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Comment by Morromist | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda curious about this too. But then I'm always amazed at the enormous workforces these tech companies have, and I'm sure they cut them as thin as they can. Like adobe has 30,000 employees & some blogger estimated that 1/3rd of their workers are actually working on their software. I use their software sometimes and I really haven't noticed many changes to it over the years, except recently with the ai stuff. Like from 2015-2020 I can't think of any major things they added to adobe illustrator. I guess making and maintaining software is hard.

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I fully agree most big tech companies are pretty bloated. But FWIW a lot of my time at SaaS companies, especially in the B2B space, was spend working on features for larger customers that most others would never use or even see. Like, yeah, product X isn't that complex, but $BigCorp wants to use it in their private cloud, or needs it to be single tenant, or needs these audits done, or want their $Gov client to use it. Now you have a ton of work for zero visible changes.

Good point. I'm sure a lot of the work adobe was doing between 2015-2020 involved moving to the cloud and stuff like that which I just never interacted with, and cloud stuff probably has a lot of B2B work. Plus during that time the value of their stock grew like 500% with an ATH at 700%!! They were kicking ass! Probably, to justify their growth they had all kinds of projects they were working on, some of which never saw the light of day, others which grew new parts of the company like Adobe Dimension.

Even at companies that appear super bloated I don't think people are idle, its just that mantaining stuff is a lot of work, projects get cancelled, and, like you said they do a lot of specialty work for big clients.

Adobe has a shit ton of product lines, people think of it as just the core Photoshop, Illustrator, etc., but just go look at how much random stuff there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc.#Products

That's in addition to running the big SaaS offering of the creative cloud and all of the other SaaS's (behance, adobe express, adobe stock, etc.).

All of those include software engineers, SRE, support staff, PMs, etc.. Then there's the massive amount of sales staff, go to market, etc.

There's also a lot of R&D and domain experts, stuff like Adobe Firefly? That was spun up in like a year apparently, probably continuing existing in-house research.

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