Pros
It's very difficult to divide Pros and Cons. I'll try to write actual situations I encountered, not just writing my impressions, "good or bad". So let me mix them up here. As a memorial to my leave this company. (Place and title is anonymous) == Culture == I had worked for a bureaucratic company that everyone including non-tech people would know the name and is several ten times larger than Akamai. From my experience, Akamai has five times more managers and positions compared to a far larger company than Akamai. I feel too many management teams and the job titles end up leading Akamai to "no decision can't be made". Even though Akamai is still small - midsize company, Akamai is the most bureaucratic company I've ever experienced. The interesting part is that there are so many rules but many managers even don't care about the rules. They tend to overwrite even very basic company rules. In most cases, those rules are used to say "It's not my/our job". A lot of red tapes in Akamai. So, it's sometimes impossible to achieve a very simple thing. Let's say, when you go to someone to ask a task following a guide on the intranet, you might be told "it's not my task because my manager has told me it's not our task even if they're defined and written on the intranet". Or "I know Akamai is selling that service/product but our team doesn’t have enough skill, so we don’t do that." These are just examples, but you would often encounter similar situations because one small task is divided into many small tasks. It's very common throughout the company, not depending on your job title. So, in most cases, I think your responsibility is very small compared to average companies. If you like small tasks and don’t want to experience new things. I recommend this company. You would get a great work-life balance. But if you are like go-to-guy, I don’t recommend this company because a lot of people would come to you and push you to do their jobs even if those tasks are not your responsibility. No rules. You need to work with many people to achieve a small task. Sometimes, you need to find someone who follows the company rules secretly behind his/her managers if the manager is kind of people who don't like to follow the rules. The more you are versatile, the more you would encounter these troublesome situations. I felt Akamai consists of village culture. Cliques are everywhere. They control the company and block innovation and changes. And the culture created by them is, as you can imagine, naturally corrupting. If you like corruption and are good at getting benefits from the culture, this culture will fit you. I think this creates village culture. I've seen several bullies consistently over the years. One bully is recognized and reported even by a customer. So, I could say it's the prevailing culture. HR recognizes those bullies but seems trying to confine them as if there is nothing happening. And I've seen some managers seem to have difficulties communicating with customers or partners. I've seen and been told by customers or partners that some of Akamai's managers are arrogant even in front of customers even when they have trouble with their platform. Naturally, many staff employees follow that kind of style while saying customers are most important. So, you often encounter many illogical situations. One best point in Akamai would be that you can get more anger management ability. I was told by my former colleagues in Akamai. "You proved yourself to be a really bad guy because you could work for such a long time in Akamai" Many good colleagues quit. The average is around one or two years. They are still good friends.
Cons
Instead of Cons. I put my review from the perspective of technologies. == Technologies == I don’t recommend this company, especially for engineers. If you want to have some experience with CDN, go to Fastly or AWS. Akamai CDN is based on old physical server technologies, there a lot of legacy operations that seem to be automated very easily. Akamai is trying to move on to new technologies, but it's too slow. The number of CDN servers is still number one in the world and the strongest point from the perspective of capacity. But Akamai started losing the advantage as other cloud vendors are focusing on CDN. And I feel making things more complicated by dividing into many manual tasks is the typical Akamai way while many tech companies making things easier with technologies. There are many small products based on CDN which could be a simple product with other venders. I would say they are coming from too many organizations and politics. The way I look at it, to create more positions, Akamai has needed to divide one product into many products. Maybe there is so much to do. But that would be because of a lot of manual work which comes from the immaturity of legacy product architectures and approval processes which have to go through many people. It's very common for engineers to say that they feel they are wasting their time, should be able to consolidate these tasks. For example, with AWS, you may be able to do a task in 5 minutes. With Akamai, it takes one month or impossible. If it's a simple task, these things could happen very easily. And roles are divided into many job titles. So, your responsibility would be very small. Depending on your situation, most of the tasks you do could be clerical tasks. At least I know a few guys who weren't satisfied with their roles and quit saying that their responsibility is too small and they can't understand why a simple single task requires many people. So, if you have good work ethics to learn more and work hard, I think this is not the place you should belong to. You would encounter a lot of red tapes and politics, local rules by cliques. For example, in other companies, one person can manage and complete one simple task. But in Akamai, sometimes it can be called a project and may require three or four people. But you can’t tell these things from job description open on the internet. Akamai is trying to expand into new technology areas such as enterprise security which are completely different from CDN. But Akamai has track records keep failing new business. You can find them if you look up on the internet carefully. As I see it, Akamai tries to put those new businesses into the same business framework as CDN. So, Akamai still has difficulties to get those new business rolling. So, you shouldn’t expect much in these areas. Some people may like birth pains to create new things and get new business rolling. But I think only you can encounter there would be politics and red tapes, a lot of reasons "we don’t do that" by old cliques who stick to the experience of CDN. I've seen a few people left in very short terms, again and again, saying that they had trouble with those situations. It seems a typical innovation dilemma. If you have good experience in those areas, it wouldn't work here. Even with CDN business, Akamai doesn’t allow customers to sign up online. You need to sign a contract that is really complicated and hard to understand and takes a lot of time. From outside, as many cloud companies allow customers to sing up online, it seems an easy thing. But Akamai has a lot of reasons why "we don't / can't do that". There are a lot of people involved in one product development, but even the specifications of a product are very vague. Most of the specifications are "not defined". So, learning a product takes a lot of effort and time then even with that effort and time, you will still be not sure about the product. Actually, there are many materials online, but most of them are sales/marketing materials even though they are supposed to be targeted at technical people. In most cases, you need to work based on some kind of rumors. Product information is usually exchanged verbally or through chatting. In most cases, the source of information is someone's blog on the intranet. No culture to write down information. Everyone is not sure who is responsible for a product even though there are many product managers. Product managers (I don’t know why there are many product manager titles for one product) are in most cases not able to be responsible for their products probably because of a lot of red tapes.