Akamai Technologies

• Great work-life balance.
• Lack of intense pressure, lay-off threats, etc.
• Fair compensation and evaluation, if you take the process seriously.
• Company is always profitable and stable.
• Company is very important to the Internet's stability/performance.

Lack of intense pressure also means lack of accountability, do-little employees, and even do-little products/teams. A lot of meetings and talking; lack of smooth, repeatable processes in development. Tons of process, but it's not efficient. Hiring is inflexible and cheap (letting Googles and Apples take potential hires away based on higher compensation; lack of flexibility in opening positions to suit referred talent; and other absurd budget-related failures). Very cheap in terms of incidentals (equipment, parties). Almost all tech built in-house since 1999 -- slow to benefit from the open-source community; almost no contribution to open source either. Company always profitable, but it seems to be coasting in terms of breaking through with respect to market opportunities.

I don't presume to give business advice, as it's not my area. It does feel like the company has certain basic strengths that drive profitability and dominion over other Content Delivery Network corps, and sales and PS are great at keeping the gravy train going. However, it doesn't seem like new projects tend to succeed or make a large difference. So the company seems sort of static.

My main advice is to improve flexibility in hiring, especially on great referrals. The default must be to snatch great people at almost all costs. Instead, the default is that there's no position or there's a bit of an insufficient budget, etc. So we don't get highest-tier talent, even though our standards are sufficiently high. It's frustrating. At least it is this way in California (Santa Clara, San Francisco). HQ near MIT in Cambridge, MA, might be a lot better at this.