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.
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.
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.
Is this true though? From my understanding, Altman was able to overrule the board largely because the employees (especially the one who had been with the company for more than 1-2 years) were worried about their stock options.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of the OpenAI team are ghouls just like Altman, that fundamentally lack humanity (incapable of honesty, inability to tell right from wrong, incapable of empathy).
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean this in the Hollywood sense, like the evil antagonists in say star wars, I am sure they come off as “normal” during a casual conversation. I am referring to going deeper and asking subtle questions referring to matters of ethics and self-enrichment in an off the record environment. They will always come up with some excuse to justify their greed as being “for the betterment of humanity” or some other comical word salad.
You know I‘m worried you might be exactly on point with this assumption. I still give some of them the benefit of doubt because humans can „reason“ themselves into pretty dangerous things by appealing to authority and the like. Doesn‘t make all of them evil but sure as hell way too gullible for the field they‘re working in.
Happy cake day!
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.
That’s what it is with a union too, it’s just more organized. You can strike without a union, it’s just a lot harder to organize and the stakes are way higher.
And with a union, you have legal protection. Individually, you don’t.
Not necessarily. Private unions exist and don’t have legal protection.
I’ve never heard of private unions, so I googled. Sounds like it’s just a union at a private company? That’s probably the vast majority of unions. And yes, they have protection under the NLRA.
You’re right! I didn’t realize individual workers and informal unions had a right to strike.
But their protections are a lot more limited than public unions, like the teachers or police unions. If you’re striking for better pay or conditions, it seems you can be replaced and, depending on circumstances, fired without legal repercussions, whereas if it’s for unfair labor practices, you have more protections.
But you do have a lot more legal protections than I thought, so that’s good to know.
In an ideal world, yes. But most people aren’t willing to lose their jobs and healthcare, potentially putting their family’s financial situation in dire straits, over protesting this.
Don’t blame the workers. Blame the executives.
Not blaming anyone, just saying words don’t mean a lot.
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.
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.
You’re not wrong! But at least for now I got a decent PS alternative for $45. We’ll see how things go.
They’ll go fine for as long as Canva allows you to use that version, and after that it’ll go poorly. We have already done this dance a few times, why do you think Canva, a company with huge VC investments, will turn out any differently.
Its time to start supporting the open alternatives now.
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.
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.
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.
Which products do you use instead?
Saw this in one of the Linux forums. I hope its useful.
I want to point out, because I see this chart or something like it a lot. Adobe has an absolute monopoly in the professional design space. None of these programs can remotely come close to the creative suite if you’re doing more than tinkering. If you’re making memes or doing some personal image manipulation, you can get by with GIMP or something. If you’re creating professional art or creating files for print or publication, you need Adobe. It’s scary that one corporation holds so much sway over an entire industry but they definitely do.
Affinity is the closest but still a ways off being a viable replacement for ID or PS. Source: worked in a design studio, every few years we would try Affinity in an attempt to de-Adobe our workflows but it’s just not comparable.
I’ve been pretty excited about what I’ve been seeing from Affinity. You’re right, they’re not there yet. But they’re closer than anyone. They need more money and time and they will hopefully get there.
Yeah to be fair it’s been a few years since I looked and the list of issues that meant we couldn’t switch wasn’t too massive. Hopefully they get there!
Its getting real close and I like Affinity’s workflow much better. Theres a few small bugs here and there. If anything im a Freelance professional but its my hobby first. Ive used Photoshop/Lightroom, GIMP/RawTherapee in the past on the photography side and Inkscape on the Graphic design side but now I mainly use Designer 2 and Photo 2. Granted my workflow is probably a decent bit different than a studios and I dont know what specifcs a studio needs over something like my workflow. What sorta challenges did switching to Affinity present for your studio?
The main issue was plugins and external programs compatability. There are some really obscure plugins for advanced work in Indesign, like syncing with client spreadsheets for catalogue work, auto generating indexes/references, that kind of thing. Another problem with ID was working on a network with multiple users accessing the same file from different locations. With Photoshop it’s a similar story, we had a lot of actions and custom scripts that would’ve been a massive headache (or impossible) to port over manually. Personally I use a lot of scripts/actions using smart objects, auto selections etc for batch processing and the feature set in Affinity just isn’t (or at least wasn’t) up to it. These days I prefer Capture One over Lightroom for RAW processing but I still need to use LR when processing timelapse because the 3rd party plugins only exist for LR.
LMMS is cool
Oracle and Adobe seem to be the most evil companies, but we should be careful not to anthropomorphise them.
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.
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?!?”
