I recently completed (and flunked) a full interviewing sequence for the Senior Mac/iOS C++ Engineer on the Adobe Application Platform (Torque Native) team and thought it might be useful to recap the experience for the next interview victim coming down the chute. Torque hasn’t been officially announced yet, so I can’t divulge details as to what Adobe has planned, but the Adobe Application Platform name and Torque (codename?) were made public in the job postings so I feel safe to at least refer to them at this point.
Unlike companies like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn (where a pool of engineers from across the company grill a particular candidate to see if they can pass a number of very high technical hurdles), Adobe matches Apple in that a particular team with a specific position in mind will interview the candidate. I did a separate interview for a separate Adobe team two months prior where there were four engineers and one manager doing the interviewing and in that case, almost every engineer on the other team asked me Google-style algorithms questions. For this Torque Native team interview, I had four interviewers in total were one was a manager and the other three were peer engineers. Two of the engineers asked domain specific questions (for my Macintosh & iOS specialty) that I didn’t feel were out of line for the position. The last engineer asked me the brain-freezing questions that torpedoed me out of the running. I’m recapping some of the questions this guy asked me below so you’ll have them in mind in case you’ll be talking to this particular team yourself.
The location in San Francisco is in a former warehouse space that was beautifully renovated a few years back, and they’re in the process of renovating it yet again (all cube walls have been half height up until now, and supposedly Adobe is moving towards the trendy — and IMHO not productive — open plan office space variety). Adobe is picking up other buildings around their original 601 Townsend space, so their cafeteria was also recently renovated and expanded to accommodate the increased population. Unlike Google, Facebook and LinkedIn (where everything in the cafeteria are completely gratis & free), Adobe employees actually have to pay for their lunches. Free soft drinks, fizzy water and fruit are available in the cafeteria and in kitchens on each work floor.
Something else I wasn’t impressed with was that Adobe recruiters are not nearly as helpful as recruiters at other big Silicon Valley companies, such as Amazon or Apple, in terms of preparing you for your interviewers. While the coordinator (a separate person from the recruiter) will likely send you a list of interviewers names prior to the interview, you won’t have any idea of what the interviewers will be talking about so it’ll actually be a challenge to know what to expect when you actually speak to the team. Three out of my four interviewers were friendly and collaborative, one of the engineers was overtly hostile. One useful recommendation I can come up with is to look up your interviewer’s LinkedIn profiles and make an educated guess.
Hopefully my experience flunking Adobe’s Torque Native engineering team interview will help you to prepare for your own day. If you find any of the information I post here to be useful, please let me know by clicking the "helpful" button below. This helps motivate me to be as detailed as possible in my recaps. Good luck to you!