Adobe

Adobe has been great to work for. They work very hard to make sure that employees have the resources they need to succeed. I appreciate their aggressive moves towards diversity and pay equality, as well as supporting the communities they are in throughout the globe.

Adobe is a very large company, and that means that things move slower (career-wise) than they would in a small company. It suffers from the same thing that many Silicon Valley companies suffer from: if you want to progress your career, it is faster and more effective to leave the company than to work your way through the internal bureaucracy.

I have watched so many great people leave due to the lack of promotion and mobility within the engineering groups. Any engineer that wants a promotion is much better served by looking outside of Adobe than by trying to work with their manager within.

It is also clear that a resume from outside of Adobe carries much more weight than achievements within Adobe. So many managers weigh "2 years with Amazon" higher than "5 years with Adobe." That either means that Amazon hires better people than Adobe, or management does not have enough faith in their own engineering department.