By my last year at Avid everything had changed. Most of the people I have worked with are now gone and I fear that my friends that are left will not be far behind. there were many changes which some of which were good intentions but when the latest upper Management (lead by Gary Greenfield) took over, everything went south. That is the nicest possible way I can put it. From the time he started as CEO and and instituted his "friends and family plan" to fill other top management positions, people started getting canned almost immediately. I estimate that as of this post they've let go 60 percent of employees and have outsourced most if not all their software technical support.
There is currently nowhere to move up or over to so you're just stuck doing whatever position you're hired to do. They seem listen to neither customers nor employees. They talk so heavily on customer service yet support reps get grilled about taking full ownership of cases from start to finish, and not having more than around a dozen cases open at a time so that all customers will get exceptional service while 10 min later when they are at their desks trying to do just that, so many calls get backed up that management grills them to take as many calls as possible so customers don't have top wait on the line. So, what happens is some reps take as many cases as they can handle and still provide good service and others just take as many calls as they can and end up having tons of open cases they'll never be able to get back to everyone or provide equally excellent customer service. I was in that boat and it didn't matter which of these 2 ways you chose to handle your day, you got reamed either way. All very knowledgeable
Ireps but put in a no win situation. It was no better in any other department.
Besides this and the constant fear of layoffs we were consistently told we were not making money and were operating in the red but things looked hopeful and their strategy for success was working. However we all had to take furloughs, for a while they dropped the 401K matching, they changed the health insurance plans to something extremely sub-par to what we had. Most of all their spending on beautification of the company killed any since of logic. If my memory serves me the year before last we were told we would not have a big presence at NAB due to our limited budgets. The next year in the middle of layoffs and the like, while having them reducing employee benefits they spent hundreds of thousands on a new logo (which I hear was a ripoff of a logo for a video/audio company in Europe) and a massive presence at that years NAB. Then we hear we were going to move to a lavish campus where employees would work at desk custom made by the top designers in Boston and sit in $1,500 chairs. Yet again, still stating at the same time we don't have money so we're going to let more people go.
Gary Greenfield is rumored to have been brought in to turn the company so as to show a profit so Avid can be then sold to the highest bidder. I can't say that that is actually true, but looking through his work experience and the way he and his team have been running things, it is extremely hard to discount.
When all is said and done, and they are gone, if there is still an Avid, I will be first in line with my resume. I wish everyone still left the best of luck.
