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.
That’s fair. The way I look at it is that executives curb what the employees actually believe and want to work on. I saw this at a petrochemical company that was part of a big oil company. Everyone was excited about sustainability projects and cutting emissions and renewable technology. The execs just didn’t give a shit and continued to push for oil and drilling. If workplaces were democracies, we’d see so much more wonderful things.
Maybe. We might also see more companies going under or not having enough funding to actually innovate.
What seems to work best is a medium-sized business run by a fair, passionate individual who sets the direction of the company. Something like Valve, or successful indie game devs. If my company were a democracy, our revenue would likely plummet because we’d just vote for whatever we wanted to work on, not what actually sells.
I think there’s a lot to criticize about publicly traded companies, but good execs do have value. Maybe democratic companies can work well in some areas, but I think it’s a case-by-case thing.
I think there’s something to be said for medium sized companies. I work for one that’s trying to grow and become much larger, but it’s decidedly not big. Our execs though actually seem like pretty cool people, and the CEO seems to be a legitimately good person. He’s generally been open and honest, and he’s told stories that make me think he does actually value employees as people.
He was talking about gay rights and the value of diversity during our weekly company forum the other day, and I asked him about our company’s support for DEI given the political pressure from conservatives to abandon it. He said he didn’t give a damn about them, and doing the right thing was more important. I don’t agree with everything he’s done – we’ve had layoffs, and morale isn’t great, and we’re totally broke – but I respect that he actually seems to mean what he says. And even when we had layoffs, executives and management weren’t safe either.
I think a lot of what it comes down to is the genuineness of leadership and how closely tied they are to rank and file employees. That’s easier at small and medium companies. Large companies also tend to attract greedy robber barons.