My take on ADBE as ex SWE at Adobe

I see a lot of people posting here about how Adobe is a value stock, and I disagree with that. So I wanted to explain why I think Adobe is more of a trap than a value stock. I was working at Adobe until about 6 months ago. I may be biased because I hated working at this company, but I will try to just explain what I experienced while I was there. The management does not seem to have a clear plan for what to do with their products. They just keep trying different things and hoping something works. I never really saw a clear vision for the company. When I was at Adobe, very few projects lasted more than a few months. Most of them would get deprioritized within a couple of weeks. Many times I was told, hey, this new task came from upper management and it is high priority, we need to do this fast. Then a week or two later, that task would get deprioritized and something else would become the new priority. This just kept happening. If there was a VP visit, things got even worse. Teams would be asked to create some bullshit demo for the VP or other upper management just to impress them. These demos were usually not going anywhere and could not actually be used. A lot of them were basically just an API call to GPT to do something with an image, and then it would be presented as some new generative AI feature. I don't understand how management would get impressed by these things, but I think they did. These are projects that school students could probably build nowadays. There were also some very senior developers( fellows), whose job seemed to be largely about creating these demos, impressing management, and getting promoted. It seems that at Adobe creating demos matters more than actually having an impact on the company. In any good company, I would expect a senior engineer should be judged based on their actual impact on the company, whether that is revenue, product adoption, technical improvements, or something similar. Then there are the PMs. All the PMs that I worked with did not even know their own features properly. They did not use them much, so as a developer I sometimes had to show them how to use features they were supposed to own. Whenever there was a new requirement, it would take a long time to get the specifications. By the time we got them, there was not enough time left for developers to actually build the feature before the deadline. Then the requirements would change multiple times because we would tell them something was not technically possible, or because there were mistakes in the original specs. For a few weeks I was sitting next to some of these PMs, and a lot of their daily conversations were about whose house they were going to have the next house party at. I also remember people asking our old CEO about the stock price. His answer was basically that the stock was undervalued and that he was going to do something about it. When the last time I saw him, he did not even say that anymore. I guess he lost hope too. Then comes Firefly, which is probably the most sucky AI model I have ever seen. Adobe spent a lot of money developing it and marketed it heavily around being commercially safe. The idea itself was fine, but Adobe is not Google, Meta, or Microsoft. They cannot afford to hire the absolute best AI researchers and engineers at the same scale, and they also do not have the same amount of data to train a competitive model. The result was a model that was simply not good. Adobe integrated Firefly into almost every Adobe product, but people do not actually use it. From the analytics that I have seen, most people simply use third party models like Gemini and GPT because obviously they produce better images. Even if those models are not commercially safe, it does not really feel like people are bothered by that. At least from the data I saw, it seems like people do not really care that much about whether the model is commercially safe or not. They just want the model that produces better results. What I don't understand is that even after Firefly failed to compete, Adobe continued to pour billions into developing a product that is nowhere near as good as the competition and that people are not actually using, while Adobe still has to pay for those third party models when users use them instead. At this point, I feel like a lot of people at Adobe are just trying to salvage whatever piece of the pie they can before this ship sinks. There are a lot more things I could say, but this post is already getting long and I do not think it would serve much purpose to keep going. This is just my experience from working there, and obviously I could be biased. But based on what I saw, I personally do not see Adobe as the value stock that many people here seem to think it is. Have a nice day.