Twenty Years in the Valley
Day One of the Dream Job
On August 31, 1995 — twenty years ago today — I walked into the front lobby at 1098 Alta Ave in Mountain View, California. Today, that’s Google Bldg 1098. Back then, it was Building E for Adobe Systems.
It was the first day on my new job as the interface designer for Adobe’s professional graphics products, which included Photoshop and Illustrator. I was a bundle of emotions ranging from total euphoria about landing my dream job to utter dread fearing I might screw it all up. Back then, Adobe had many amazing designers on staff working on everything from type to marketing materials to packaging to media content. Many of the best designers in the Bay Area either worked for Adobe or were affliated somehow with the company, and that’s still true to this day. It was a place that had that magic aura for a young designer like myself.
However, Adobe hadn’t yet hired a designer specifically to work on the software products full time, someone who would sit with the engineers and work through everything from iconography to dialog layouts to user workflow and feature mechanics. I was to be that designer, and I was buzzing about the prospect.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the last twenty years, mostly about what I’ve learned over the past two decades lucky enough to be on the front lines during one of the most amazing technological advances we’ve seen in our history, akin only to The Renaissance era possibly. I’ve also been reflecting on some of the experiences I’ve had over the course of my career, wondering if there’s anything useful in those stories for up and coming designers.
Hopefully I’ll be able to extract a few useful anecdotes or stories as we enter the next era of software and digital products. Until then, I thought I’d indulge with my recollection of my first day on the job in Silicon Valley.
When I showed up in the Bay Area in August of 1995, Netscape had just gone public to usher in the Internet Age, Microsoft had just released Windows 95, and AOL was mass mailing CD-ROMs to every person in the country regardless if they owned a computer or not. In my head, I had arrived a little late to the Revolution, as the Atari days were long gone, Apple was in a funk that was bordering on implosion, and Seattle seemed more like the place to be with its music, media, and tech scene in the center of the country’s imagination.
I walked into the lobby of Building E around 8:00am. My manager, Bryan Lamkin, was an early bird. He asked that I be there at the crack of dawn. To this day, whenever I meet with Bryan to catch up, it’s almost always before 8:00am and almost always at Joanie’s Cafe in Palo Alto. I had rolled into my corporate housing apartment in Mountain View at 11pm the night before, exhausted from a two week trek across the country in my beat up Nissan Altima from Amherst, Massachusetts, my previous home. I had slept little the previous night, and so I went to work on that first day with about two hours of real sleep in me.
Bryan at that time was the Group Product Manager on Photoshop. He had a small team of five or so, and I was the new addition. When I showed up, Bryan was finishing up his staff meeting, so I had to wait twenty to thirty minutes before heading in. When I met up with him, he introduced me to three members on his team, John Leddy, Lisa Cleary, and Kevin Connor. I knew John prior to joining Adobe, and it was nice to greet a familiar face to start. But that was about all I’d get for familiarity that day.
Bryan smiled broadly, “Let’s take a walk.”
Bryan and I headed out of Building E and started walking slowly across the Adobe campus to Building B, 1565 Charleston Rd. That building housed the cafeteria and the core application teams I would be working with, namely Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and Dimensions. (Today, I think it houses the Android team for Google.) Through my interview and hiring process, I planned with folks at Adobe to work on Photoshop first, as that was the product I knew the best. I also knew Mark Hamburg, the most senior engineer on the team outside of Thomas Knoll. Working on Photoshop was quite possibly the sole reason I moved my entire life to Silicon Valley from the east coast. It was and still is one of the most magical pieces of software I have ever used. Of course, in my head, I knew Bryan was taking me over to Building B to meet up with the Photoshop team.
What better way to start Day One of the Dream Job?
As a bit of additional background here, I should be honest and say that when I joined Adobe, I was the typical “QPF” designer that was fairly dominate in the early 1990s. That is to say, my tool arsenal of choice was Quark XPress, Adobe Photoshop, and Aldus FreeHand. I knew how to use Illustrator, but had gotten my start on FreeHand in 1989 and preferred it for reasons that can be dissected in some other article.
Bryan, like many Silicon Valley executives, is a master at the walk and talk. We chatted about my trip across the country, where I was hoping to find an apartment in the area, how things were going with my family. And we chatted about a few things I would need to handle as a new hire as we walked over to Building B. When we got there, I signed in and got a temporary badge. It wasn’t an official badge yet, but it was an Adobe badge and it was mine!
Then Bryan asked me to follow him into the conference room on the first floor of Building B. Bryan mentioned that there was a change of plans before we entered the conference room. The Photoshop team was in the middle of product planning for the next version, and the Illustrator team needed my help first as they were into early feature design work on their next version.
Dammit, why is it that nothing ever goes as planned?
Bryan entered the conference room and I followed him in. In the room, around 9am or so by now, sat the entire Illustrator engineering team, including the Dimensions engineers; roughly twelve people. They stopped and looked at Bryan and me as we walked in. Bryan was still smiling broadly from our walk and talk.
Did I mention that Bryan is 6'7" tall? When he enters a room, especially when he’s in a good mood, you can feel his energy across a few city blocks. Whatever the engineers were discussing, they immediately stopped when Bryan and I entered.
Bryan announced, “Team! I’m very sorry to interrupt you. I wanted you all to meet the newest member to our group at Adobe. This is Andrei. Andrei is our new User Interface Designer, and he’ll be working with you and the other teams on the pro graphics products. Andrei, this is the Illustrator engineering team. Now my apologies, but I have to run to handle a quick emergency. I’ll come back just before lunch to pick you up and we’ll sync up then. Ok? Great! Really great to have you on board. Folks, take good care of Andrei, it’s his first day. Ciao!”
Then Bryan left, still smiling as he shut the door behind him.
(This is of course dramatized for effect. It’s not exactly verbatim, but it’s pretty damn close. When you started at a place like Adobe back then, many moving parts were always in motion across the entire product organization, so new hires often got tossed into the mix quickly. Mine was perhaps quicker than most.)
I stood there and had no idea what to do. The Illustrator team just stared at me, and I think we were all a little floored at what just transpired. So I did the only thing I could think of doing: I nodded politely to the group, said hello, and sat down in an empty chair at the executive sized conference table in the room. The quiet hung in the air for what felt like a few minutes.
Then one of the most senior engineers on the team broke the tension, “I’m sorry… who are you and what are you doing for us?”
Pause.
“I’m the new interface designer.”
Another long pause.
The engineering manager finally broke the pause. “Ok then. Glad to have you. Where were we again?” I sat there quietly as the team finished discussing the status of the new features they were working on.
Inside, I told myself, “This is real. You’re finally here. Building B at Adobe Systems in Mountain View. You made it.”
I probably had a huge smile plastered on my face as I sat there. In fact I’m sure of it.
