Avid aquire Euphonix...more control surfaces

[Snarf]

I can`t code for sh#t: But I use the software and make a mean cup of coffee. And I just want to know what`s happening to my investment. :P

[O.G. Killa]

Originally Posted by Max Gutnik

Like most technology companies, Avid has development teams all over the world. Despite this, the majority of critical development for Pro Tools is done in Daly City. To say otherwise is patently false.

That said, we are currently hiring more developers in our Daly City location, so if you know any uber-talented software engineers interested in working on Pro Tools in the Bay Area, please be sure to let us know.

Hi Max, thanks for joining the discussion!

With CA unemployment rate at 12.6% in march... I think you could probably throw a rock just about anywhere in the bay area and hit a software engineer looking for work.

But... it is interesting to see what you are looking for...

https://www.avid.com/US/careers/search-jobs

Req ID 3892BR
Title: Engineering Manager - Continuous Integration Team Lead

The Avid Pro Tools development group is
seeking a strong Engineering Manager at its
Daly City location. The successful candidate
will lead a medium sized team with members
in both Daly City and Kiev, Ukraine.
Responsibilities include coordination with
leaders across the organization to establish
modern best practices for software
engineering, creating and maintaining a
backlog of improvements to technology
infrastructure to implement those best
practices, and mentorship and stewardship
for 5-8 direct reports. In addition, this team
is expected to provide leadership and
guidance for the engineering organization as
a whole. This role requires the ability to work
across organizational and geographical
boundaries, the ability to evangelize and
train best-practice skills, excellent
communication skills, and excellent
judgment and leadership ability.

and

https://www.avid.com/US/careers/search-jobs

Req ID: 3932BR
Title: Pro Tools Software Engineer

The Avid Pro Tools development group is seeking a talented and enthusiastic junior software engineer at its Daly City location. The successful candidate will join a medium sized team with members in both Daly City and Kiev, Ukraine. Responsibilities will include software development and maintenance of features for Pro Tools the next generation of Avid audio products.

So now while I'm sure you can officially say that critical development of Pro tools is done in Daily City... Up To This Point! What about 2 months from now, or a year from now? And what is defined as the "critical" parts of development. Would it be thinking up an idea? or would you call it telling someone else to make that idea happen? Or would you call it the actual finger to keyboard writing of the code to make the idea happen? Or would you call it QA? It's hard to say what part of the development process would be the "critical" part, no?

Also... in searching the avid jobsite for jobs in Ukraine I can't find any... Global Logic anyone? Opening an office for development in a specific country is great, but call a spade a spade here. Outsourcing development to an "offshore & outsourced software product application design & development firm" is completely different. The way these "firms" operate is on a supply and demand basis. That is how they can offer such drastically cheaper rates.

Say you have a big push to release a new product, the firm allocates 50 software engineers to the development. Once the initial release is finished, 40 of those 50 software engineers get moved over to develop a different product for a different company. The next big software push your company has, they bring 40 guys back onto the project to help the 10 that stayed around... BUT!!! the 40 guys are usually not the same 40 that worked on the last project release. A few might be, but statistically speaking the odds of getting the same exact group of guys is almost impossible. So now you have these other guys that don't really know what they are looking at trying to follow the instructions given to them by the parent company and the project "team leaders" (the core 10 engineers) within the firm.

I'm sorry, looking back on my post it might seem as though I'm coming across as if I'm against outsourcing development resources overseas. I'm not entirely against it. Having worked at a software company myself, I understand the value in outsourcing certain aspects of development and support. When I worked at Dragon Systems we looked into the very same thing since we had to develop language specific software for dialects around the world... what we eventually found out... it can create more chaos than productivity, as I'm sure you guys have been finding out for the last 6 months or so. Eventually you will realize that certain aspects can be farmed out... But most need to stay in-house.

Anyway, my big problem isn't with the outsourcing, it's the timing. It was a smooth transition to outsource Avid/Pinnacle's development work because the software was fairly stable at that time. Protools on the other hand could have benefited from waiting for another year or so before outsourcing as much as you have.

I have no doubt that certain aspects of Protools have been developed overseas for years now, I'm not doubting that at all. I know the AIR team was all from overseas and they did a great job... but their development tasks weren't on the main fork of the PT code.

If this were the Digi of a year or two ago things like the ADC bug in PTHD or the midi note opt+drag bug would have been fixed in a CS release by now, and we probably would have had a few more point releases and a few more CS fix releases of PT8. It's not like PT8 just came out in Jan2010 or anything. I mean, it's been out for a while now. Here's a press release of the release of PT8...

http://www3.digidesign.com/index.cfm...629&langid=100

Look at the date... Dec 17th, 2008!!!!!!!!!


Anyway, back to your comment about development outside of digi being "patently false"...

A Digi engineer wrote this in Oct 2009 about working for Avid/Digi...

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Dig...ews-E27661.htm

Digidesign Software Engineer in Daly City, CA: (Current Employee)
“Recent second round of layoffs, most people demoralized.”

Pros:
Great products, amazing people (whats left of them), good holiday package, interesting work.

Cons:
Off shoring train wreck in progress.
Low pay.
People demoralized by layoffs.
Fear of project cancellations.

Advice to Senior Management:
You need to find some vision or move on. Reducing costs without investing in high growth technology is a recipe for fail.

Need I say more?

[Max Gutnik]

Originally Posted by O.G. Killa

Need I say more?

You said quite a lot! I appreciate your passion, Derek, but none of it changes the fact that the majority of critical development happens in Daly City. That said, we have some very talented engineers all over the world that are just as passionate about Pro Tools as those of us here, and we're very happy to have them doing the good work that they do.

[tamasdragon]

All in all, I really cannot understand the anger, and disbelief towards the software engineers in Kiev, etc.
This area (eastern europe) suffers from many things, but we have many very bright minds in coding here.

[O.G. Killa]

Originally Posted by tamasdragon

All in all, I really cannot understand the anger, and disbelief towards the software engineers in Kiev, etc.
This area (eastern europe) suffers from many things, but we have many very bright minds in coding here.

It's not a anger or disbelief in their abilities. I'm sure they are going to be AMAZING... in time. And that is the problem I have... the time... and timing...

Think of it this way... You have a Mazda RX7. Very cool car in that it uses a very unique Wankel rotary engine. As Mazda, have a few mechanical engineers that have been working on this car and these engines for 10 years or so, designing the car and upgrading it along the way.

You finally decide, "hey, Mazda needs a face lift, let's tear the RX7 apart and rebuild it from the ground up again and make improvements to nearly every part of the car, including the engine!" Great!!! Your engineers go to work and start developing the next generation. Then right as you are about to roll out the first production model... you fire your entire development staff except for one guy who kind of knows a little bit about everything in the car, but isn't an expert in any one area of the car.

Then you tell him, we are going to use german engineers (formerly from BMW) to fix any problems with the car from this point forward. They will work on it in germany, and you will be liason and manager of them through skype.

Germany is known for making great cars and great engines, and BMW especially. But you can't tell me guys who have spent the last 10 or 20 years working on BMW inline 6 cylinder and BMW V8 and V10 twin turbo powered engines are going to be able to sit down, look at a rotary engine and in 2 minutes understand how it works inside and out and fix any and all problems that arise... all why doing the entirety of their communications throw the web.

Yes, the Germany mechanical engineers are brilliant and they will, given the time to get to know the rotary engine, do things with it that others never even thought of before and refine it to a level never achieved to this point... BUT!!! in the meantime the RX7 is dead in the water while the German mechanical engineers learn about the inner workings of the RX7, learn it's systems, design strategies, its layout, etc.

The same thing happens in software companies when they outsource. It's not that the engineers working at these outsourced companies are inferior, it's quite the contrary. Usually they are the most brilliant minds and that i why the outsourcing company tries aggressively to hire them instead of them moving to the US to look for work. But, even the most brilliant mind needs time to sit down and understand what is going on before trying to fix or change anything. And in a lot of ways, the smarter you are, the more you understand just how important it is to sit down and understand what you are looking at before you start changing things.

And this is why in almost a year and a half, we've only had TWO small point releases of PT8 (PT 8.0.1 and 8.0.3) and two CS releases for 8.0.3.

My problem isn't the skills...it's the timing, timing, timing. Avid, in switching to this model in the middle of a huge product overhaul and rollout has basically crippled the software for the last year and a half.

Most likely within the next six months, as positions get filled and developers in Kiev and Daly City start to understand all the innerworkings of the code under the hood of PT8, we will start to see fixes and point releases pick up.

But, an Audio DAW is NOT an online financial backend. It's not that easy to outsource. Kirk Arnold may have had an easy time outsourcing development efforts of Fidelity's online software interfacing and banking software... but audio engines and the complexity of running a DAW with third party applications, sync'ing to picture, and midi and being sample accurate is a lot more involved and proprietary than banking software best practices.

And it's one of those things where upper management looked at other industries hoping to draw parallels to their own. And hey, their Executive VP and COO has done this before at other companies... It'll be a breeze... "Standard operating procedure" (To quote Office Space). But she/they clearly didn't understand the technology and dramatically misjudged the ramp up time for outsourcing.

And so we've been stuck with a dilapidated PT8 since Dec of 2008. And that is my problem with the outsourcing. Doesn't matter if they are doing it Kiev, Mumbai, or Hong Kong... The fact is doing it WHEN THEY DID crippled the development of the software and it has yet to fully recover and move forward. Not to mention they let go of most of the people that understood the proprietary parts of digi's technology in order to hire people for much cheaper who don't understand the proprietary parts of Digi's technology and have to learn it from scratch.

You get what you pay for. They may have been bitching that they have to pay someone $100K to work on Protools here in the US, when they can hire someone overseas to do the same job for $50K. Great!!! But... the person charging $100K can do the work in 1/3rd the time because they are already up to speed with the technology while the $50K guy is going to have a learning curve and end up costing $150K in the end when looking at time spent.

It's the same thing with sound engineering. Some producers look at a very experienced sound engineer and say, "why would I hire him for $100 an hour when I can get this brilliant young kid fresh out of school for $25 an hour to do the same job..." But then half way through the project the producer realizes it takes the kid 8 hours to do what the experienced sound engineer can do in two hours... and then it doesn't really seem like a savings anymore when the studio they are sitting in is also $150 an hour.

[JasonO.]

I would love to see more audio control surfaces out of this venture and a Euphonix more integrated with Pro Tools makes me quiver. But Euphonix doesn't only make audio controllers anymore. And what they do make may be more valuable to AVID:

http://www.euphonix.com/artist/news/index.php?id=30

Buy out the competition and let the ICON rule? Oh, and get a great contoller for color correction.....

Jason