Akamai Reviews in San Mateo, CA

Pros

a lot of growth can happen

Cons

lot of competition in this sector

Advice to Senior Management

na

Pros

Super smart engineers including many PhDs in the Cambridge and San Mateo offices.
Great technology + innovation all around.
Top talent from industry.
In house developed monitoring infrastructure for the 100,000+ servers distributed around the world is top notch.
Flexibility with work hours.
Immense opportunity to learn about distributed systems and the Internet in general.

Cons

Can do with an onsite cafeteria.
Location in San Mateo - long commute for most employees who prefer to live in South Bay.

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

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

Exposure to many types of leading edge technologies
Place to learn all about the internet

Cons

Very demanding
Too much politics at times

Pros

Akamai is a great company to work for in terms of talent and the kind of work they do. The colleagues you will work with and extremely bright, talented and motivated. You will be exposed to a lot of different areas in the Internet world and there's a lot to learn. Most groups are open and you can always just go walk to someone and ask about their product.

Cons

Career development is almost non existent. Moving between different levels of engineering doesn't really matter much. There's still a lot of old guard in the company and it's not easy to compete against them in terms of promotions (which in a way is good). A lot has changed in the recent years with a number of acquisitions and the company is no longer as tight knit as before.

Benefits are nothing to write home about.

Advice to Senior Management

No idea. I'm bad at advice!

Pros

Lots of smart people from MIT and other great places; a very unique product; a clear market leader; a great customer base - you provide a valuable service for most of the major web sites.

Cons

Not that much innovation going on at the moment. Akamai is largely selling whatever was developed years ago. If you are not in the main Cambridge office, it is hard to get things done. Some good people have left for this reason.

Advice to Senior Management

More innovation. More empowerment for remote offices. Don't run the company like it is IBM - run it as it used to be run.

Pros

Very smart peopl. Very complex problems. New exciting technology. Lots of customer feedback and interaction

Cons

akamai is very stingy about compensation.They say that they are less competitive on salary and more competitive on bonuses but it seems they are not competitive in either case.

 akamai has very isolated groups and each of them are very high performance. I have seen extremely less interaction among groups.
Groups/teams themselves are very less collaborative and thrive on individual performers. If you are someone who thrives on group effort this is not a place for you. You need to be solely competent who can work in a very fast paced environment and needs to be able to perform.

Advice to Senior Management

increase compensation