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Fairly undemanding, but dysfunctional. Technical debt is high and always on the rise

Senior Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Akamai Technologies for 2 years
May 13, 2022
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros
  • I can get away with playing video games during the workday and working really slowly on my tickets.
  • I can take time off whenever I want, ish.
  • Good benefits.
  • Mature company.
Cons
  • Technical debt
  • Nobody with the ability to hire staff or allocate budget to addressing technical debt is really doing that.
  • Horrifying lack of reasonable quality assurance (as in, key systems do not have unit tests).
  • QA staff as a whole have no idea what they are doing and are stuck in the year 2000 at the latest. Most testing is done manually and by the seat of one's pants, console-cowboy style.
  • Service incidents caused by aforementioned technical debt and lack of quality assurance have prompted the company, not to address technical debt or prioritize improving the pre-release QA process, but to instead create a tight chokehold on teams' ability to release new software at all (including bug fixes for issues which couldn't be caught in those whacky pre-prod half-baked testing setups which are in danger of causing new service incidents!).
  • People who complain about this stuff are not challenged on the validity of their frustrations, but also nothing happens to materially improve the situation.
Advice to Management

Replace some of the in-house garbage that's been around for 15 years with decent, industry-standard solutions.

Use more open source projects.

Create a department which effectively maintains CI/CD infrastructure so that workaday developers don't have to touch that themselves.

Ship your logs to a log-management online service, even if it means paying a vendor. It's not as big a security risk as it was back in the day, and it is so difficult to debug production and testnet systems using half-baked bash scripts wrapped around grep and stuff like that that you are burning out all of your competent developers to a crisp.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
5.0
Culture and Values
4.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
2.0
Career Opportunities
2.0
Compensation and Benefits
4.0
Senior Management
1.0

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