I recently completed (and flunked) a full interview sequence for the Senior Mac/iOS C++ Engineer position on the Adobe Application Platform (Torque Native) team. I thought it might be useful to recap the experience for the next interview candidate.

Torque hasn’t been officially announced yet, so I can’t divulge details about Adobe’s plans. However, the Adobe Application Platform name and Torque (codename?) were made public in the job postings, so I feel safe referring to them at this point.

Unlike companies like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, where a pool of engineers from across the company interviews a particular candidate to see if they can pass rigorous technical hurdles, Adobe follows Apple’s model. At Adobe, a specific team with a specific position in mind will interview the candidate.

I had a separate interview for a different Adobe team two months prior. In that case, four engineers and one manager conducted the interview, and almost every engineer on that team asked me Google-style algorithm questions. For this Torque Native team interview, I had four interviewers: one manager and three peer engineers. Two of the engineers asked domain-specific questions (relevant to my Macintosh & iOS specialty) that I didn’t feel were out of line for the position. The last engineer asked me "brain-freezing" questions that ultimately torpedoed my candidacy.

I'm recapping some of the questions this engineer asked below, so you’ll have them in mind in case you speak with this particular team yourself.

The San Francisco location is in a former warehouse space that was beautifully renovated a few years back. They are currently renovating it again, moving from half-height cube walls towards Adobe's perceived trendy—and, in my opinion, not productive—open-plan office space. Adobe is acquiring additional buildings around their original 601 Townsend space, and their cafeteria was recently renovated and expanded to accommodate the increased population.

Unlike Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, where all cafeteria items are completely gratis, Adobe employees actually have to pay for their lunches. However, free soft drinks, fizzy water, and fruit are available in the cafeteria and in kitchens on each work floor.

Something else that was unimpressive was that Adobe recruiters are not nearly as helpful as recruiters at other big Silicon Valley companies, such as Amazon or Apple, in preparing candidates for their interviews. While the coordinator (a separate person from the recruiter) will likely send you a list of interviewer names beforehand, you won’t have any idea what the interviewers will be discussing. This makes it challenging to know what to expect when you speak with the team.

Three out of my four interviewers were friendly and collaborative; one engineer was overtly hostile.

One useful recommendation I can offer is to look up your interviewers' LinkedIn profiles to make an educated guess about their focus.

Hopefully, my experience flunking Adobe’s Torque Native engineering team interview will help you prepare for your own. If you find any of the information I post here useful, please let me know by clicking the "helpful" button below. This motivates me to be as detailed as possible in my recaps.

Good luck!

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