Akamai Technologies

Akamai's benefits and pay are good to great, and the work-life balance is excellent.

You'll have an opportunity to work with really huge datasets, and the intersection between your work and your daily life will start to become apparent as you realize just how much traffic Akamai controls.

It's a real opportunity to make a difference with some decent technology.

There's a huge and shiny new building in Kendall Square that Akamai will be moving into very shortly. It's very modern and cool.

The tech stack at Akamai is almost entirely proprietary. The company does let teams integrate open source and new tech as they see fit, but the process is very slow.

Basic solved problems like continuous build and integration seem like unmoveable behemoths, even though they are not. Technical debt is rising, and the company leadership has explicitly admitted that they are prioritizing revenue streams over any sort of technical debt reduction or mitigation.

Over the past 5 years, the company has gone from a fairly nimble, if a bit introspective, organization to a profit-hungry big business.

There are a few departments that seem to be guided by randomly throwing darts at a board, with no thought to how it will affect other units. Communication between business units is poor to non-existent.

Hire more people and stop trying to squeeze blood from a stone in engineering. You can only get so much out of people before they decide to quit.

The company name doesn't carry as much weight as you think it does, and talent is quickly going elsewhere. You risk being a company of lifers that will all retire within 10 years of each other at this rate.

The company is incredibly profitable; stop being so greedy and take on some technical debt reduction, and the problems will start to solve themselves.