Arista Networks

Healthy work-life balance. And that is it!

This review is going to be exhaustive, so sit tight if you decided to read!

Compensation review

Base pay: Base pay is significantly below the industry standard, and no annual hikes are awarded (as opposed to industry standard). Also, in the past 5 years, I have never seen a market adjustment.

Bonus: Arista gives out an above-industry-standard bonus, but it is going down. It is probably the only good thing about Arista's compensation.

Stocks: If you are a pre-IPO employee leaving Arista, the company is way below industry standard here as well. FYI, refreshers are only granted at the end of the grant period (i.e., ~4 years) (again, not as per industry standards). Though it didn't happen to me, I know some cases wherein the refreshers were not offered, went down in numbers, and were delayed by as long as a year. [Some of these employees were performing well, by the way]. Another bad thing about the stocks at Arista is that an increase in stock price is considered to be an increase in compensation, whereas the opposite is not true.

General Overview: Generally speaking, the overall annual CTC at Arista is way, way below the industry standard, and the gap/percentage increases over time. Another thing worth noting is that even if everything goes well, there is no guarantee that your annual CTC will go up (in fact, given the conditions in the India office, there are high chances that it will go down).

Company review

NO perks at Arista. No internet bill reimbursement, no food, company outings are the worst I have ever seen (one-day outing to a resort which includes the cheapest possible resort package), team outings aren't great as well (if they happen).

Politics depends on your team; some are good, and some are too involved with politics. Same goes for managers; some are awesome, some micromanage too much.

Managers/leaders at Arista India have limited power, and mostly everything is governed by HQ. (Including monetary and engineering decisions).

A review: A broken algo that will determine your rank and your numbers! And the output of which will never be shared with you! So technically, you will never know where you stand in the company.

Arista's flat hierarchy: Everybody here is an SE. What this brings: 1.) No defined roles. You don't get to learn leadership/architectural skills required in the industry. 2.) No motivation for promotion. 3.) You can get demoted if a review feels so! 4.) AND Politics

Work review

Work is not at all good and not at all useful in the industry. You will be working on an 8-year-old codebase and will be doing maintenance work half of the time (it can also go up to 100 percent). Whatever development you do will be on top of this old codebase only, hence you will not be learning much. Whatever you learn is Arista-specific, and no new tools/open-source code is used over here.

Advice to prospective employees

DON'T join Arista; it is not good for your career. Also, don't look at reviews from people with over 6-7 years of experience. They are pre-IPO employees and made a lot of money from ANET stocks, plus when they joined, Arista had some nice projects. Now there are no nice projects, and your learning is going to suffer. Also, at this point in time, there are a lot of better options out there who will pay you more money and offer better work.

PS: If you want a healthy work-life balance and are heading towards your retired life, Arista is for you. If not, please DON'T join.