Limelight Networks Reviews

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

Pros – I read all 8 reviews before posting and thought I should set the record straight. I've learned that 1 star reviews you find on the internet are typically based on emotion rather than fact, and that seems to be the case here.

Limelight is the best company I've ever worked for, hands down. Their excellent benefits include: competitive salary, quality medical/dental/vision insurance, flexible hours, telework opportunities, and an onsite 24x7 self-serve deli (Tempe HQ office). Obviously every position is not eligible for flex hours and telework, but many are. Even at Limelight's other offices where there is no deli, the company stocks snacks and drinks. And you are free to go offsite for lunch despite what one reviewer stated.

All supervisors and management I've ever worked under have been open and friendly. I have advanced twice since starting at the company 5 years ago. Senior management is very forward-thinking and engaged. They provide regular updates to the entire company, and are very transparent internally compared to most organizations. No, they haven't turned the company into Apple or Google yet, but the company is continually improving and gaining industry recognition.

Limelight is a small group of hard-working professionals who have built a leading digital services provider. The company is steadily moving forward and in less than 10 years has become a leader in the industry. Our customers love us and reward us with new business all the time. We're more of a partner to them than a vendor. Anyone in the know is already aware of this. If this sounds like your kind of place, I welcome you to join us. You will be challenged and rewarded.

Cons – Limelight is a truly unique company. There really are no other companies out there that do exactly what we do, the way we do it. There are a couple that come close, but not quite. This is a huge bonus in our industry. However, the cost of being on the bleeding-edge of this new business concept is the unpredictability and frequent change and adaptation required.

Right now, the company is constantly growing and changing, and with that comes frequent re-organization and new process implementation and refinement. This can be frustrating, but if you are willing to be flexible and to take charge where you see an opportunity, you will be successful. Sometimes problems (read: opportunities) come up and you just have to own it and take care of it yourself. If you have a "That's not my job" mentality, you won't last long here. We are a tight-knit group of professionals who are not afraid to get our hands dirty and are always willing to help each other out to get the job done.

I've been here for over 5 years and am used to regular change, but I suppose many people can be frustrated by this, particularly if they are from a large, well-established organization. Limelight is still very "lean"; employees are numbered in the hundreds, not thousands. If you expect everything to be perfectly ordered and predictable, good luck in the tech world. Go work at a telco, bank, or insurance company.

Advice to Senior Management – Work on developing and implementing a concrete, effective internal organizational plan with clear responsibilities and processes, one with that will work now and into the future. This will provide a more welcoming environment for employees who are not

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

Current Employee – been working at Limelight Networks full-time for less than a year

Pros – This is an excellent work environment and definitely challenging. Although I have been here a short time, I see management is definitely very proactive about keeping customers happy and takes every customer issue very seriously.

Cons – Better integration between the newly acquired companies would help.

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

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

Pros – Limelight team in Seattle is fast-paced and is really good at getting things done.

Cons – Too much process sometimes causing a delay in delivering products.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

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

Pros – Culture: The culture at Limelight is AWESOME! There's an overwhelming sense of camaraderie within the team, and I have yet to witness really any finger-pointing going on when mistakes are made (and they are made at times). When there are fire-drills, everyone bands together to diagnose the issue and solve it, without blaming anyone. We do postmortems afterwards to figure out how to prevent issues like this from happening again. The folks that I work with are willing to step in for each other, when needed, and even when they're not asked to. Also I feel like we have a culture of making sure credit is given to the person who actually deserves the credit, since there isn't really any competition amongst each other (which is thanks to management and also the people).

People: Also, I find the group of people I work with very fun. We have occasional events like go-karting, whirlyball, happy-hour, board-game night, hackathons, etc. It's a great bunch of people to hang out with, during work-time, lunch, dinner, or on weekends, all up to you. I like the team's sense of humor, lame or not, since they're fun to hang out with, and discuss random things like algorithms, software frameworks, games, politics, sports, outdoor events, life, future, sponge bob, zombies, etc.

Attitude: Along with that, in my opinion, the engineers here are humble and down-to-earth. I can't think of any other engineer that I've met at Limelight that I felt was condescending, other than myself, but that's because I'm super-awesome, and you know it. Pretty much most engineers are willing to help you out, as long as they're not too busy with the project they're involved in or if there isn't a firedrill happening.

Growth: Also the management is great here at Limelight. It still has a startup feel, even though it's a public company. Basically you can grow as much as you want to grow. If you want to be the service owner of 100 services, you can, as long as you can manage it, and management will help you out by shipping a case of redbull to your door every week if you need and enjoy it. If you want to experiment with new languages, frameworks, etc, you have the flexibility to do so, as long as you can defend your position on why what you did is the best approach at the moment for you. Also the management here is good about making sure you take time off when you need to, and since the other engineers are there to step in for you, you can take your vacation without much worries about getting called during a firedrill.

Management: I can only speak for management within my group, but management has done a good job of making sure to try to prioritize project and filter requests if it's not a priority, so that engineers can spend more of their time working on things that make the product better for our customers. Of course, some requests (internal or not) trickle down to us that should've been filtered, but nobody's perfect.

Transparency: With that, I feel that management is pretty transparent with us. They tell us how it is, and answer our questions, as long as it doesn't violate any of the rules of being a public company. I feel like management definitely hears the employees, and is real with us when they say they're going to do something about the issue, or if the issue isn't a big enough priority right now.

Brilliance: There's a lot of brilliant minds here at Limelight, that can help give you guidance, and help you grow. Lots of good managers that want to help you grow, and will open up opportunities for you, and will go to bat for you.

Innovation: Here at Limelight, they do value innovation and hard work, so your efforts don't go unnoticed. Your peers also recognize you for what you contribute, and will fight for your recognition if it goes unnoticed. There's also good incentive programs within Limelight to promote innovation.

Vision: Lastly, I like the vision that management has. I do believe that Limelight has a great future ahead of it. I also love how Limelight is a customer-based culture, so the work that you do here is to help your customers and in-kind the customers will thank you for it. Due to being customer-centric, sometimes developers will get involved with customers directly to implement a new feature or to solve an issue, so I believe it's a positive in terms of engineer growth aspects.

Cons – Collaboration: Since Limelight has several separate groups that work on different products, I don't think Limelight does a stellar job of coordinating work effort. There isn't as much in-your-face visibility on what other teams are working on and experimenting with. It's available to you via the wiki, along with talking with other teammates that might know about it, but since it's not as transparent what is being worked on, sometimes there's duplicated work. But the thing is, I'm not sure if it's any different at other places (same issues at my previous workplace). I know management heard our groans about this, and they're working on setting up a system to address this issue.

No Company Parties: Also because the groups are separated in different regions (Tempe, San Francisco, Seattle), there rarely seems to be any company-wide events that brings all the divisions in one place for a celebration. I do have to say that realistically, that's difficult to do, but it would be nice to have.

Antivirus: PCI compliance requires antivirus on my machine, which can hog up my CPU for a while, but it's a necessary sacrifice, right? That's what I'm told, right? Right?

Compensation: The compensation at Limelight isn't notable, especially in comparison to the other companies around the Bay Area. I would say the compensation is average or maybe a little bit below average. But there is a balance between what compensation doesn't provide, does it provide in other ways, like the culture and growth prospects.

Food: We don't get catered lunches and dinners every day.

Firedrills: Firedrills aren't fun, but when are they ever fun? We still need to do a better job of reducing false positive alerts, since false positive results in engineers and ops from being too desensitized to it. This is currently being work on.

Restrictive Policy: Along with the positives of innovation, there's some negatives. I do feel like Limelight's policy on side-projects is a quite restrictive. Basically if you plan on working on your own side-projects on your own time with your own machine and software, Limelight supposedly can take claim over that side-project. Of course, you can take full ownership of it if you tell Limelight about it and have them determine within a specified timeframe if they want to own that project or not, but I feel like if you're doing it on your own time with your own resources and you're not working on a competing project using Limelight's IP, then it should be 100% your own project. Of course, being able to determine it's not a competing project can be very subjective, and not one person knows all of Limelight's IP.

Mandatory Tasks: Like with most companies, there are times you're handed boring tasks. There's really nothing you can do about it since those boring tasks need to get done. On the positive side of things, the PMs and managers try to distribute these tasks so not one person is overwhelmed with projects that they don't find interesting.

Meetings: As we grow, we've been having more and more meetings. Meetings are used as a way to disseminate information but to also better collaborate. There have been times that there were too many meeting, and all of these meetings is really not due to management, but due to the engineers. Since we, the engineers, are the ones that set up these meetings for design reviews, hiring process, etc, we can't blame anyone but ourselves. On the positive side of things, this is all in our control.

Advice to Senior Management – Continue to push your vision, and unify the groups, to deliver a great product that can change the industry.

Also I would love to have more time dedicated to growth, meaning that instead of spending time of projects that come down from customers, management, etc, I would love it if some time was dedicated to working on projects that can benefit the company, like research new frameworks, etc.

It would also be nice to have a competitive salary amongst the top companies in the Bay Area.

Lastly, I would like the policy on personal side-projects to be a little bit more lax, if possible. Unfortunately this policy deters me from pursuing side-projects or results in turnover, since it's the same as working on the weekends if the side-project ends up being owned by the company. In that scenario, the only incentive for doing so is for the betterment of the company, which is good, but that weekend time could also be spent enjoying the outdoors too. In the end, this may result in less innovation due to engineers not experimenting with new technology, and also results in dissatisfaction with the company itself.

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

Current Employee – been working at Limelight Networks full-time for less than a year

Pros – The culture of the Seattle office is second to none. Everyone's working together to make great products. We have almost no conflict between engineering, management, product and sales.

You might not believe this, but as a software team, we get to spend the time we need to deliver high quality, maintainable software, rather than rushed, buggy crap. Both product management and sales respect the engineering team's recommendations and only occasionally oversell / overcommit.

Cons – Some of the company policies coming from HQ can introduce unnecessary overhead around things like machine acquisition and deployments, but even this is kept in check by excellent management.

Advice to Senior Management – Continue growing toward the more agile, less process driven ways of doing things. Follow the lead of the Seattle office to develop a collaborative, trust-based environment throughout the entire company.

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

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

Pros – Fun atmosphere
telecommute
producing technology that the world uses and will rely on

Cons – Dynamic environment, change is always taking place in effort to improve efficiency.
Top level communication is sometimes vague.

Advice to Senior Management – In my opinion, it is better to delay the launch of a product when it is not ready to protect the brand vs. releasing a product to meet a date requirement.

Something like:

Customers would rather have a house with doors a month late, rather than getting a house with no doors on the scheduled delivery date.

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

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

Pros – There are many technologies in place so there are always opportunities to learn new things. The management staff is encouraging and always willing to listen to suggestions for improvement. The environment is casual and very conducive to creativity. Even though the company is always growing it still has a small company feel with great teamwork visible everywhere.

Cons – It is a smaller company so opportunities for promotions occur less frequently than at some larger companies. Management seems to have the "it's not what you know but who you know" attitude towards some purchases and hiring decisions.

Advice to Senior Management – Encourage more interaction between groups surrounding evaluation, purchasing and implementation of software / solutions, possibly create a steering committee. Sometimes purchasing decisions are made in a silo so things are put into production without feedback from other groups that are affected.

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

Current Employee – been working at Limelight Networks full-time for more than a year

Pros – Limelight balances the best of both worlds. My background is primarily in young startups - with all that it entails - commitment to changing a market, bringing new products to market, ability to be flexible to changing market dynamics and customer requests. And even though Limelight is a public company, it encompasses all of that. But it's balanced by the fact that it's a small public company with almost 2K customers around the globe, where you don't wonder on a weekly basis if your Series A money is going to run out.

The career opportunity within the company is your's to make - if you are a top performer, opportunities, new and interesting projects get thrown your way. No one has ever said no to me when I have wanted to be involved in something. Add to it that the fact that I work with some of the smartest people in the industry, and it's a great place to work.

Cons – Both the company and the market is at a pivot point of change and with that requires some very intense periods of work. While I work late hours, sometimes on weekends, and am always "on", the flip side is that no one has ever though twice if I have to leave earlier for a PTA meeting or a little league game. The executive managers that I have worked with have consistently been good at supporting a work/life balance.

Advice to Senior Management – The regular company meetings are nice - but would be great to do have more informal get togethers with executive management so there can be more dialogue that is hard to do on via WebEx.

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

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

Pros – Extremely flexible hours (depending on department)
Free food/snacks from the world famous Limelight Deli
Your fellow employees will consist of an immense brain-trust of talent including some of the nation's top notch engineers, programmers, managers and technicians.

Cons – Some of the departments have mandatory 10 hours shift, but they are 4 x 10's
Some departments have mandatory 12 hour shifts but they are 4/3, 3/4 day structures by week.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep doing what you are doing and pushing Limelight forward to the future!!

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

Current Employee – been working at Limelight Networks full-time for more than a year

Pros – People & Perks. You'll work with some of the smartest people you've ever met. The perks are outstanding. Besides the infamous free deli, you'll enjoy great medical/dental/life/401k benefits, events, a wonderful location, casual dress, casual humor, all with a supportive team. If you do well, you will be rewarded. Great work environment!

Cons – There are still growing pains, although I see that as a benefit - a great opportunity to create legacy processes and procedures.

Advice to Senior Management – Make sure every department is transparent to upper mgmt. in the way they handle their employees. My positive experience may not reflect what goes on in other departments. And remember that job security, respect, and potential advancement is sometimes a better motivator than cash.

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