Adobe Reviews in San Jose, CA Area

Pros

Good benefits, nice office location, great peers to work with, solid products

Cons

No opportunity for career growth or promotions, innovation seems stalled, management is very risk adverse and initiatives to drive change are not support, duration of employee tenure is valued over new ideas or skills, extreme cost cutting measures over the last two years are begining to impact comapny performance

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to employees in all levels of the organization, bring in some employees with fresh skills and/or institute a job rotation program, encourage a tollerance of risk taking, reward new ideas, support change management initiatives with more than platitudes.

Pros

Good benefits, nice work life balance,telecommuting ok & great facilities

Cons

No leadership or vision for change management
Limited opportunity for advancement
Weak Middle management - very territorial
Frequent reorgs/layoff = chaos and loss of productivity

Advice to Senior Management

Cost cutting comes at a price. Your quality is suffering due to extreme cost cutting measures.
Frequent reorgs and the lack of leadership to transition into reorg has cost the company
Oh & how about innovating - new versions of CS & Acrobat can only do so much.

Pros

It is good company if you are in right team. If not, you are out of luck.
Good benefits compared to other companies in bayarea.

Cons

Pay is less compared to other companies. If you are in few teams, this is not a problem.You need to check out team before joining.

Advice to Senior Management

Make sure to improve motivation of employees. Setting up vision for company will increase stock price. Bring back bonus to employees.

Pros

Great products, smart colleagues, generous benefits (health, 401K matching, sabbatical, time off at managers' discretion - this is good if you have an understanding manager), flexible telecommuting program, a friendly, collaborative team atmosphere, pretty buildings with nice offices with doors you can shut, good corporate citizen.

Cons

Limited opportunity for advancement or professional growth. Middle management weak and scared. Too many turf wars. Powerful been-there-forever cliques. Reporting structure lame, it allows family members and romantic relationships to report to one another .Sending too many jobs to India and China, Difficult communication as teams are split up among US, India, China which weakens collaborative efforts, Annual layoffs each year ruin morale.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on innovation. Quit trying to please Wall Street at the expense of your human resources. Try to keep some jobs in the US. Focus on improving the quality of what used to be amazing products - they've become too bloated and buggy. Bring back Chuck, John and Bruce to revitalize company mission.

Pros

Laid back
Good Products
Good work/life culture

Cons

Laid Back
Bureaucratic
Not enough focus on Internet

Advice to Senior Management

More Internet Focus

Pros

Pretty good salaries and excellent benefits, very nice environment with personal office for every engineer. Work on products everybody recognizes. Almost no everyday pressure from mid-level management, with accent on overall performance.

Cons

Management chain sometimes is way too long and includes middlemen far from both engineering and decision making. Engineering job title structure is flat (it's common for Adobe to have Computer Scientists with 10+ years of experience and Senior Computer Scientists with 15-20 years) - might be a problem when you change a job.

Advice to Senior Management

Less concentrate on Flash and stop war with Apple. Do not send so many jobs to Indoa and China. Flatten the management chain.

Pros

You get to work on interesting products and technologies. If you don't like what you are doing, it is relatively easy to transfer to another group. Company has a good reputation in the marketplace. Very good benefits and amenities, including employee software purchasing, private offices, on-site post office and gym, some free food and drinks.

Cons

Benefits have been significantly cut in the last couple of years. Promotions are difficult to get. Cost-cutting measures have resulted in ridiculous bureaucracy in purchasing equipment. Layoffs are frequent. New hires are usually in China and India instead of USA. With some products there is a lack of leadership from senior management, which results in low-quality products. It is very difficult to fire incompetent people, especially managers.

Advice to Senior Management

Add a system for people to review their managers so senior management can be notified about poor managers. Instead of laying off people in the US to boost the stock price, should be investing in acquiring great talent to really mature some of our products.

Pros

Good culture, although declining. Lots of opportunity, if you are proactive and push it. Solid benefits, although declining. Excellent work/life balance, if you want it.

Cons

Sr. Management becoming much more insular. Seem to becoming more tone deaf- to wall street, to customers, and even to our own employees. Transparency- once a hallmark of Adobe, is declining. Clinging to a shrink wrap world.

Advice to Senior Management

get more aggressive about driving innovation. Stop trying to protect our shrink wrap empire at the expense of new technology that will pave the way in the next 20 years.

Pros

Smart people, Great campus, Great benefits

Cons

Feeling of Isolation, Company needs to encourage more collaboration, time and opportunities to learn, need better mobility across teams

Advice to Senior Management

Provide more opportunities for your team to innovate

Pros

I respect Adobe's management/senior leadership and believe that the company has a solid strategy for meeting the challenges of the future. Each employee's role and contribution is respected, something that is very hard to find in similar companies. Finally, while not as good as in the past, the overall benefits/compensation plans are solid.

Cons

There seem to be very little opportunities for career advancement, definitely a sense of having to "do the time." Also, the culture can sometimes feel a bit "stodgy" -- innovation/change not always embraced.

Advice to Senior Management

Consider stronger paths to career management/advancement