The company is saturated with antiquated, overlapping and competing systems (how many bug tracking / project management systems do we have? I lost count at five!).
Efforts are duplicated across the company.
This year, in announcing our *first* ever recognition of International Women's Day, our founder and CEO said "There's an International Women's Day! Who knew?!" That tells you everything you need to know about the company's dismal track record when it comes to addressing gender imbalances at the engineering, management, and director levels.
I've met maybe four female software engineers in my 7+ years at Akamai (but it's OK, 2/3 of the accounting and human resources staff are women - just not the department heads). I've encountered one black male software engineer - I hear there may be a few more out there. (But nearly every security guard and mailroom employee and maintenance worker is a person of color, so it's cool, right?). FOUR of the 48 people in executive leadership roles are nonwhite - four men, all of them of South Asian descent. FOUR of the 48 people in executive leadership roles are women, all of them white.
Beyond the complete lack of diversity among the employees, the company seems to be innovating chiefly through marketing rather than investing in real research and development. Some teams do devote resources to thinking ahead, but this is not a coordinated, company-wide effort. Attempts at major process improvements are inevitably stymied by stubborn and/or backward-looking managers.
