I, along with a number of colleagues, had the opportunity the other day to speak to Rachel DuRose of Insider (formerly Business Insider) about why we work at Adobe—and why a number of us have returned. In case you’re interested, here are my summarized comments:

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“I joined Adobe in 2000. I was working on web animation tools and after a couple years on that, a job opened on Photoshop. I ended up going to Google in 2014 because they were making a huge push into computational photography.”

“I guess a key difference for me between companies is that Google got into photography kind of as a hobby, and for Adobe it’s really the bread and butter of the company. Adobe people tend to come to projects because they really care about the specific mission — people tend to commit to a project for quite some time.”

“I came back in March of last year because I saw what Adobe had been doing around AI and machine learning. I was excited to come back and try to navigate that emerging world and figure out how we make these things useful and meaningful to a lot of folks and also do it responsibly so that it aligns with our values.” 

“In my first tenure and in my return, imaging and the creative parts of Adobe remained the bedrock of the company identity, so I think that’s a through line. I guess the contrast, if there is one, is that now the company has expanded into all these things it really didn’t do before.” 

“Every job is called ‘work’ for a reason. It’s gonna be challenging and frustrating and a million other things, but the caring part, I think, is the distinctive one. I’m cool with people swearing because they care. I’m cool with people who are unreasonably committed to getting something right, or going that extra mile.”