Akamai Technologies

The company is loaded with smart people. It's challenging and exciting to work in an environment where the internship candidates are working on their second Ph.D.'s!

Working at Akamai sometimes feels like working "backstage at The Internet," as we watch terabytes of data fly around the world. (Marketing claims that we "deliver 30% of the content on the Internet" are conveniently impossible to verify or refute.)

My view of the company is shaped by the group I work with – largely a set of dedicated, knowledgeable people with deep domain expertise and a willingness to share whatever they can in terms of time, knowledge, and tips. I work in the Cambridge office.

The company is saturated with antiquated, overlapping, and competing systems (how many bug tracking/project management systems do we have? I lost count at five!).

Efforts are duplicated across the company.

This year, in announcing our first ever recognition of International Women's Day, our founder and CEO said, "There's an International Women's Day! Who knew?!" That tells you everything you need to know about the company's dismal track record when it comes to addressing gender imbalances at the engineering, management, and director levels.

I've met maybe four female software engineers in my 7+ years at Akamai (but it's OK; two-thirds of the accounting and human resources staff are women – just not the department heads).

I've encountered one black male software engineer. I hear there may be a few more out there. (But nearly every security guard, mailroom employee, and maintenance worker is a person of color, so it's cool, right?).

• Four of the 48 people in executive leadership roles are nonwhite – all four are men of South Asian descent.
• Four of the 48 people in executive leadership roles are women – all of them are white.

Beyond the complete lack of diversity among the employees, the company seems to be innovating chiefly through marketing rather than investing in real research and development. Some teams do devote resources to thinking ahead, but this is not a coordinated, company-wide effort. Attempts at major process improvements are inevitably stymied by stubborn and/or backward-looking managers.

Invest more in your employees. Invest more in research. Blow up the customer portal and start from scratch. Start developing real replacements for mission-critical legacy systems, which I was told were considered obsolete when I was hired more than seven years ago! Stop hiring senior managers and executives from fading, aging tech companies like Cisco. See if you can find a few talented women and a few people of color to fill senior management, engineering, and sales roles.