Adobe – “There are still lots of opportunities to do great things 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.)