Adobe Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Work environment(gym tt, nice field, flexible work hours), nice technical people, great facilities, encouraged to file patents, top 10% salary, great food. Good work life balance. Cutting edge technology

Cons – Internal politics, treating QA as second citizens. Poor middle management. Poor leadership quality in middle management. Trying to grab spotlight for things that you even did not do yourself. Not much importance to values. It you want to grow fast, and work with the management on goals of your own, for a QA it does not seem possible. Have patience and let them decide, when they wanna promote you. Yo u cannot take charge of your career on your own.

Advice to Senior Management – Make QA important and give it its due. QA is not good enough, is second to dev, is a self fulfilling prophecy

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Adobe (the formerly-Macromedia part, anyway) is taking the lead in rich client development. They are taking the mindshare away from Java on the client, which means more developers use what you work on, which is a good place to be. Aside from working on cool technology that actually gets used, you don't have to give up your life to do it. I feel my management is very flexible about letting me work from home as needed and sets realistic scheduling expectations. I'm also getting paid enough of a base salary to live in the SF Bay Area and the profit sharing is a nice bonus as well.

Cons – Some parts of the company are getting long in the tooth and jealous of the new kids on the block. There are two Adobe's -- the original Adobe that developed all of those fonts, PostScript, Acrobat, and Photoshop, and then there's the Adobe that used to be Macromedia. The original Adobe has a very corporate feel and the new Adobe has more of a free-wheeling, agile feel. That could be because it's younger.

Advice to Senior Management – Long-term, figure out which company Adobe is going to be, culture-wise. It seems like it wants to be the new Adobe, since Flash is getting a lot of attention as the future of the company, but upper management still feels like the older, more conservative and comfortable company.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – We work on amazing products. My friends love sharing the employee discount. Almost everyone I meet instantly recognizes what it is I work on. The people we work with are intelligent, which makes a big difference when you have to work with them day in and out. It is a big, recognizable software company that you can be proud to be a part of, while still smaller than the other big software players.

Cons – They only have a few offices, so relocating and keeping your job would be difficult. Everyone I know uses my as their personal sound board for every complaint about Photoshop, Flash, Acrobat, Updater, etc.

Advice to Senior Management – To not cut back on the things that make Abobe a great place to work, even in these times.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – work life balance so far is good.

Cons – budgeting issues may end up being a little frustrating

Advice to Senior Management – None.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Adobe has a set of great product and talent people. You have a solid base to build upon. The culture is friendly and encourages employee to have a good work/life balance. Productivity is the focus not the face-to-face hours. Benefits are good and you can enjoy low employee price of Adobe's premium products, such as creative suites, etc. San Jose office is a green building. The facility is very good. There are many video conference rooms available for you to communicate with teams across the global. Also in the San Jose office, you can access to an in-house Gym with many good equipments.

Cons – There are several downsides here. First, the core business is largely built upon traditional consumer shrink-wrapped software business model. The model is pretty much dead, threaten by free software, open source, subscription, Saas, etc. The company has not found a new growth area yet. Its enterprise product has not found a market segment after four years trying to create one. Its Saas offering faces many other players which entered this market much earlier than Adobe. Its mobile business had a touch year and future yet to be seen. Secondly, the culture emphasizes on collaboration just too much. You can easily have all day meeting without having made any decision.

Advice to Senior Management – Emphasize on its core competency. Find a new model for consumer market. Divest the enterprise suite.

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Benefits, great software, fun environment

Cons – Can be stressful, A lot of competition

Advice to Senior Management – Keep pushing ahead

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Great products that are fun to use and develop. Outstanding buildings and amenities. Happy, friendly, down to earth, intelligent coworkers. Well respected company.

Cons – Some products are rather large and risk taking can be limited.

Advice to Senior Management – Make sure that you are helping people be successful with their jobs

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Adobe

Pros – The products and brand are excellent and there are a large number of extremely smart and nice people to work with. We built great products, we encouraged people to innovate and pursue excellence, and treated both employees and customers ethically. Our people and our customers are cool--artists, designers, developers. That is the best audience to serve (IMO). There are still lots of opportunities to do great things at Adobe.

Cons – As it has gotten larger, and more distributed globally, the layers of bureaucracy and business processes are too heavy, and the company moves slower than ideal. Senior Management has mostly (but not always) tended to be a bit conservative.

The most common complaint was that the system of title leveling and organizational design made it very difficult for people to get promoted. One should note that because of Adobe's approach, a person who might expect to be a VP at another company would likely be a Director at Adobe, and Director a Manager, and so forth. There are some benefits to this approach (the company is not littered with a million VPs who actually have little responsibility) but all in all I think it is too conservative and makes it hard for folks in the middle to move up in terms of their title without leaving the company. This was not an issue for me, but it is by far the most common complaint I heard as a manager (and I agreed with, but was unable to change.)

Advice to Senior Management – Keep the focus on building great software. Focus on recruiting rock star engineers and give small teams more autonomy. Slow and in some areas reverse the trend toward globally distributed workforce. Despite the cost advantages of places like India and China, the increased cost of communication and collaboration on speed and innovation is not worth it, 9 times out of ten. It is fine to build very mature complete products in India, but one should not be splitting teams across geographies or encouraging new product teams to use labor in a different geography. Product teams should all be (close to 100%) in shouting and walking distance of each other, not spread across multiple offices, time zones, and continents. (Not just an issue between CA and India, but also close locations such as San Jose and San Francisco.)

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – The salary at is pretty good, relative to other tech companies in the valley. The work-life balance is also very good. The brand looks great on a resume, and generally carries some clout when dealing with partners and customers. Further, you generally look cool at a party when you say you work with Adobe.

Cons – Adobe feels and operates like a much larger company than it actually is. I'm not sure if it has to do with a culture rooted in PDF and form handling, but Adobe moves in a very slow and bureaucratic fashion. Execs like to say it's a "conservative" culture --but on a day-to-day basis it just feels like I work for General Motors or some mega-corp.

Adobe's future is questionable. They continue to do a great job extracting revenue from their existing products, but have repeatedly failed to re-invent themselves or develop a new major revenue stream. At this rate they are destined to end up more like Xerox or Kodak than IBM or GE. Right now they are stuck operationally, and strategically as a packaged channel software company. This makes exploring new business models (SaaS, Enterprise, etc.) nearly impossible despite a rhetorical ethos of innovation.

Promotions are hard to come by at Adobe. They fancy themselves a very flat organization and it's nearly impossible to get promoted to Director or VP. This flat org approach means the opportunity for career advancement are very limited. It also means that Adobe has a strange hero-worship for their executives. Coming from Macromedia, where our execs were just normal people (though often very bright), this is pretty weird.

Adobe doesn't value intellect in hiring or promoting. They would much rather bring in a hired gun (castoff) from another tech company , with a mediocre resume, versus promoting or developing internal candidates of promise. This has played out time and time again, with employees leaving, and re-joining several years later in order to get a promotion. It also plays out daily in terms of work interactions, where I'm forced to deal with people that just aren't very bright.

Last off, Adobe's best asset (work-life balance) is also one of it's major drawbacks. For the most part, employees don't feel a sense of ownership or a strong desire to do the right thing for the customers or the business. There is a fairly pervasive "punch-the-clock" mentality. The "that's not my job" and "that decision is above my paygrade" attitudes are rampant throughout the company. It reminds me of when I worked in a factory full of teamsters. Punch in at 8, punch out at 5, do your job and nothing more, and do anything possible to avoid extra work. Further, if anybody expects anything of you, complain to the Union Steward.

Advice to Senior Management – Your culture is broken and you have a much bigger morale problem than you are aware of.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Adobe

Pros – The salary is competitive and I feel the company as a whole generally cares about the welfare of its employees & treats them well. The benefits are pretty good compared to all the other companies I've worked for previously. ESPP, profit sharing, Commuter Checks, software discounts (huge huge discounts on adobe software), company matching on charitable donations, telecommute. onsite fitness center (SJ office). About the only thing missing is onsite childcare benefits (though i don't have children currently)

Cons – The San Jose office is much more conservative than the SF office. This might be in part due to the older age demographic in the SJ office vs SF (I heard it was like 39 median in SJ and early 30s in SF, this was back in '07 -- i am in my mid 30s). Also, it's pretty hard to get decent pay raises once you get in...though that's the same at any large company.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep the bureaucracy thin...don't create too much process for the sake of process...the people in the trenches need to focus on work and not red tape. Also give people a chance to innovate in all areas...I left for a small startup b/c i wasn't able to innovate

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend