Akamai Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Akamai

Pros – - Very well positioned with cloud, security, and data trends opening lots of opportunity for the company
- Strong and respected senior management team
- Incredibly intelligent coworkers some of which are leaders in their fields

Cons – - Still a bit of a start up mentality even as it grows to be over $1B company
- Lot of new hires leading to a new v old guard separation in talent

Advice to Senior Management – - Focus on prioritization of key company objectives
- Establish the infrastructure to onboard new resources effectively during current growth

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Akamai full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Excellent company, great tech, great people. Global reach, and conservative business plan.

Cons – Shifting managerial vision at the top, terrible at acquiring other companies. Barebones fringe benefits. Terrible name recognition. Oftentimes too sales driven.

Advice to Senior Management – Spend more in engineering. Every project is painfully under-resourced.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Akamai

Pros – Excellent, smart people - always a challenge and career opportunities are endless

Cons – Culture can be very political

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Akamai full-time for more than a year

Pros – Work life balance is decent'ish. People are nice to each other. Non-toxic work environment.

Cons – Luddites rule the roost at Akamai - the thinking(often times of architects and engineering leaders) is stuck in the 80's and 90's, stubborn and insular. Being one of the earliest movers in what we now think of as the "enterprise cloud"-space, they have let so many opportunities slip by and ceded ground(and are still doing so) to a plethora of "cloud" companies who did not have that advantage. There is no vision or technical leadership to even bridge this gap, let alone break out of this cycle of building and maintaining aging, fragile and inflexible technologies & infrastructure. A lot of time is spent on reinventing the wheel with little to no benefits. I can honestly say that my time at this company was the least productive and that it did not let me grow as an engineer - in fact I feel I regressed quite a bit, being stuck in a very dysfunctional engineering culture. Final observation: I have written and submitted college assignments with more rigor and quality than some of the code that gets shipped out to production at Akamai.

Advice to Senior Management – Learn from what is going on outside of Akamai. Inculcate a culture of openness to accepting when you are wrong and of learning from and building upon good/successful ideas. Ditch your old ways of thinking ASAP.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Akamai

Pros – growing company, best in class, lots of opportunities

Cons – suffering through growing pains, lots of management changes

Advice to Senior Management – Try keeping managers consistent, so that the employees may reap their benefit.. changing the reporting structure every year causes nothing but pain and anguish

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Akamai full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Awesome company, talented people, great benefits, unlimited timeoff, flexible schedule

Cons – The Internal departments have limited opportunities of growth

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Akamai full-time

Pros – Compensation, Schedule Flexibility, Akamai Anywhere (work from anywhere)

Cons – Internal politics can be quite intense

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Akamai

Pros – Super smart people, right in the middle of making the internet work.

Cons – It can be a bit chaotic at times.

Advice to Senior Management – I'm deeply impressed with upper management at Akamai. I've worked (as a consultant) in quite a few companies before coming here full time, and think they do a spectacular job in terms of ethics, social responsibility, transparency, strategy and general execution.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Akamai full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – lot of smart people, location is awesome and close to subway station

Cons – none known to me so far

Advice to Senior Management – none to give right now

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Akamai full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Depending on your manager, telecommute can be encouraged or frowned upon.

Cons – Most of people only keep to themselves. You never know when and who will stab you from behind even just when you think everything is going alright. A lot of managers are extremely short-sighted. They bend forward and take every requirement from Product team and turn them into a CR (change request, just like a bug) without even considering the overall impact to the system and pushing back when necessary. I guess that the manager's performance is evaluated by the no. of CRs they close. That's why they want to open/close as many as possible.

There is hardly any chance for advancement. Unless you're one of the boss's pets, you're pretty much stuck in the same position for many years until either your boss moves up or you can't take it and get moving yourself. Advice for the potential employees: work hard to get the level as high as possible since it'll be very hard to move up once you join.

Advice to Senior Management – Do an overall audit of the first line managers. Interview employees and understand if there are anything unpleasant with the same boss. When you get consistent answers, you know who the weeds are.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend