Adobe

Some things I've experienced or observed while working at Adobe. These are a few articles (stories) on my experiences as an Adobe employee for couple of decades. I like the company and the people. All companies have quirks, these are some of the amusing or memorable experiences/observations. No slams, just more journaling life experiences. ℹ️ Info           ~ Aristotle Sabouni Created: 2022-01-16

Unicode, I Am A Witness

           Main article: Adobe/Unicode, I Am A Witness

Someone internally (Megan Dale) needed connections to try to get to buy-in for the eye emoji (Unicode character adoption by Apple, Google and Microsoft) to get it as part of their anti-bullying (I Am A Witness) campaign: 👁‍🗨, that my company was working on with Ad Council, Goodby Silverstein & Partners and a host of media companies. I connected her up to our representative (Ken Lunde), who got her a spot in a Unicode lunch meeting to make our case: and acceptance and adoption were stunningly fast (only a few months). Since the launch, this had over 100M impressions on the Internet campaign, and dozens of TV, Radio stations picked it up. So it was a good, fluffy effort to help victims of bullying, and encourage kids to speak up and say, "Eye see what you did there, and it's not OK". Conclusion Do I think this is a good thing? Kinda, but not significantly. It was short term, but now mostly forgotten, like many/most political trends. In the grand scheme of things, this was fluffy bullshit. Creating a character for a fad campaign is something Unicode should have not done: this is not universal, is not forever, and is not going to become part of the language, even visual language -- so is a waste of bits. Still, it's the exact kind of fluffy/stupid thing that a political organization like Unicode could get behind. Thus it doesn't hurt much, it might help a little in the short term, and it makes a few people feel good/sanctimonious about making a difference. My job is to help them and the company get what they want, no matter what my personal beliefs on this are. So I'm both happy that I helped them do it. And roll my eyes that this is what people wanted to prioritize, over something more on target: like defining a real language-based set of hieroglyphs that were more complete, or ways to try to enforce consistency (and remove political correctness) so that companies can't bend the language with their interpretation of inanimate objects.

More

• 2013 Redwoods Ziplining - My team event included Zip-lining in the Santa Cruz Redwoods (Mount Hermon Adventures). What the heck, I went, it was fun and pretty. Nice crew.
• Adobe CoreTech - Software companies often centralize, then decentralize code -- because there's no right way, so the other way always looks better. When you create a libraries team (Core Tech) -- they are beholden to many masters (products) -- and thus their implementations are always a lowest common denominator, pleasing no one. And they get to be the hated bottleneck for all problems.
• 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.
  
  
• Adobe for All - There's this program called "Adobe for All" -- which originated out of the Adobe for Women efforts. These were/are efforts that allow Women to shadow execs, Women to have Women speakers, and stuff like that that are denied/discouraged for men. Later, the "for All" really meant all minorities... straight white males need not apply.
• Adobe/email is hard - I was changing roles in my company, so I asked IT to create a new email address for me, so that I can leave the old one as an OOO (Out of the Office message) to tell people where to go for support on the old roles problems. Like most of IT, dumb policies, no edge cases and overworked people, shit the bed and screwed it up. Repeatedly.
• Adobe: Beer Bash - Adobe has some awesome benefits, and they often rank in the top-10 places in the bay area to work... and the bay area ranks in the top of the nation, and our country is ranked pretty high in the world as well. Our beer bashes are definitely one of them. This table is the inner circle responsible for a lot of it for decades. Ahh friends. Many have retired away.
• Adobe: Snackpocalypse - Free Snacks, along with Free Soda's, is a cultural norm at Adobe. But like many things at big companies, it's not what you have, but it's about which direction you are headed. Little things can go a long way to annoy your base. While we had it forever, every now and thenm, they cut what they give -- and there's a little outrage over a free benefit getting lessened.
• AdobeProud - A group/maillist/slack channel that allows the Adobe LGBT-community to connect and share LGBT events/issues. Since the LGBT community demands conformity to far left marxists ideology, it devolved into a place to bully anyone that tries to inject balance and moderation. HR sides with the mob.
• Chinese Fire Drill - Work was doing a fire drill, and I joked that it was a Chinese Fire Drill. HR overhead, and nearly needed a fainting couch.
• Inside Adobe - "Inside Adobe" comes from Adobe's internal corporate website, which is called, "Inside Adobe". Why is it called that, instead of "Adobe Insider"? Because years earlier, when Apple created the Macintosh, their internal developer documentation was called, "Inside Macintosh". So anyone familiar with that, would vote for that nomenclature to sort of parody and pay tribute to Apple.
• Macromedia - Richard Bullwinkle mooned Macromedia on exit (not Zalman Stern as some think). Since they were both heavy set white guys that left a week apart, Zalman gets a bit more blame for that one.
• Open Floorplans - Open Floorplans: a really bad idea brought into popularity by idiots and bean counters. (Adobe went to Open Floorplans while I was there, to the grousing of most but a few corporate sycophants). Then COVID hit, vindicating all of us who pointed out that they are disease passing, producitivity killing, open septic tanks. COVID converted me from anbout to leave, to happy remote worker.
• Photoshop - Collection of stories about Photoshop
• Swalwell goes to Adobe - Eric Swalwell spoke at my work. It was billed as a conversation with him about his role on some tech committees, and his experiences in congress. That sounded interesting. Instead he brought shame to my company, his district, my State, and my Country for not laughing him off of his soapbox of caustic stupidity.

---

🔗 More

Tech Technology: Organizations, Reviews, People

Organizations Organizations that I felt the need to comment on (more often on the negs than the positives). But there's good/bad in all.

Tags: Tech  Organizations