Akamai Reviews

Pros

1. Great place to work. Very relevant product and technology.
2. The Senior Management is efficient. Some real humble and honest guys (The CEO/Founder are fine examples).
3. Good compensation and incentives (Foe sales). Best when compared to others in the market.
4. The benefits are decent and in comparison to other companies in Bangalore they are great.
5. You can operate independently (in sales) just by updating you manager. Not much of micro management which is good.
6. Flexi-hours which is great.
7. Facilities are great when compared to a lot of other companies out there.
8. Stable company (great technology).

Cons

1. Hard working, silent and dedicated individuals will remain wherever they are. Chances of moving to the next level is slim.
2. India Management is mediocre (not the best) and hence the company not really reaching its full potential.
3. Local HR team is incompetent and hence you don't have the best of the best locally. Difficult to find people you can look up to.
4. No real career progression road map for sales folks. You may get a salary and role change but will continue to do the same thing again. No real learning.
5. You need to hob nob with the top guys to really progress in your career, so folks who silently go about doing the jobs have no chance to progress.
6. Managers are selfish. They only take issues up if they get directly and indirectly affected. They lack empathy.
7. Unable to retain and nurture good/quality employees.
8. The internal job postings are a farce. The candidate is already selected before the IJP is rolled out and the others are made to undergo the entire process and end up being disappointed in-spite of doing well in their interviews.
9. You need to have influence to progress anywhere. If you are not known to the top guys you have no chance to progress.

Advice to Senior Management

1. Chalk out an effective and implementable career plan for tenured and performing employees. Not only on paper and pep talk. But really put these to action.
2. Review Manager capabilities and weed out opportunists who add no value to their direct reports.
3. Be honest and transparent to the employee (tell the facts openly and not hide things).
4. Work to retain good quality employees.
6. Try and make Akamai a fair organization (by action) and not by fancy words.

Pros

Generally good people who care about the work, which is cutting edge for internet. Opportunity to advance and learn if you want it. Innovation is valued.

Cons

Company is in transition now from being a startup in early 1998 to operating more on the big business standard model now. That can be a difficult transition if you value the sort of meritocracy and individual initiative that you have in startup situations. More departmentalization and compartmentalization, less whole view big effort.

Advice to Senior Management

Do not let the corporate politics and interdepartmental departmental struggles for resources and priorities (that characterize bigger businesses) kill the Akamai startup spirit.

Pros

People, Management, Technology, and Customers that you cannot beat combined with good pay for performance, work place flexibility, and driven culture for those who like to compete and win.

Cons

Un-relenting pace can lead to crushing hours, making work life balance a continual struggle. Employees are the companies number one asset, but the perks and support systems do not reflect that comprehensively.

Advice to Senior Management

Open up to a partners and developers so that others can build on our platform and amplify our impact across the industry.

Pros

Work From Anywhere
Work on systems which impact all internet users

Cons

Brilliant technical staff, spread across the whole world.

Pros

Dynamic company, great technology, dedicated people. Leading global brands trust Akamai for their online business today, and know Akamai will help them innovate for the future.

Cons

Akamai is forever in start up mode. To succeed you must work at a rapid pace, and be able to make and defend your decisions

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to focus teams across the business and drive efficiency into the operations as the company expands globally and the portfolio grows.

Pros

Excellent people to work with and lot of challenging work. Good work/life balance. Lots of opportunities to move between teams.

Cons

Some times company direction could be difficult to tell. Acquisitions are not well integrated into the company all the times. East coast/west coast offices could pose challenges.

Advice to Senior Management

Great leadership. It would be helpful to get to talk to some of employees for their views on improving the company rather than having all the directions from the top. Overall things have worked out well.

Pros

Lots of exposure related to customer integration projects. Short term and variety of projects.

Cons

Very quick tunaround times required often less flexibility towards self learning. Very fast pace.

Advice to Senior Management

Create more collaborative and close knit teams for better knowledge sharing

Pros

Akamai (in San Mateo) is a collection of intelligent people that can have fun together, have a focus on customer satisfaction and are willing (generally) to roll their sleeves up and get the job done. They provide good compensation, and are flexible on working remotely. There is generally a lot of trust given in allowing you to work your own way.

Cons

The product team is slow to change, and there remains a disconnect between market needs and engineering delivery. The service organisation is primarily focused on transactional work, which provides little implicit satisfaction. During 2010 - 2011 there has been a lot of issue with employee retention, as people grow dissatisfied and leave.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more nimble, improve the product focus, and provide more opportunities for career growth.

Pros

Friendly People
Go get em attitude, positivity.
Encourage new ideas plenty of opportunity to be heard.

Cons

Very big, somewhat demanding with a good amount of pressure to perform job, this can be seen as a pro as well...

Advice to Senior Management

Keep being friendly and understanding, keep pushing us to do more and more feedback would be appreciated, good or bad.

Pros

The work you do affects virtually every important company that has a website, every single day. The company's foundations -- financially and technically -- have been laid down very well. There's little doubt that the company will continue being at the forefront of the CDN industry for years.

The benefits are terrific. The company skimps on everyday perks (e.g., providing lunch during meetings), but in exchange they focus on providing solid bonuses at the end of the year and providing solid base salary. The company was the dot-com bubble's poster child (check out their stock history), which came crashing down very quickly, and they had to lay people off a decade or so ago. Consequently, they've been very conservative in the years since. I'd be surprised if they'd ever lay anyone off again, short of a disaster. In an economy with companies that don't hesitate to dump their employees, that's worth a lot.

Cons

It's kind of slow and stodgy. Management has recently been making a lot of noise about 'innovation,' less because they seem to know what that means in this company's context and more because that's a word that everyone uses. The real innovators in the industry -- the Googles, the Facebooks -- are leaving Akamai in the dust. Akamai doesn't even really register on the map for people coming out of college with CS degrees. Akamai should be a company that keeps people in Cambridge, but it's not. I doubt many of the top candidates from MIT and Stanford and CMU have ever decided to come to Cambridge because Akamai offered them a job.