I don't know if that's true, but even if I take your word that it is, this really has nothing to do with the OP's problem, which is order fulfillment and not the actual Creative Suite software.

And as a user of quite a bit of Adobe's CS software (I have a full CS6 Creative Cloud license for a year due to attending Adobe Max last year and had CS5.0 prior to that), I don't see too many signs of what occurred with Quark when it comes to the quality of new releases. The Creative Suite software is all pretty good year over year and generally improves more than regresses, and this is true up to and including CS6, IMO. Granted, one could argue each new release doesn't offer a ton more than the past release (especially considering the premium upgrade pricing), but that's true of virtually any mature commercial software product.

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The process was atrocious. Each phone call essentially started from scratch. One time, I actually got a U.S. representative, and while they were more coherent, ultimately they were no more help, insisting I go back into the other support "flow", which dumped my right back into an Indian (I'm assuming) support center.

It took a fucking month. By which point, the person's original deadline and need had passed.

At the end, I was explaining to the support staff what they needed to do. I finally got someone with a bit of initiative, and after they went to their manager once and received the wrong information, I convinced them to make a second attempt, again with my clarification.

These "managers" have access to a system that generates keys. All the manager had to do was look up and generate the right kind of key. Which they finally found, after my strong insistence and detailed description.

This was one of many support center "managers" consulted by staff during multiple calls, none of whom had a fucking clue about their own product.

If they had, and had demonstrated any motivation, let alone initiative, this month of purgatory would have been reduced to one 10 minute support call.

You can see why they "need" to shift support overseas. It must be the only way they can afford endless hours of utterly useless support staff time.

Fuck Adobe. I'm generally reserved on HN. But these bozos really deserve the outrage.

P.S. I've nothing against overseas (for me) staff. The staff were consistently polite and patient on the phone. They were just utterly untrained and unempowered to solve the problem. (The "managers", OTOH, were in front of the fucking key generation system. They merely had to actually identify the right product and generate a key for it.)

There seems to be no support management team in any normal sense, and no upper-management concern about the lack of support management.

Here's 59 ways they failed to deliver me a working product:

http://consumerist.com/2008/03/adobe-needs-eight-employees-t...

I did, finally and purely by chance, end up speaking with a front line support representative who not only came to understand what I was describing but who also demonstrated some initiative.

When they, after my lengthy -- starting "from the top", once again -- explanation, inevitably "went to their manager", they were given an incorrect response. I explained this, and how I had encountered it before, and what was actually needed. And this person actually went to the manager a second time and "pushed back" enough to get the manager to look again. Lo and behold, they found the right product in the licensing system (a special combo installer created for the CS 5.5 32-bit support) and finally supplied me with a working key for that installer.

Unfortunately, my intuition is that that front line representative was probably not long for that job.

P.S. Upon reflection, I now recall that I may have spoken to such a manager, once. Just long enough to get the brush off.

Sorry, but that's the way it works. Especially if you are mentoring someone overseas.

It's not (just) a matter of spite. Particularly if you're a bit older, and you're staying in or locked into that sort of corporate environment: You are much more employable when you are already employed. (You need a job to get a job.)

This is all, of course, from a U.S. perspective. YMMV.

P.S. I am all for mentoring and have been the mentor more than once. But these days and in these types of organizations, it is often not fostered or rewarded. And it is not up to you to make up the difference with your own sacrifice.

I don't think I'm at odds with what the parent says (who is, I think, describing a different organizational attitude, as opposed to working differently within the one that actually exists). But, as someone who was brought up to "pay his dues" -- I'm not sure whether people even learn or believe that attitude, anymore -- I'm saying, "pay your dues" is no longer a general rule and is often used as a lever of exploitation.

No great surprise, my saying that. But it bears repeating.

I was there...they herded everyone down to an all-hands meeting, and announced that they had made an unsolicited offer to buy Adobe. The room went nuts, but I remember a few of the more senior developers grumbling that it was insane (which it was. Adobe had a poison pill, and even if it hadn't, the stock leapt as soon as the news of the offer hit the wire. Quark never had a chance.)

Three years later, of course, Fred Ebrahimi fired most of the development staff, and the rest is history.

For anyone else wondering what a "poison pill" is, in this context:

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/poisonpill.asp

As for Adobe's shitty software, it doesn't help that Adobe have acquired most of their titles via acquisitions, check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...

Some of the software (such as flash) are handed down many times, ensuring the loss of those who knew the code best, which were often the company owners who cashed out after the initial sale.

Adobe's software titles and portfolio are so massive now that it's no surprise that they're laden with bugs, overly focused on new features and notorious for their CPU requirements, memory footprint and ancient code.

The best Adobe software titles have always been their home grown, more recent titles, such as Lightbox and InDesign. It's clear they know the code here and how to revise it.

Adobe's risk is that, like Quark, their main business is in relatively few titles. They could be competed effectively by anyone who is willing to take on the big 3 design requirements. (Raster Editing/Vector Editing/DTP for PDF/postscript output.)

The reason gimp fails to make a sizeable dent in photoshop is because it has next to no support for CMYK images(or spots), which are essential to print.

The one thing that really held back InDesign at first was the hideous amounts of RAM it required just to say hello.

I'm not sure why there's a need for apprenticeship today, when there are so many ways to record and exchange information. There just needs to be a culture giving value to documents and documenting practices. This doesn't reduce the need to hire good people, but is likely to increase their work efficiency, regardless of how much development is outsourced.

... and then being fired? Great piece of advice!