Akamai Technologies

Work-life balance is decent'ish. People are nice to each other. Non-toxic work environment.

Luddites rule the roost at Akamai. The thinking, often times of architects and engineering leaders, is stuck in the 80's and 90's; stubborn and insular.

Being one of the earliest movers in what we now think of as the "enterprise cloud"-space, they have let so many opportunities slip by and ceded ground, and are still doing so, to a plethora of "cloud" companies who did not have that advantage.

There is no vision or technical leadership to even bridge this gap, let alone break out of this cycle of building and maintaining aging, fragile, and inflexible technologies and infrastructure. A lot of time is spent on reinventing the wheel with little to no benefits.

I can honestly say that my time at this company was the least productive, and that it did not let me grow as an engineer. In fact, I feel I regressed quite a bit, being stuck in a very dysfunctional engineering culture.

Final observation: I have written and submitted college assignments with more rigor and quality than some of the code that gets shipped out to production at Akamai.

Learn from what is going on outside of Akamai. Inculcate a culture of openness to accepting when you are wrong and of learning from and building upon good/successful ideas. Ditch your old ways of thinking ASAP.