Good company being ruined by bad managers - Anonymous employee Adobe Employee Review

3.0
23 Feb 2019
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Competitive Salary - Shares are roaring for past 7 years - Nice office campus - Free food - Employee share purchase plan - Wellness reimbursement - Work life balance depends on teams, mostly good

Cons

Managers - Most of the engineering managers who have spent more than a decade in the company, act like just delegators without any other technical contribution. - Play politics throughout the year and promote the interests of their favorites ( who give status to him/her and poses forceful presence in meetings which may happen 24x7 because of global teams). - Get the real work done by new comers (here you will remain a new comer until you spend over 4 years) and give the real credit to the engineers having big titles who rarely code / design and think of mentoring (playing politics) as their only responsibility other than attending waste status meetings. - Good appraisal / promotion are mostly political decisions. Engineers with big titles - Rarely code / design. - Are out dated in tech space. - Always play safe or I should say safest- Upgrade / re-write something when any dependency is about to go end of life in next 12 months. - Are always eager to get on some long term projects with very little technical challenge. This gives them ticket to good appraisal/ promotion for longer period of time. - Are very much behind in technology and always want to push juniors to use decade old frameworks, libraries, and tools so that they can still understand without having a habit of reading / experimenting. - Use negative code review without any references to slow you down in some cases. The only explanation they could provide is to keep similarity to rest of the code. You could discover worse kinda codebases in older teams.

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5.0
10 Jun 2026
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CEO approval
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Pros

all good things considered to work here

Cons

often times, it can feel pretty boring

5.0
8 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Awesome culture. I love going to work every day. People are really nice - exciting to be in the industry where a lot of innovation is happening - good work life balance - flexible RTO - two one-week shutdowns per year, unlimited PTO, global wellness days, great benefits

Cons

- Leadership lost its way. Missed huge opportunities in markets served by Canva and GenAI. Took the wrong bet on commercially safe models, missing out on huge opportunities that were captured by competing GenAI models. No clear strategy or vision from management about how to get back in track. Our products are losing market share every day and management seems to be lime deer in headlights, unsure what to do - Watching stock price deflating nearly every day is disheartening - Decision making is very slow. Takes ages to get things approved. - C-suite is mostly over 50 and often seem out of touch with latest AI and tech trends. Uphill battle sometimes to get them to see urgent opportunities that need to be acted on immediately - Adobe failed to organically develop major products in the last 20 years. Major recent ones; Firefly and Express; have not been successful.

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