Great products & solutions but poor management tier - Anonymous employee Adobe Employee Review

2.0
Feb 4, 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Product & people: Adobe has some really great products and solutions together with a bunch of really capable people delivering solutions for the customer. The team is diverse, multi-disciplinary and bring a wealth of experience from different backgrounds. Remuneration: Competitive salary. Definitely above average when you come in. Bonuses are tied to company performance and utilisation. Utilisation being the dominant factor. The role that you perform in the project plays no part. Culture: Depends on which products and solutions you work with. The team members are generally very supportive, helping and cooperative. There is great banter amongst the team and in general you feel welcomed Sales: Amazing sales people…. Period. They are all capable of selling snow to an Eskimo!

Cons

Growth: If you are not in sales; let's say in consulting, then I am afraid, you are nothing more than a resource who simply exists to drive revenue. This approach is openly communicated by the management. Their expectation is for consultants to get into long term engagements and look to extend by any means possible to drive revenue. This is expectation is regardless of a consultant's experience, skills and ambitions or at what level they were brought in to do the job in the first place. Basically, if you are on a project, forget about growth. Stay put, make money and stop wanting things! If you are in consulting then there is no career path; especially if you come in at a pretty senior level to begin with. On the contrary, life is totally different for the sales organisation. Net pay rises simply do not exist in consulting unless you are being promoted from a junior level to senior. Training: There is a training budget but in reality, nobody utilises this. All requests for training either internal or external will be met with "maybe we can organise an internal enablement session within the team" or simply a "no". Within Adobe, there is an internal multi-solution architect training programme which most senior consultants will naturally aspire to. This is an intensive programme and management expectation is that this is done totally off the back of your own time. Basically, for six months you will have no weekends or evenings. At the end of it, there is no official title change, effective pay rise, a real certificate. You guessed it, the only difference is that you bring in more revenue for the company. Management: There is no transparency in decision making by the management. It's a blackbox! Check-in and feedback process is a complete farce and is a compliance pretence. There is a pseudo management structure which distances the real management tier even further. Seriously good managers/leads are just a handful. A recent re-organisation of the team to make them more cross functional has hindered; not helped. Talent team: The recruitment team in the UK is the worst I have seen in my career so far. They are ineffective, inefficient and incapable. Adobe's on-boarding process also requires huge amount of improvement to bring it in line with some of the other big organisations.

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Pros

Awesome manager, work life balance, great pay, good food

Cons

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4.0
Jun 16, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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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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