Brilliance, kindness, and respect - Senior Software Developer Adobe Employee Review

5.0
Sep 24, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

My colleagues are out-of-this-world technically skilled, but are almost universally humble and generous with their time. The company's response to COVID has been both humane (giving us company-wide time off on a regular basis) and customer-centered (focusing only on the priorities that'll help our users the most). When people take time off, they're truly off; on my team, we don't come back to missed Slack messages on Monday mornings (or even many weekday mornings). For the summer shutdown (a week) and winter shutdown (another week), email is truly silent as everyone takes real time away from work, and we all come back ready to go again. I get to work in extremely technically advanced spaces while keeping time for myself and my family, and am ecstatic to have landed at a company that supports both.

Cons

It's a big company, so things can move slowly; the focus on robustness means that you're unlikely to start working in the latest-and-greatest UI frameworks or to integrate exciting betas of third-party products. Adobe makes up for this by being fast on hardware adoption, though – the products have got to work on a variety of chips for extremely advanced levels of work (hardware demos often show off how well a new machine runs Adobe editing software), so the research teams get to skate out ahead of the rest of us.

Explore other reviews about Adobe

5.0
Jun 21, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great work life balance here

Cons

Leadership executive changes makes future vision unsure

4.0
Jun 16, 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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