Leaving Adobe, my dream company, without an offer in hand

Hey folks,

Yesterday I read a Medium post by another engineer titled “I resigned from my amazing job without an offer in hand.” I shared it and then replied to the author, because that headline was pretty much my last few months:

Read your piece on #Medium, went through a similar experience. Took a plunge from #AdobeIndia, travelled South, got my shit…

..together, worked for it and landed the gig I wanted for a long time. Now having a blast learning new stuff everyday for doing things I ❤️!

Two tweets can’t hold nearly three years though. So here’s the longer version. :)

Hello, World err… Adobe!

I finished my B.Tech in 2014 from a college in Delhi with no campus placements, and headed to Bengaluru for my first job at Webyog. Then I joined Adobe in Noida. My Facebook post that day just said “Hello, World err… Adobe!”

Adobe was a BIG deal for me. It’s the company behind Brackets, the open-source editor I was a huge fan of and had contributed to, and those contributions are how I got invited to interview there in the first place! I ended up on the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) side, in Digital Marketing. Confession time: I was a bit skeptical when I first heard “Digital Marketing”, thanks to some prejudice I’d picked up in college about what that meant for an engineer. I owned up to that in my farewell mail too. :P

26 hours of Android

In December 2014 there was an Android app hackathon open to Adobe employees, and I went all in. On the last night I posted “lets finish this Android app” with a photo of my laptop and phone, and later: “Been 26 hours back to back! #AndroidHackathon #adobelife. Finally app looks … Gorgeous”.

The app was called Interseller. Yes, after Interstellar, which had come out a month earlier. Duh.

It was a marketplace for Adobe employees, and it actually got launched internally.

That was pretty much the mood of my first few months. In November I had posted “Achievement unlocked: 5000 lines of code written”, and in February 2015 I booked a whole conference room just for myself for a night of building (“#BeastMode”, “#HackathonNight”).

A new office

In March 2015 we moved into Adobe’s new office in Noida. Adobe’s CEO, Shantanu Narayen, was there to cut the ribbon, and I posted three tweets of photos in about six minutes (no regrets). The first one just says “New Adobe office! Looks amazing..!!”

Two more from the same set, 25 March 2015.

The good years

The next two years were good. Nothing dramatic, just a lot of small things I’ll remember:

• I rode my Royal Enfield to the Noida office, about 40 km from home, which is a big part of why that bike needed so much service.
• For New Year 2016 Adobe gave every employee a Fitbit Charge HR, and later that year I cut its charging cable. Long story.
• My whole team sat and watched the countdown together the day the OnePlus Loop VR headset went on sale.
• Cricket net practice at the office under a cloudy sky, which I posted as “#CloudPorn #Cricket #NetPractice #AdobeLife”.
• In August 2016 Adobe IT offered a chance to win a free lunch to anyone who upgraded to Windows 10 by the 31st. I tweeted the prompt with “#Windows7 #FTW”. ;)

Upgrade to Windows 10, maybe win a free lunch.

I got to travel too! In September 2015 I was in Singapore and then Sydney, where I did the Harbour Bridge climb (expensive, but the experience of a lifetime). A month later I was in Tokyo, standing in Akihabara and posting “Finally. Electronic market. God, I have waited for this moment”, and then going up the Tokyo Skytree. I visited the Adobe office in each of those cities, and all three made it into my farewell mail.

Work kept me busy. AEM was on an annual release model, and in January 2016 I was so occupied that I just paid GoDaddy’s hosting renewal for BitSnapper instead of migrating it like I’d planned. Earlier this year I also put out AEMATOR, a bash script that automates setting up an AEM development environment from the terminal.

Leaving without a plan B

So why leave a dream company?

I joined Adobe as a Software Engineer. At Adobe that’s the title for the quality engineering track, and the developer track has its own title, Member of Technical Staff (MTS). In my three years there, though, I ended up doing developer work almost the whole time, mostly backend, because that’s where I was strong.

So I tried to move over to the developer ladder. More than once. It never went through. I hadn’t interviewed for that track when I joined, and I don’t come from one of the IITs. The switch also needed a team change. My manager wasn’t keen to let me go, and moving between teams came with a lot of internal politics.

After three years I stopped trying. I was already doing the developer work, just without the title. It seemed simpler to go somewhere that would hire me as a backend developer from day one than to keep waiting. So I decided to leave. And I did it without another offer in hand.

My last day was Monday, 3 April 2017. Like every good nerd, I sent a farewell mail with a subject line from Toy Story: ”∞ To infinity… and beyond! ∞”. It started with “Today is my last day at Adobe. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” and then this, which I totally mean:

Adobe was a dream company for me being an average guy from an average engineering college.

I wrote that working with engineering managers taught me how a lot of small modules come together into a bigger picture, and working with product managers taught me how a product goes from development and testing to something you can actually sell. I wrote that I had literally seen the company grow (and the stock, lol) and watched AEM mature as a platform.

I signed off with a line I really like:

Change is the only constant and everything else is in a constant change.

Then a “nerdy bye”: a picture of the chemical structures of thymine, adenine and adenine, the whole thing squared, with “TAA TAA” written under it. Under that, “Live long and prosper”, and a p.s. that just said “Excelsior!”. Star Trek AND Stan Lee in one footer. I regret nothing. :D

(That was a big upgrade on my last farewell btw. When I left Webyog, my work account got deleted before I could send mine, so I pulled the draft back out of Evernote and sent it from Yahoo.)

Travelled South, got my shit together

What came next is what I squeezed into “travelled South, got my shit together”.

“South” meant a tour of South India, hopping between a bunch of places.

Within two weeks of my last day I was also finally moving BitSnapper off GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting, the migration I’d skipped the year before. It cost me a week of sleepless nights and turned into a long rant. The description of that post ends with “To infinity… and beyond!”, which tells you exactly where my head was at. :P

Then I worked for the next thing. In May 2017 I joined Shuttl in Gurugram, the bus startup, and that’s the gig in the tweet. Two months in, my desk is a mess of Raspberry Pis, Arduinos and jumper wires, and the crunch we just came out of ended up in the news! It’s a whole different world from working on an enterprise product at a big company, and I’m loving every bit of it.

So, where does that leave me?

It’s been four months since that farewell mail, and I’m doing exactly what I said in the tweet: having a blast learning new stuff every day. Adobe was my dream company and I meant every word of that mail. I just didn’t have the next offer lined up when I walked out. And honestly? Turned out fine. :)

Cheers!

New Adobe office! Looks amazing..!! #AdobeLife

@jatinkrmalik, 25 March 2015

Wow! It doesn't get better than that 😍😎#AdobeLife #Noida #NewOffice

@jatinkrmalik, 25 March 2015

#CloudPorn #Cricket #NetPractice #AdobeLife @ Adobe Systems

@jatinkrmalik, 20 February 2016

When #Adobe tries to lure you to update to #Windows10 :D :P #Windows7 #FTW

@jatinkrmalik, 23 August 2016

That's what we did in last few days of crunch. More coverage to follow. #ShuttlInnovation #Coder

@jatinkrmalik, 25 July 2017

Loved this one. A similar experience here: “I resigned from my amazing job without an offer in hand.” by @Taruna2309

@jatinkrmalik, 4 August 2017

@Taruna2309 Read your piece on #Medium, went through a similar experience. Took a plunge from #AdobeIndia, travelled South, got my shit....

@jatinkrmalik, 4 August 2017

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