Akamai Technologies

Work-life balance. Good people to work with.

This is based on my personal experience - others' mileage may vary...

• Support overload of existing production systems; keep firefighting.
• Rampant production failures leave little time for personal growth as a software engineer, unless you have come in with a lot of experience from the industry and all this doesn't bother you.
• Too little time to write actual code, unless you are too brilliant and can code up something very quickly.
• Architect does things on his own terms and overrides the tech lead and manager. Often times the tech lead and manager are as clueless as the new hire. Poor mentoring.
• Terrible for an entry-level engineer.
• Too many things to know before feeling productive; a whole lot of complexity in products.
• Immigration process is slow for entry-level folks (F-1 students moving to H-1B -- take care; clarify about the green card immigration process during the interview).
• Upward mobility is not so good; it takes 4-5 years to get promoted (since there are only 3 levels for software engineers), no matter how hard you worked. Till then, keep growing linearly in terms of compensation.
• A lot of the old guard - people store company knowledge in their heads, not sufficient documentation. You can get tired of going and asking for every small thing (even after spending 2 years in the company) -- this should be resolved by better training for new hires.
• Old legacy systems are in place -- need to use more open source.
• Not as competitive in compensation and perks as other top Silicon Valley companies.
• Conservative East Coast management - stingy in spending.
• Record profits, record quarters -- but still cut down on perks and bonuses to employees who are the main assets.
• Projects are understaffed. Very painful at times, even when the shortage of staff affects critical release cycles by a big margin. They do not want to spend!

I would look at better places in Silicon Valley to work for if you are a new or recent grad.