Ability To Make Things Better or Worse For Millions Of Customers
Pros
Adobe provides an amazing opportunity to create software that millions of people around the world use every day to make their own business work - that fact continues to amaze and motivate me and many people I work with. Lots of people I have spoken to who have left Adobe to pursue other opportunities seem to then want to come back, partly because of that opportunity to reach so many people. More generally it's also a company that pays well compared to many of the other tech companies, and has great benefits. It's also a company stuffed with talented and clever people which makes it a great environment to work in.
Cons
Every couple of months our middle to upper management tell us that the company needs to take some kind of new direction. There is often an air of 'Oh, last month's plan was created by someone who was an idiot, but THIS plan is really the one that will save us'. Then plan then inevitably changes yet again a month later. This means that it's very difficult to create and grow products or teams that become sustainable and meaningful. Likewise for middle to upper management, seemingly the ONLY thing that matters is strategy, or 'the slide deck'. Little time is spend understanding or driving real execution. It seems to many that our executives believe that execution is something that the magical pixies do with when they've gone home. All these frequent changes have led to an environment where everything is a drama, everything is needed yesterday, and asking or even expecting people to work crazy hours is considered the normal. Even worse, success is measured in terms of movement, and NOT the actual outcome.
