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

2.0
4 Feb 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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5.0
8 June 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.

3.0
8 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great opportunity to learn from incredibly smart people, many opportunities to continue education, great for independent workers, not so for entry

Cons

Upper management forgets that first line managers need training. You need a thick skin to survive them

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