Akamai Technologies

• For the right role and performance, pay is excellent.
• Amazing scale, which can teach a motivated engineer tremendous skills and techniques.

• toxic culture and extraordinarily political.

Teams sabotage each other to ensure that their competing ideas win; it seriously happens all the time.

• Sadly, people play on Tom's personality to get projects done or tanked.

• Many in senior leadership are clueless, or willfully ignorant, about what is happening in their teams.

• Good ideas, especially those based in industry best practices, are often ignored or discounted because of "Not Invented Here" or early inventor syndrome. Because Akamai's tech was truly so great in 1998, they struggle to let go of parts of it that have now been leap-frogged, leading to a bizarre state of advanced and very clunky or backward and outdated technology, and not just for legacy systems but even new work.

• As an example: The VP in our office showed up to work less a couple times a year, only when bigwigs would visit. Effectively delegating his entire job, even direct reports wouldn't be able to reach him for weeks at a time. He never did perf reviews or gave feedback. Nearly non-existent leadership for his teams, but he talks just enough of a good game to leadership to somehow get away with it for years now.

Get a CEO. Tom is an amazing scientist and mathematician, but focuses on numbers so much that he doesn't see the games played at the next level down, or how bad the politics have become.