At present, most of the fault diagnosis methods with extensive research and good diagnostic effect are based on the premise that the sample distribution is consistent. However, in reality, the sample distribution of rotating machinery is inconsistent due to variable working conditions, and most of the fault diagnosis algorithms have poor diagnostic effects or even invalid. To dispose the above problems, a novel symmetric stacked autoencoder (NSSAE) for adversarial domain adaptation is proposed. Firstly, the symmetric stacked autoencoder network with shared weights is used as the feature extractor to extract features which can better express the original signal. Secondly, adding domain discriminator that constituting adversarial with feature extractor to enhance the ability of feature extractor to extract domain invariant features, thus confusing the domain discriminator and making it unable to correctly distinguish the features of the two domains. Finally, to assist the adversarial training, the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is added to the last layer of the feature extractor to align the features of the two domains in the high-dimensional space. The experimental results show that, under the condition of variable speed, the NSSAE model can extract domain invariant features to achieve the transfer between domains, and the transfer diagnosis accuracy is high and the stability is strong.