A Sto­ried History

There are a few tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies that have been around since the ear­ly days of the mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy trans­for­ma­tion of soci­ety that essen­tial­ly start­ed with the first per­son­al com­put­ing devices devel­oped in the ear­ly 1980s. Microsoft and Apple obvi­ous­ly fall into that cat­e­go­ry, and so does Adobe. Start­ed in 1982 in founder John Warnock­’s garage, Adobe start­ed out by devel­op­ing the Post­Script lan­guage, which was the first tru­ly inter­na­tion­al stan­dard for com­put­er print­ers. Thanks in large part to Steve Jobs attempt to buy the com­pa­ny ear­ly on (an offer they reject­ed) and his sub­se­quent invest­ment in their shares and licens­ing of Post­Script, Adobe was the first com­pa­ny in the his­to­ry of Sil­i­con Val­ley to become prof­itable in it’s first year.

Adobe went on to devel­op dig­i­tal fonts, fol­lowed by the land­mark Illus­tra­tor soft­ware for ear­ly Apple Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers. In 1989 they released Pho­to­shop, for­ev­er chang­ing the graph­ics world, and four years lat­er they released Acro­bat and Read­er along with the PDF, which is still today an inter­na­tion­al stan­dard for dig­i­tal doc­u­ments. Their acqui­si­tion in 2005 of Macro­me­dia gave them con­trol of a slew of new prod­ucts and ser­vices, not least among them Flash. They ceased devel­op­ment of Flash for mobile devices in 2011 in favor of HTML 5, again influ­enced in no small part by Steve Jobs with his refusal to use Flash on iOS devices.

Into the future

Adobe con­tin­ues to expand their hori­zons and busi­ness ven­tures today. In 2018 they acquired Mar­ke­to, a mar­ket­ing automa­tion soft­ware com­pa­ny, which should open up more mar­ket­ing jobs at Adobe, and in Jan­u­ary 2019 they acquired a 3D tex­tur­ing com­pa­ny. Their rev­enues have tripled since 2009 from just under $3 bil­lion to just over $9 bil­lion in 2018, with over 21,000 cur­rent employ­ees, rough­ly 40% of which are locat­ed in their head­quar­ters home of San Jose, CA. Their cur­rent push projects include the Adobe Doc­u­ment Cloud, the Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud which is an end to end Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Man­age­ment solu­tion, and their Cre­ative Cloud, which pro­vides “the world’s best apps and ser­vices for video, design, pho­tog­ra­phy, and the web”, mak­ing Adobe cloud jobs an expand­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty with the tech giant.

Should You Work There?

As already allud­ed to, jobs at Adobe seem to be read­i­ly avail­able for the right can­di­dates. There are cur­rent­ly around 1,800 open­ings being adver­tised in a wide vari­ety of loca­tions around the coun­try, includ­ing CA, OR, UT, MN, NY, TX, and more, many of them media jobs for design­er and devel­op­ers, but also in man­age­ment, con­sult­ing, ana­lyt­ics and more. The gen­er­al con­sen­sus among employ­ees is that the com­pa­ny is great to work for, with good work/life bal­ance as well as good pay and ben­e­fits. One enthu­si­as­tic employ­ee had this to say on Glass­door: “I can hon­est­ly say that I’ve nev­er been sur­round­ed by so many gen­uine, authen­tic, and nice peo­ple in my career. The work envi­ron­ment is one where col­leagues tru­ly care about each oth­er. It may sound sim­ple but it’s real­ly moti­vat­ing to be at a com­pa­ny where employ­ees care so much about each oth­er and the com­pa­ny cares about you as a per­son not just anoth­er employee. ”