what the hell happened.

Ultimately the things that made the separate companies (Avid [video], Digidesign, M-Audio, Sibelius, Pinnacle etc.) great places to work have been slowly eroded over the last 3 years. These separate companies were not only staffed but managed with people who came from the respective industries and totally understood the needs of the customer, and the kind of staff required to support that. Avid as they are today are just another corporate entity being bled dry in every respect - financial, knowledge, creativity. An absolute shame. It's cliched to speak about "the good old days" and change is of course inevitable but having experienced how good working in the audio and video industries can be, I can safely say that Avid now is the polar opposite. Can't really give any advice to the leaders, I think it's past the tipping point. Advice to staff - plan your exit strategies now.

Pros

Flexible work arrangements are great, if you manager supports the idea (most do!). Avid has no problem letting employees work from home during bad weather. There are some great, smart people working there and colleagues are very willing to help each other out. The facility is very nice and near the highway/shopping/restaurants. There are many creative/musically inclined employees, which makes for a nice work environment... the company encourages art/music amongst employees, but could leverage this much more.

Cons

Management keeps employees at a distance, interacting with them very little - I can't over emphasize how much of a negative impact this has at Avid (can we just get a 'good morning'?). The lack of engagement in teams is discouraging to employees and stifles creativity, innovation, and intiative. With layoff after layoff, employees are more and more depressed - good people are being let go and so-so managers are left beind. The medical benefits are changing to a complicated structure in 2012....something to investigate carefully upon an offer.

Advice to Senior Management

Engage employees: this isn't done by newsletters, you need a certain type of person in mangerial roles who actually has the ability to roll up his/her sleeves and pitch in. Directors in many depts shouldn't be just figureheads in meetings... this makes them out of touch with reality. Find employees who are INNOVATIVE, ENERGIZE others, and are GREAT REPRESENTATIVES of what should be a creative/young company and PROMOTE them!

Pros

For those who hail from or who fully understand the space/industry Avid is in, the products and the customers are amazing. Many of the people still left at Avid were once customers themselves and have their finger on the pulse with staying ahead of the curve when it comes to evolving the products.

Cons

Everything else! Over the past few years, there has been an enormous shift in senior management that CONTINUES to keep shifting and changing. No sooner is a new VP of Marketing or Sales brought in and they proceed to uproot the organization structure below them coupled with senseless layoffs, a new regime comes in and uproots the whole scene all over again. Throughout the uprooting process, the "VP's du jour" (yes, your time is limited and count your short days, VP's) have no grasp on the industry. They apply their Marketing or Sales 101 "best practices" that don't necessarily to our business, our customers, our products. Given the Creative space that Avid hails from and help created, it's a crying shame to see VP's of Marketing and Sales (and other areas) coming from generic high tech companies or WORSE, financial services firms. A VP of Marketing at Avid should not have a background in investment banking! That's what it's come to and they apply their cookie cutter ways and methodologies that are doing our customers and talented employees a major disservice. The arrogance is staggering. Rather than coming into Avid (not to mention the industry) in a somewhat humble fashion, the senior management team (VP's, Directors) are like bulls in a china shop and immediately pretend they know what to do to solve supposed problems. They proceed to restructure, make reductions in force, restructure again and leave everyone left standing absolutely clueless. Word to the wise --- Avid's senior management/executive team is so clueless and ignorant that all individual contributors are set up to fail. They place in in shambles and the majority of employees who have endured YEARS of roller coaster change (like patient champions) are finally saying "see ya" as things are at an all time low (and understatement). The most recent reduction in force in an absolute joke. People were let go and deemed "redundant" even though everyone was firing on all cylinders to keep up the charge., Since the redundancies, Senior Management promised to everyone "we're going to do less - but we're going to do it better". Insulting to say the least. Those left behind are doing more (thanks to the reduction in force) and we're doing it worse than ever due to not enough time in a day!

Advice to Senior Management

Advise to the Board of Directors....employees assume you are looking to dissolve Avid and sell the company off in bits and pieces. It's been rumored for years, it's the buzz throughout the industry right now thanks to the mess you've allowed to happen internally and the stock is another telling factor. Otherwise, start paying attention, carefully investigate the qualifications of the senior management team, where they come from, what their industry experience is and their approval rating by their employees or risk losing the human infrastructure that continues to keep this company afloat. The word on the street is that Avid is going DOWN DOWN DOWN. if that's not intentional design by the BOD, then you best start making some changes at the TOP versus letting the top make changes which continuously prove to be horrible decisions, detrimental to morale and continue to add confusion overall within the company making it impossible for anyone to put their best foot forward which ultimately wastes everyone's time and your money!

Pros

Co-workers are enthusiasts.
People working at Avid want to make their customers more successful.

Cons

Senior management does not have a vision that they could share with the employees.
Senior management believes in outsorcing but is not giving us the infrastructure and travel budget to do it right.
Senior management believes in listening to customers but does not empower teams to create the products customers wanted.

Advice to Senior Management

1) Have a vision. It's so easy guys. This is what your employees want to believe in if you would let them: "Avid creates the best media workflows in the industry. With every product you buy we provide an Avid-advantage-workflow making our customers more productive".
2) Trust you employees. Stop controlling everything we do. Empower your employees and let them make decission. We know what our customers want.
3) Stop travelling - you and all management guys - and give your travel budget to those who develop the products.

Pros

Talented people (what is left) great products. Investment in technology infrastructure once solid.

Cons

Upper management is running this company into the ground. The decisions are ridiculous and don't make sense from a financial, moral, tactical, and lack business sense all together. Parts of the business that were progressive were dismantled, while leaving no plan for how the lights stay on.

Advice to Senior Management

Find a new management team fast.

Pros

Regular pay check, until you are laid off without warning, leaving more work to those left. Medical insurance.

Cons

Experience is so terrible I don't know where to begin. Management has no clue about video business.

Advice to Senior Management

Actually treat employees as you say rather than giving lip service to "you are our most valuable resource".

Pros

We make great products for dynamic, creative people. I used to be proud to call this place my workplace.

Cons

The executives are completely out of touch with the people who do the work. I think the last big layoff was the last straw for a lot of us. We are left with huge holes in the organization, and a million VPs who don't have a clue. Almost everyone here used to actually work in Audio or Video. Now the only thing that seems to matter is if you live in Burlington. The heart and soul of Avid is gone, or is at least on LinkedIn.

Pros

Avid has a history of industry-leading products and people on the ground who are genuinely competent and dedicated. Engineers, product managers, and ground-level sales people do this because they love it. Employees have bands, do freelance video work on the side, and plainly love being involved in media.

Cons

Avid's completely incompetent upper management and woefully self-deluding reporting structure have lead to a company that continues to lie to itself about its potential and effectiveness, all while circling the drain. If you want a lesson in how to destroy an engineering company, Avid over the last few years is a great example.

Most importantly for engineers, a great deal of their time is spent managing the incompetence of outsourced engineers, often resulting in incomplete work or inept engineering. Managers who have escalated reported concerns have been demoted or fired, resulting in a layer of middle management that dangerously underplays the negative impact of an unsuccessful outsourcing strategy. Much more time is spent on process, planning, and correction than on actual engineering.

This may seem typical for the software/hardware industry, but believe those who say that Avid is an anomalous extreme. Over several tech companies of varying size, I've never encountered any company as genuinely broken as Avid. I would only recommend this company to someone I absolutely hated.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop lying to your employees on a semi-annual basis, and stop lying to shareholders. Nobody within the Avid organization believes a word said by any executive, and the annual exodus of post-layoff employees fleeing to saner companies should have served as a wake up call a few years ago. Perhaps you think you can replace competent, experienced engineers with incompetent contract labor, but this mediocrity is reflected in the product line and, more importantly, continually dwindling sales and revenue.

The best thing the executive staff could do for Avid? Quit. Leave. Never, ever, participate in our industry again.

Pros

salary and benefits package were excellent

Cons

Poor leadership. The company was doing so much better before they employed this group of muppets to increase revenue and cut costs