Adobe Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Talented Professional People. Great benefits and Timeoff.

Cons – The company has become extremely conservative with the economic downturn which means, less interesting projects, less follow through on existing projects, pull back in investments in multiple key areas.

Advice to Senior Management – Be less of a follower and go after real innovation. Commit to new products and markets and win them. Don't just go after products after the competitors have already won the market.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Great people, great benefits (both fixed and variable) and tend to pay more than similar competitors in the software industry.

Cons – The company tends to acquire expertise rather than develop it's people so advancement/growth opportunities are increasingly limited. After numerous acquisitions the result is a bunch of warring fiefdoms all competing for relevance. Seems that upper management is struggling to find their way. They lack a compelling vision and commitment and instead are placing competing bets in an attempt to satisfy shareholders though successive acquisitions of a less profitable companies.

Advice to Senior Management – Take stock of your company's strengths and market opportunities. Synthesize them into a compelling vision for your company. I worked at Adobe when the founders ran the company and there is nothing as invigorating as committed and visionary leadership. Internally, the company seems increasingly fragmented and rudderless.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Great compensation, good benefits too. Benefits include generous profit sharing and access to local deals on retail and services. Technology is OK.

Cons – Yesterdays news in many ways. The technology is limited to their cloistered family of products. Repeated claims of product expansion haven't made it past prototype phase, which is frustrating and stifles compensation via stock.

Advice to Senior Management – Start behaving like a tech company. Small-minded decisions and outsourcing of internal system software makes it hard to work there. Recent migrations of products to "low cost geographies" creates a retention issue, because of the fear employees have for their job security.

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Excellent benefits, opportunities to learn and grow, many teams have excellent leadership,

Cons – High level of dissatisfaction and attrition from the sales organization. The management drives in one direction and changes course a multitude of times before seeing any rewards. Hurry up and stop with no results.

Advice to Senior Management – Reduce the internal hurdles to being successful at Adobe.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Market leader in graphics and communication software that has interesting and evolving technical solutions. There is a wealth of shared technology that enables a variety of product deployments. Deep technical and customer expertise brought to product definition and development. Pride in delivering high quality products. Collaborative work style and environment. Conservative fiscal policies and practices.

Cons – Increasing offshore product development. Numerous reductions in force.

Advice to Senior Management – Proactive expense management and predictably conservative decision making and risk taking seems to be serving us well in tough economic times.

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Good benefits. Reasonable hours. Meeting heavy culture.

Cons – Slower pace of getting things done. Some times the top down directives contribute to a feeling of a less collaborative atmosphere.

Advice to Senior Management – Take time to explore and understand the skill sets of employees.

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Great benefits such as health care, caltrain pass, vacation time, ESPP, and so on.
Big org so very slow paced if that is what you like.

Cons – No way to move up the latter.
Performance reviews completely useless since any promotion is controlled by VPs and they don't look at that: They want you to be a brown-nose.

Advice to Senior Management – Get some balls and do something instead of promoting a platform that no one uses nor cares and which has not generated any relevant revenue at all.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Other than benefits there are no good reasons to work at Adobe

Cons – No communications from leadership.
No concern for their employees (contrary to popular belief they sorta force people into saying that it is a great place to work).
No concern for what an employee does/has done.

Advice to Senior Management – Hmmmm quit?

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – Adobe is doubt one of the best places to work for. They pay well. Although there are some valid concerns about the new "discretionary" additional time-off and bonus programs, benefits are still better than many companies. Everyday I'm surrounded by very smart people and that's helpful for professional development.

Adobe has a lot of great products, some of which are the best in their respective industry. Although I work mostly with enterprise products, I can expose myself to other products by attending developer seminars, deep dive sessions, etc. Adobe is also very transparent internally, which results in a great work environment.

Cons – The time-off and bonus programs are changing in this year and, personally, it is heading for a not so good direction. Company profit sharing is gone. PTO balance can no longer be carried over. Management says the change is to make it more flexible to use additional time-off and receive bonuses at the discretion of your manager. I believe they did this for the benefits of the share holders instead of the employees. This could seriously result in talented people leaving the company.

Advice to Senior Management – Get your priorities straight. Time to market is way too too slow on your SaaS, enterprise and mobile offerings. Maybe shift some of the resources to work on things that the market wants. Streamline your software dev methodology. Customer care is so broken. Please fix it before customers leave us. TSO organization isn't working out. Professional Services is not meant to be a profit center. Please don't try to operate like big consulting firms. TSO isn't aligned with Sales. Lastly, your employees are getting unhappy. To attract and retain talented employees, you must have good comp plans and benefits. Right now you are not heading in the right direction.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Adobe

Pros – At one time Adobe was a great innovative company. There are still some technically challenging and interesting projects to work on if you are in one of the right groups. A lot of smart people to work with and in some areas leaders in the field.

Cons – Management is perpetually confused and running back and forth with yet a new direction every other year and in the years between complete new directions they change the way that they are implementing the direction they chose last year. Employees have to be very careful of what projects they are working on when the direction changes or you'll be out the door in the (almost) annual Christmas layoff.

Benefits continue to be cut to the point that there is no longer any guaranteed paid time off but only a possibility of a couple of weeks at the discretion of your manager (no accrual, no guarantees, no liability if you leave or are laid off).

There is no consistency in promotions and a number of managers run their own little fief-doms where they implement their own promotion policies (i.e. promoting women only).

Advice to Senior Management – Choose a direction for the company and really commit to it.

Decide whether employees are a valuable asset to the company or a nuisance rather than saying they are the former and treating them like the latter.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend