Pros
I have been with Akamai for a relatively long time and haven't written a review so it was about time! There are many reasons why I think Akamai is a fantastic place to work and I'll mention a few, but they are far from all. If you like these - consider joining us - I want more awesome people to call friends & colleagues! - Great people. When I say that I mean in the full spectrum as human beings. Pretty much all the people I have worked with throughout the years are genuinely nice people who work hard at achieving Akamai's mission to make the Internet a better, safer place for everyone. There is tremendous talent here at every level - engineering, customer support, product management, sales, hr. The tone is set from the very top by Tom who is extremely hard working & smart, cares about the company & people deeply and manages the company to the highest ethical standards. Evidence of which is our inclusion in the JUST 100. - Culture. Akamai is a diverse company with people from all over the world and in almost all parts of the world - united on values of honesty, transparency, fairness and mutual respect. While there will always be exceptions I really feel these are the overarching principles by which we go about our days. - The mission. Everyday we who work here are responsible for making billions of people's online experience a good and secure one. Be it streaming movies, reading the news, shopping online, banking, you name it. We take this responsibility seriously and go to extreme lengths to make sure we get it right. When something does break or doesn't go as planned - we fix it as fast as we can and try our best to make sure it doesn't happen again. Ironically, most of the time people don't know we even exists which means we are doing it right. - Our technology. Akamai has been around since the early days of the Internet - pioneering many of the fundamental technologies & concepts that power the Internet of today. But we aren't standing still - there is evolution and innovation happening here everyday. Everyone is empowered and encouraged to contribute to this. Just over the course of the last year I have personally played a part in innovations in both edge computing and security for example. - Akamai is profitable with solid financials. As opposed to many if not most of our competitors we aren't bleeding cash every quarter. This means the company has endurance which is critical for material & long term investments - be it in new technology, hiring talent, scaling up to meet future demand or weathering out storms. - We are serious about our environmental & sustainability programs. Early on the company set goals for emissions, energy and e-waste and publish a yearly sustainability report on how we are doing. This is one of the reasons we are included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI) and the FTSE4Good Index.
Cons
Overall there's not much I would say are big cons as they typically come as consequences of the pros but for full transparency here's a few. - We don't market ourselves as much and as well as we should. This mostly affects attracting talent (so hopefully this review can help change that a bit). Customers and those in our technology space know us well but outside of that we are a bit anonymous. - Profitability means we invest with care. That's not to say we don't take any risks - we do - but if the economics don't materialize after a while we also aren't afraid to move on. - Bloated organization in parts. Primarily I would say this manifests as too much middle management and process sometimes. But I never let that hold me back and neither should you :)