Pros

The products are great. Flexible time off. Fellow employees are great. What's left of the culture is great. Proximity to decent food.

Cons

After recent layoff anouncements the company is in shock and I'm not sure it will quickly recover. Location in Daly City. The review process keeps changing, and is rarely followed anyway.

Advice to Senior Management

The latest rounds of communication are only making the employee moral sink lower. I used to love working there, but now I get depressed as soon as I enter the doors.

Pros

Great people. Great product. Amazing challenges. Can be very stimulating place for people looking for a good challenge after a boring position.

Cons

Extraordinary pressure put on pro-video engineering. Senior management absolutely careless about employees life. You must be available 24hrs/7days a week in case something goes wrong with customer systems. Escalation process is totally broken, support staff needs to be restaffed and retrained and engineers must compensate in the mean time. Engineers are tired and tension can be felt.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more respectful about the key engineers. They are leaving the boat if you didn't notice already.

Pros

I came to Digidesign, lured by the glimmer of the presige the name carries outside the company. It still feels like a rockstar gig when dealing with outside people in the music business.

Cons

What a bait and switch. Past the veneer, Avid (as it is now known) is a company on the brink. Upper management (Gary Greenfield and his cronies) are piloting it straight into the ground, ignoring the 'pull up!' sirens. Experienced and crucial employees are tossed away like trash, absolutely baffling decisions with regards to company direction are made, and as you would expect morale is a puddle on the floor. As employees, we are regularly lied to about the state of the company...all while upper management is busy awarding themselves bonuses and "Additional Moving Expenses" to the tune of $300,000. There won't be much left by the time they've completed their stated plan of moving 50% of the workforce overseas into the hands of people who have never worked with audio in their entire life. Run, don't walk away from this company.

Advice to Senior Management

Start treating your employees like they have some dignity and worth. Offshoring has already shown it's hand...a Full House of failure. Enjoy your golden parachutes.

Pros

All engineers have nice offices with quite working conditions. Employees at audio portions of the company are very passionate about the technology and music in general. Most employees are users of the hardware and software that they create.

Cons

Over the past 18 months, the executive management has been cutting costs mostly by laying off US workers and moving jobs to Kiev. Over 50% of the company will be overseas very soon.

When the video and audio engineering groups work together on projects, the efforts are dysfunctional at best and completely adversarial at worse.

In the process of the outsourcing, executive management has completely demoralized the employees. There has been a voluntary mass exodus of engineers which has caused significant brain drain from the company.

Many key engineering contributors have left the company carrying their knowledge with them. The remaining engineers are left to figure out how to build, maintain, and resolve bugs in the software.

Advice to Senior Management

Top executives should listen to and work with their employees in helping implement off-shoring. The current plan of forcing engineers to shift key technologies off-shore to engineers with no domain expertise is only driving away US engineers.

Pros

Great technology, great engineering teams with tremendous skills and industry understanding. The bottom rungs of this company have what it takes. The basic IP is still valid. The opportunity in the marketplace can be lost, and Avid is no longer a leader, but its still in the game.

Cons

Board flushed the CEO on down to just above the director level, and replaced with folks without any industry understanding or experience. Embraced the wrong internal messages from the remaining ladder climbers and have already paid a high price; then reversed direction again. The marketplace moves forward while products and resource direction flips and flops in MA.

Advice to Senior Management

Board should seek industry expertise to replace layers of business only, M&A, and operations focused management team. Skip looking at middle management within, and either seek direction from the "makers" level, or find it outside. Current death spiral can still be avoided, but not without Avid finding its central value proposition again.

Pros

Avid Technology used to have good products, and the support of the user community. It acquired some very good companies.

Cons

Avid management have completely wasted their market position and screwed many of their employees. They started with some of the most innovative products out there, but squandered their market capital with bad decisions and disrespect for their employees. The upper management lies and misrepresents to everyone inside and outside the company. They are outsourcing everything they possibly can--manufacturing, engineering, test, HR, sales. Most of the great engineers that built the products have left or been fired. They don't seem to have a strategy all all except for cutting costs. Meanwhile the CEO and other top level management in the corporate headquarters and at the divisions are milking the company for all they can, while at the same time destroying it.

Advice to Senior Management

Resign.

Pros

flexibility, challenging problems, good co-workers

Cons

support for new projects was minimal

Advice to Senior Management

software is entering a new era - software needs to be highly integrated with the web and must monitor and track usage patterns and release updates constantly

Pros

Avid is generally a great place to work with many challenges facing its employees. It has some great products and is in a challenging industry. Product lines span from leading video editing products such as Media Composer to leading audio production products such as Protools.

Cons

Company is going through a plethora of changes and is losing some great people. Change is good but right now the company has been turned upside down and most of the senior management team have no industry experience. This may work to transform some of the operation issues in the company but will most likely impact the long term strategy for the company and threatens its postion as the industry leader.

Advice to Senior Management

Ensure you retain the key employees needed for future growth and ensure the overall strategy meets the industry's requirements.

Pros

The product area is very interesting. There is a lot of very sophisticated and complex technology in use. Avid does not scrimp on developer tools. Your co-workers will be extremely smart and for the most part personable. Line management is very good and tend to be good people. The people there (staff and lower management) are some of the best around anywhere. Turnover has been very low, the company is full of veterans. You can learn a lot.

Cons

Unfortunately the company is moving heavily into overseas outsourcing, they have deals with pretty much any country which is doing outsourcing. There is little to no job security after two rounds of quarterly layoffs with more layoffs expected next quarter. The cubicles are noisy, dirty and dingy, office furniture is broken down, old and stained. Frankly disgusting actually.

Advice to Senior Management

It is your employees and their hard work who will dig the company out of its hole if permitted to. Don't forget who built the company and who can save it. Rank and file engineers are not the people who caused these problems, they have long known where the problems are and were not permitted to solve them. Laying off experienced staff and hiring cheap overseas contractors with no domain knowledge and no personal commitment to the success of the company will spell its doom, not its salvation.

Pros

Interesting product lines make Avid appear to be a exciting place to work. Co-workers are friendly and knowledgeable people. Avid headquarters campus is nestled in a nice, verdant office park surrounded by trees and a small pond.

Cons

Where to begin? Avid has been in a downward spiral for the past 4 or 5 years. Mid-level and Senior management always believed that the company was on the right track, despite massive evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, ignorance towards competitors and a staggeringly slow ability to change the company's direction has dug Avid into a hole from which it may never get out of.

New senior management has been brought in (e.g., the CEO) whose only job is simply try and make the company profitable again. That goal will be achieved by selling off business units and pushing layoffs (both of which have already happened) until Avid is a mere shell of it's former self.

Morale is quite low, perhaps due to the fact that the Avid campus headquarters can be a dingy, depressing place. Cast-off, obsolete equipment litter the hallways and most conference rooms are full of broken or breaking chairs and tables. The main roadway and parking lots are full of potholes, making the drive thru the office park a slalom experience. It's not a place that engenders a sense of pride and hard work when going to work each day.

Advice to Senior Management

Your competition is hot on your heels and will soon pass you. Making money "by any means possible" is a rotten tactic and will undoubtedly cost many loyal employees their jobs. Hire smart, capable management and take a very close look at what's happening down in the trenches.

Oh, and clean the joint up, willya?