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The Challenge: Wanting Out of Infosys After 1.2 Years
I joined Infosys as a Systems Engineer straight out of college, and for the first year it was fine, training, a small maintenance project, learning how enterprise codebases actually work outside a classroom. But somewhere around month ten I started noticing the same week repeating itself. Pick up a ticket, patch a legacy module, raise a pull request that three people would review a week later, move to the next ticket. My manager was decent, the team was decent, but I could feel myself not actually growing technically, just getting faster at the same category of work.
What actually pushed me to start looking was a conversation with a friend from college who had joined a product company right after graduation. He casually mentioned a system design discussion his team had that week, and I realized I hadn't touched anything resembling design decisions in over a year. I wasn't unhappy exactly, just aware that if I stayed another year doing this, moving later would only get harder to justify on a resume.
How I Prepared for Adobe While Still Working at Infosys
I didn't quit first and prep after, mostly because I couldn't afford the income gap and partly because I wasn't sure I'd actually clear anything without more practice first. So prep happened in whatever hours were left after a 9-to-6, which most days meant two hours in the evening and a longer stretch on Sundays.
The first month was almost entirely DSA, revisiting arrays, strings, and trees from scratch since a year of ticket-based maintenance work had genuinely rusted my fundamentals more than I expected. I remember being embarrassed at how long a basic tree traversal problem took me in week one compared to how it used to feel in college. The second month I started mixing in some system design basics, low-level design mostly, since I knew a product company would probe deeper into design thinking than Infosys ever had.
The part I underestimated completely was going back through my own Infosys project and actually understanding it well enough to talk about it in depth. On the job, you just do the ticket. Explaining the "why" behind an architecture decision your team lead made eight months ago, when you were following instructions rather than making the call, takes real reconstruction work. I spent a full weekend just re-reading old design documents and Jira tickets to rebuild that context for myself.
Applying to Adobe: Referral Versus Cold Apply
I tried the Adobe careers portal first, cold, and heard nothing back for three weeks. What actually worked was a referral from a former senior at my college who had joined Adobe's Noida office the year before. I messaged him more out of habit than real expectation, mentioned the role I was eyeing, and he referred me within a day. The recruiter reached out about two weeks later, which was faster than I expected given how long the cold application had just sat there.
The recruiter call itself was mostly logistics, current CTC, expected CTC, notice period at Infosys, and a quick check on why I wanted to move. I was honest about the stagnation reason rather than dressing it up, and the recruiter didn't seem to mind that at all.
Inside Adobe's Interview Rounds: Being Grilled on My Infosys Project
The process opened with an online assessment, two coding problems within a fixed window, one on array manipulation and one involving a basic graph traversal. Nothing that felt unfair for the experience level, and I cleared it comfortably given how much DSA I'd redone in the previous two months.
The first technical round was standard, a coding problem on the shared editor, then a walk through my resume. That's where things got harder than I expected. The interviewer asked me to explain the architecture of the module I'd worked on at Infosys, and when I gave a fairly generic answer, he pushed further: "but what did you specifically decide versus what did your team lead decide?" I could tell he was trying to separate genuine hands-on contribution from someone who'd just executed instructions on a support project, which is a real and fair thing to check for, but it caught me off guard because I hadn't rehearsed that level of specificity. I recovered by being honest about which parts were my actual calls, a caching decision I'd pushed for after noticing repeated slow queries, and which parts came from my lead, rather than inflating my role across the board.
The second technical round was more coding-heavy, a medium-difficulty DP problem, and I stumbled briefly trying to define the recurrence relation before talking my way back to a working solution out loud, similar to how I'd recovered on the project questions. The interviewer seemed more interested in how I approached the problem than whether I nailed it in one attempt.
What actually helped: the weekend I spent rebuilding context on my own Infosys project mattered more in that first technical round than any extra LeetCode problem would have. Interviewers moving people from service companies are specifically checking for that gap, and it's worth closing before the interview, not during it.
The Hiring Manager Round and What Adobe Actually Wanted to Know
The hiring manager round had almost no coding, just a deeper conversation about ownership. He asked about a time I'd disagreed with a decision on my team, and I talked about pushing back on a rushed deployment that I thought needed more testing, which got delayed by a day because of my objection and turned out to be the right call when a related module broke in staging. He also asked directly why I wanted to leave a stable service-company job with under two years in, and I gave the same honest stagnation answer I'd given the recruiter, which by that point felt like the right call rather than something to soften.
The Offer and Negotiating My Infosys Notice Period
The offer call came about a week after the hiring manager round, and the number was a meaningful jump from my Infosys CTC, enough that resigning immediately felt obvious. What I hadn't planned for was how complicated the notice period math would get. Infosys required three months, Adobe wanted me to join within six weeks. My manager was supportive but the internal buyout process took almost two weeks of back and forth with HR before it was approved, and for a few days I genuinely worried the whole timeline would fall apart over paperwork rather than anything to do with my actual performance.
It didn't. I paid a partial buyout for the shortfall, wrapped up my KT documentation faster than I thought possible once I had a hard deadline, and joined Adobe about five weeks after the offer.
Key Takeaways for Anyone Trying to Switch From a Service Company to a Product Company
If I were doing this again with the same 1.2 years of Infosys experience:
I'd rebuild deep context on my actual project work far earlier in the prep timeline, not treat it as something I could wing during the interview itself.
I'd start the referral search before the cold application instead of after, since it was the referral that actually moved things, not the portal submission.
I'd start the notice period conversation with my manager the same week I got the offer instead of waiting a few days out of nervousness, since that internal approval process ended up being the tightest part of the whole timeline.
If you're prepping for something similar right now, still clocking in at your service-company job every morning and grinding in the evenings, the mock interviews and resume feedback I used on devsunite.com/resources helped me figure out how to actually talk about a maintenance-heavy project without underselling the real decisions I did make.
Frequently Asked Questions About Switching From Infosys to Adobe
Can you move from Infosys to Adobe with only around a year of experience?Yes, in my case with 1.2 years at Infosys through a referral into a lateral SDE role. The process was an online assessment, two technical rounds, a hiring manager round, and an HR discussion, without a separate system design round at that experience level.
What do interviewers focus on most when you're switching from a service company?Whether your project experience reflects genuine hands-on decisions rather than just executing assigned tickets. My first technical round specifically probed which architectural choices were mine versus my team lead's.
Does a referral actually matter more than a cold application?In my case, yes. My cold application to Adobe's careers portal sat untouched for three weeks, while a referral from a former college senior got a recruiter call within two weeks.
How do you handle the notice period gap between a service company and a product company?I negotiated a partial buyout with Infosys HR to shorten my three-month notice period down to match Adobe's six-week joining window. That internal approval took about two weeks and was more stressful than any of the actual interview rounds.
Conclusion
Switching from Infosys to Adobe after 1.2 years wasn't about being unusually talented, it was two months of evening and weekend prep, one uncomfortable round of being questioned on how real my project ownership actually was, and a notice period negotiation that nearly outlasted the interview process itself. If you're a year or so into a service-company job wondering whether it's too early to make the jump, the timeline is shorter than it feels from the inside.