Akamai Technologies

Generally friendly.

Nice and smart coworkers.

Vibrant internal chat (Zulip) and a less vibrant, more official Webex chat.

Fairly remote-friendly; almost everyone is free to work as much or as little from home versus the office as they want.

After outages last year, there's a new level of focus on safety and some movement on things like better tooling.

After outages last year, it's currently hard to get some stuff done. I'm hopeful that the pro here will win out long term, but it's really hard to be sure.

Short-term focus: It's hard to convince execs to work on tooling or tech debt reduction that won't benefit a particular team within a matter of months. For example, the Developer Productivity team isn't funded to produce good release management tooling, and new products are a "we need this feature in six months, make it work" thing, without cleaning up the issues that are left behind. There's some hope that the outages last year are finally causing change on this.

Assigned desks are only available with 182+ days in the office (about 4-4.5 days a week). Otherwise, you get a flex desk. We've complained, and there's some hope this may change.

Pay more attention to tooling (BaRT, query, etc.).

Plan more slack, so that when an urgent new project comes up, people can drop something non-urgent (tech debt cleanup is great for this!), rather than trying to figure out which is more urgent.