Thanks to my friends at Adobe

My last day at Adobe was April 3rd. I am very fortunate to have worked at one of the best places to work during a phenomenally successful time as the company moved from packaged desktop software to a combination of software and services built as a whole.

I had the chance to work on interesting projects. Most of my time at Adobe was working on Brackets, one of the top 20 starred projects on GitHub. I got to work with smart and dedicated people on a project that people love, how great is that? The project underwent many changes while I was there, and the growth was unbelievable.

Most recently, I was the tech lead for a new, as-yet-unreleased project. One thing that I think Adobe does really well is that it gives people many opportunities for career development. I have been a manager at other companies before, but I am enjoying being hands-on at this point. Even so, Adobe provided a path for me to be promoted (thanks to my managers for supporting me in that!). I had many opportunities for success, despite being a remote worker.

There are pluses and minuses to working at a big company. The scale of what Adobe does can be breathtaking. I attended two MAXes (the creativity conference that highlights Adobe’s creative software) and two Tech Summits (an internal conference that brings together technologists from all over the company). These events are huge and well-run, and I enjoyed being on the program committee for the most recent Tech Summit.

Adobe’s scale enables it to create products that do things that no others do, and the pace of innovation is quite something to watch. I mentioned that there are downsides to big companies, and feeling like you don’t know what’s going on in other parts of the organization is one of those downsides. That’s a genuinely hard problem and people do work hard toward spreading information as well as possible.

By this point, you might be thinking “if Adobe’s so great, why did you leave?” I did not go hunting for a new job, but I came across an opportunity that I just couldn’t pass up. That’s a topic for another blog post. I have no reservations about recommending Adobe as an awesome place to work and to all of the people that made my time at Adobe special: thank you!