 Macromedia, Inc. Interview Surveys
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Job Title: administrator
Location: San Francisco, CA
Submitted on: 03-Jun-03
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Workplace
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I had a mixed experience at Macromedia. The company culture amongst the
coders seemed to be creative, intelligent, and fun. A lot of very
creative, bright, artistic, and articulate people work at Macromedia,
who are a pleasure to deal with. However, when a company grows to a
certain size, it acquires the inevitable strata of bureacracy, in this
case the business development, sales and marketing people. My job
required me to be in contact with these teams regularly, and I found
them to be mediocre at their jobs at best. So there was this odd
juxtaposition of exceptionally performing people who actually made the
products, and non-performing executives and managers who were marketing
and selling the product, who had not a whit of creativity amongst their
midst. There was the accompanying culture clash caused by this
cleavage. One senior executive who had been with Macromedia for over a
decade commented that that the company used to have uniform culture of
people with similar values, perspectives, and outlooks, which made the
company an extremely fun place - a company full of hip, diverse,
talented people at all levels. He concluded that the "new" company
culture was more typically coporate, which made it difficult to
executive effectively. He was very frustrated.
I would give both the HR and IT departments very low marks. The non-
performance of the IT department surprised me greatly, since Macromedia
is technically a "technical" company. There was a chronic lack of
resources to support employees IT needs and a lot of political
infighting. The resources that were there were undertrained for the
most part and overwhelmed.
The HR department was not very employee friendly. Employees in crisis
were not treated that well, and HR people were not that available for
consultation and guidance. I had a family crisis develop which
required me to take some time off, and was repeatedly given wrong
information about the company's family leave policy by two different
employees. I had a hell of a time clearing the misunderstanding up.
When an HR employee doesn't know the company's policies, you know you
are in trouble.
The senior executive culture at Macromedia was largely dictated by Rob
Burgess, the CEO at the time. He was an extremely mercurial person,
given to yelling, swearing, etc. He seemed like a throwback to the
1950s when he demonstrated this behavior - I could not believe I was
witnessing these scenes (I sat down the hall from Rob, so could hear
and see with my own eyes how he behaved on a daily basis).
My experience at Macromedia was marked in that I was explicitly
sexually harassed by a high level executive. Apparently this executive
had a long record of this behavior, because one of his direct reports
told me that he explicity propositioned two other female employees
after me, and that the last employee he harassed quit and filed a
lawsuit. He was subsequently fired for his harassment; at that point he
was the CTO. His behavior went unchecked for over three years, with
multiple employees complaining and providing ample documentation. The
company did nothing. I am told by multiple people that Macromedia has a
history of being sued by employees with legitimate grievances, and that
their policy is to pay out and not go to court. Regardless, they'd do
better to train their management more in proper conduct than lose
valuable employees and get sued.
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