As of this writing, News Corp is abandoning Amplify. It's estimated that they burned a billion dollars between the purchase price, investment dollars and year-over-year losses.
A small group of Amplify executives, made incredibly wealthy by their own continually failing company, has found an outside investor to bankroll their plan to take the company private again. They will split the company into a series of much smaller, independent companies. Most of the current staff (many hundreds of people) is being laid off; those unfortunates who remain will be distributed among the sad new companies, all headquartered in Brooklyn.
The new mini-companies and their skeleton crews will then be forced to sink or swim in a very bleak landscape. The companies which don't succeed right away (whatever that means - there have never been defined goals nor a clear mission) will be ruthlessly amputated like so many necrotic limbs. Layoffs will roll in unpredictable waves.
Inevitably, the companies will need to staff up again soon, to replace the talent they are shedding today. Before you, dear reader, join one of these desperate life-rafts and find yourself clinging to the side of a sinking little boat, ask yourself: is this the right move?
Potential hires, what I'm about to say might not seem important to you, especially if you are very young, but listen closely: The leadership of this company can't run a company. They have tried since 2000; they have failed over and over. They keep getting rescued by various investors, but there's no indication that they've learned any valuable lessons, the most meaningful of which is how to make a profit. Companies can't run on free soda, daydreams and PowerPoint. They need grownups with vision and experience.
If you are a job hunter, I would advise you to avoid this company, no matter how many glowing reviews you may read here post October 2015.
When you sign up to work for a company that doesn't know what it's doing, it impacts you much longer than the time frame in which you actually work there. It impacts your entire career.
If you're a product development person - look elsewhere, nobody knows how to develop new products here, so they won't be able to teach you to do it (if you're early in your career) or support you if you actually do know what you're doing.
It's really astounding that nobody at Amplify knows how to develop or launch new products, even though that's our core business. This function should be strategically driving the entire organization; that has never been the case. There is an institutional inability to think and focus strategically.
If you're an engineer, realize you'll be nothing but a cog in a huge machine of ugly legacy code that requires constant, boring maintenance. Your opinions won't matter, and you'll enjoy none of the challenges or benefits of working in the well-established software development industry in New York. To your detriment, the technology leadership at Amplify is historically among the weakest in the company. The various CTO's in recent years have been disasters, some of them fired and escorted out of the building in broad daylight, others of them being "disappeared" like so many South American dissidents.
If you are a creative (UX designer, designer, copywriter, game guru) you should only come here if you want to stunt your creativity and stall your career.
If you are a project manager, you won't have any authority to actually make a difference.
If you're in sales, you must be nuts.
If you are a senior manager (SVP or C-level hire) you'll be signing up to be ignored in favor of a core group of the founder's cronies, who never listen to anyone else and haven't a clue what they're doing.
If you've worked with bright, motivated, organized leadership before, you will be stunned by the undeveloped culture here. In all my time at Amplify, the smartest "leaders" I encountered were under-30 "chief of staff" types hired to follow around after the most senior leaders and clean up their messes.
The regular folk I worked with, on the other hand, were unfailingly smart, dedicated, willing to tolerate a high level of dysfunction, and highly invested in the apparently impossible dream of improving K-12 education via technology.
RIP, Amplify.
