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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Pros

all good things considered to work here

Cons

often times, it can feel pretty boring

4.0
16 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

* Refreshing focus on employee wellness * Brilliant colleagues * Compelling problems on interesting tools * Good work/life balance culture... generally (see cons) I've been at a few big tech companies and Adobe is one of my favorites. I feel empowered to make impactful changes here, I'm constantly stretching myself in fun ways, and the products we make are incredible. Product and engineering have big dreams, and all the resources we need to realize them.

Cons

* Big time crunch culture around arbitrary goals By far my biggest disappointment has been just how hard product pushes on big projects with arbitrary deadlines and difficult scope. It turns into cutting corners and delivering sub-par experiences even though we absolutely have the talent and capability to make some exceptional things if we just let the dang thing bake a few more months. I'd be more impressed with the tight clip if the goals were reasonable for good business reasons, but as far as I can tell the reason usually boils down to "some high-level manager wanted X and thought Y sounded like a good target date". * Comp growth leaves something to be desired. Raises feel pretty flat, though it's not the worst thing since stock rewards can be pretty good as appropriate for performance. Career progression is pretty good here too - I just find it odd how stale the base pay increases are year to year.

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