Amplitude reviews

Every week the poor quality of leadership shocks me. The newly hired C-suite and VP (and President) folks are toxic, and they’re mainly focused on keeping each other happy. They only want numbers that make them look good, and they can’t handle nuance or context if it extends beyond a bullet point on a slide deck. It’s common knowledge at the IC level how incompetent they are, and team resources are strained by having to make vanity decks for leadership. Leadership has no strategy; even when they grandly presented a strategy this year, it’s a handful of words with stock images. Because they don’t know what they’re doing, fear abounds: of each other, or getting it wrong, and that fear is pressed onto employees like a heavy cloud. Oh, and the micro management: leadership is blind to how much they direct tiny, daily decisions of actual subject matter experts.

Starting with the obvious, Amplitude has lost its culture. What was once a fun and fast moving company has sold its soul since going public and with the current recession. Once the stock price began to fall, the immaturity and inexperience within senior leadership began to show. While undergoing a lot of turnover, the company elected almost entirely to hire from outside rather than promote from within, especially in management. When the market started slowing down, the solution to every problem internally was increased micro-management. Amplitude is a unique and complex product which compounded issues since middle management was almost entirely made up of people who did not understand our product and had never been customer facing at Amplitude. While growing pains are to be expected, there is one inexcusable issue. At a time when CEO's of tech companies were speaking openly and honestly about market forces and the likely need for layoffs, Spencer was saying both internally and externally via interviews that the company was not in any danger of needing to do any layoffs right up until the point when they laid off a significant portion of the company. There were many who had felt the need to move on from Amplitude but elected to stay given their confidence in the strategic direction with the CEO saying that Amplitude was prepared when others were not. The CEO lied and many people who would have voluntarily found employment elsewhere found themselves on the street unemployed. This includes employees who were on leave at the time.