Adobe Culture

The first thing to realize about Adobe is that it is not a single company, it is a series of acquisitions. Most of Adobe’s products were incubated outside the company: Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker (InDesign), DreamWeaver, Flash, Premiere, and a myriad others were all through acquisitions of outside companies and products. Other than Postscript, Fonts and Acrobat, just about everything came from somewhere else.

San Jose is 3 primary towers (and a few out-buildings), and they're building a 4th bigger tower. But figure a 150 people to a floor (x 12 floors x 3 buildings): a product is often a floor or three, with an HR floor, Legal Floor, IT floors, Finance, etc. It's pretty modularized. That means that some products decorated and even laid out their floors, their way. Kind of the same way they run their teams. SF offices have fewer and bigger floors, but you still get clustering by area. And that's just the ones that are on main campuses. If you're an acquisition that has buildings in another geography (Seattle, Salt Lake City, Austin, Denver, Boston, Minnesota, NYC, Hamburg, Romania, or one of the India Offices), you're even more "on your own".

What that means there’s no pure "Adobe culture", there’s a lot of different histories and cultures and teams, that have to woven together. And thus, anything that’s true for one team, might not be true in another. And that gets down to the tools they use, the way they code and interact, the policies they choose to follow, and what’s tolerable behavior. There are some overarching Adobe'isms and values (in theory). But generally, the VP of the product, is beholden up to the EVP of the BU, and the teams below run according to that VP's quirks/style/history.