Adobe's Employees Are Just As Upset at the Company As Its Users: Report
Adobe's Employees Are Just As Upset at the Company As Its Users: Report
"The general perception is: Adobe is an evil company that will do whatever it takes to F its users."
Adobe’s employees are typically of the same opinion of the company as its users, having internally already expressed concern that AI could kill the jobs of their customers. That continued this week in internal discussions, where exasperated employees implored leadership to not let it be the “evil” company customers think it is.
This past week, Adobe became the subject of a public relations firestorm after it pushed an update to its terms of service that many users saw at best as overly aggressive and at worst as a rights grab. Adobe quickly clarified it isn’t spying on users and even promised to go back and adjust its terms of service in response.
For many though, this was not enough, and online discourse surrounding Adobe continues to be mostly negative. According to internal Slack discussions seen by Business Insider, as before, Adobe’s employees seem to be siding with users and are actively complaining about Adobe’s poor communications and inability to learn from past mistakes.
Adobe is an evil company that will do whatever it takes to F its users,” one employee wrote, echoing sentiments
Microsoft : first time?
Cool, then strike.
I was working at a company at one point that got a contract to build something I viewed equivalent to malware. Immediately I brought it up to several higher-ups that this was not something I was willing to do. One of them brought up the argument "If we don't do it someone else will."
This mentality scares the shit out of me, but it explains a lot of horrible things in the industry.
Believing in that mentality is worse than the reality of the situation. At least if you say no there's a chance it doesn't happen or it gets passed to someone worse than you. If you say yes then not only are you complicit, you are actively enforcing that gloomy mentality for other engineers. Just say no.
It‘s exactly this dangerous mindset that‘s riding us in some AI service hellhole. Too many super talented developers have told themselves exactly that instead of standing up for their principles or even allowing themselves to have principles in the first place.
Only recently have they started leaving companies like OpenAI and taking a stance because they‘re actually seeing what their creation is used for and with how little care for human life it‘s been handled.
Of course many critics knew this was headed towards military contracts and complete Enshittification. It was plain to see OpenAI founders aren‘t the good guys but „someone else would do it anyway“ kept the underlings happy. This deterministic fallacy is also why anyone still works for Meta or Google. It‘s a really lazy excuse.
One thing I like to tell people with that attitude is: whatever someone does, there’s always someone else who will see it as an example and challenge to do it “better”. Do you want to be the company that started that chain? Are you prepared to compete in that race?
For something borderline malware, someone will take your lead and make it “better malware”. If you are not prepared to respond in kind, then why did you even go there? If you’re not ready to be known as the top of the line malware creator, why start the product line?
It is unfortunately one of the darker aspects of the hyper-growth-focused tech and engineering is the often highly mercenary/transactional nature of many people in the field. Like, there’s a reason Facebook pays engineers 250-400k or more. Sure, the work can be difficult, but most of the time it’s not that difficult. They’re paying people that much so that they ignore their morals, shut the fuck up, and just take the paycheck and do the work that is helping to destroy society.
It’s immensely distressing to me as a software engineer. I am fully aware that my morality is limiting my earning potential, and that makes me kinda furious - not so much at myself, but that our economic system is set up in such a way that that’s not only possible, but optimal (in terms of earning a nice paycheck and being able to retire somewhat early).
I doubt they're unionized. A strike without a union is just refusing to do your job.
in general, assume any conpany where a good bulk of the employees are software engineers to not be unionized. many programmers tend to make significantly more constantly jumping companies, hence the turnover rate and not needing to unionize. Its also kinda ingrained in the hiring structure too as many of the large conpanies contract developers and not hire them outright.
Tactical nuke incoming
Good time to drop a reminder that Affinity's tools are 50% off right now and are buy-once software.
Unfortunately, they were also recently acquired by Canva. It may be all right for the time being, but I wouldn't throw my full weight behind them anymore.
Yeah same. I used to recommend them whole heartedly but now Im afraid they will go downhill
Well the good thing about their licensing is that you can buy a version and stick with it in spite of whatever the parent company does, and you're not banned from using older versions like with Adobe's T&Cs
And they are a really great alternative!
...for now.
- See above convo about acquisition by Canva.
They control it, not us. It fails to include a libre software license text file. Some people never learn. 🤡
You know how fucked up your company is when even your employees are mad at you.
It's always like that. When the only goal is more growth, the C-Suite will fuck everyone and anything over.
But people gotta eat and be homed, so that won't change soon.
Imagine what projects like GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Scribus etc could do with a fraction of monthly revenue of Adobe.
You mean Blender?
I don't think there any proprietary 3d software, where you can just call dev and he will make it 10 times faster.
Conway’s Law in action.
Organisations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organisations.
Adobe has been exploiuting users for years. they are invasive, they already do wayy more snooping in your data than they ever should. I stopppeed using them years ago and always recommend for others to do so. they don't deserve your money and especially don't deserve even one MB of your data.
Fuck Adobe. They are effectively a monopoly and are actively exploiting that position. I refuse to use their software, even if it slows me down.
Their PDF signing service has essentially been dead since the government started using Digital sign... now they are bleeding whatever small segments are still left using their service. This won't end well for Adobe PDF products.
I hope we shift out of Adobe completely where pdf is concerned, Acrobat is the first program I've seen with such a massive userbase that's somehow updated to be worse with every passing year. I had to stick to that shovelware for company laptops but I NEVER want to deal with large documents on Acrobat again.
Same with Unity's devs. It sucks to watch your life's work being flushed down the drain for stupid grasping at shitty, random fads.
Oracle and Adobe seem to be the most evil companies, but we should be careful not to anthropomorphise them.
Laughs in Nestle.
chiqita says hello
I’d just like to know how the same fucking company that makes Illustrator and Photoshop can come up with something as astonishingly shitty as Acrobat.
Workers learning the news: “Oh, damn. I work for a sh!t company now?!?”
