Pros
Distance to office convenient, could work from home, good work, great relationships with customers and peers.
Cons
I worked well over 40 hours a week for Akamai. I busted myself to make Akamai look good, to do everything that I could to make my customers happy, because that made me happy. But I never got any credit for the amount of work that I put in to pick up the slack because people were dropping things left and right. But let a small mistake slip through the cracks because you are overworked, you are looked at like you are not worthy to be there. Management never took a look at the operations, even though concerns were raised, but instead they didn't like people raising concerns and honed in on the person raising concerns and in the end, the overworked person trying to fill the gaps is often the one punished. They never fixed and probably still to this day have not fixed the root cause. Certain people were on customer accounts that were not serving them well. I was hired to come in and help serve those accounts. I was subjected to several months of grueling training known as "whiteboarding" where you do several hours of really bad online training, work with a mentor, and then the people who are going to be your peers (or in my case whose work I would be taking on) test you. Now that sounds kind of strange right? The people with the bad attitudes, whose accounts were being neglected were doing the test proctoring? That is correct. So, if they knew that you would be taking some of their work, it seemed that they really liked sabotaging you. You are in a room with a whiteboard, a camera, there are people in the room, you have no notes, no references, and you have no idea what people are going to ask you. And there are people purposely try to rabbit hole you so that you bomb the presentation within minutes so that they can have a laugh. And it did happen. I had worked so hard on my presentation and how I was going to put it into my own words, thoughts, pictures, and had presented it to my mentor, who passed off on it, only to be bounced on a question that had nothing to do with what I had been presenting. The audience are in a notepad session where they are writing notes on you and each can see what the others are writing. I watched guys pass their training with flying colors. No hard questions. It was like the high five fist bump macho club. However, there was one guy who minutes into his presentation got rabbit holed and he said "**Explicatory** it" and sat down at the table. He gave up trying and eventually quit. As a female, you don't get invited to lunch with the bro club. Even if you work on the same accounts., which leads to things being discussed and you are out of the loop, just because you don't have the right chromosomes. I didn't get a raise for years and when I asked why, there were "other people that were making less than me" was the reason. So, no matter if I had a killer year, the customers loved me, and the slacker that was making less than me was still slacking, it didn't matter. Things needed to be equaled out according to management. You could take a class, and be reimbursed for it. However, if you missed the deadline in getting your receipt in, you couldn't get it, even with a good reason. And especially if you had a boss who wouldn't bat for you. Why is there a deadline anyway? I got an entire Masters degree paid for by an employer, including books, tuition, and even got a bonus after I completed it. Funny, I did that just fine over a period of 2 years, but took one little course at Akamai and couldn't get reimbursed for it. That is what you contend with when you have a boss that is not in your corner. It could have been reimbursed but they chose not to. To work there, you had to be a manly woman to get the respect of your team. Some women would actually lower their voices and act bro-like to get respect. People should be looked at and respected for who they are, not what they have in their pants. If I thought my old manager was bad, enter the new manager who was once my peer. He was in love with himself and loved to hear himself talk. Nobody could stand him. He only did what management told him, trampled on his teammates, when he made mistakes, he blamed others, and tried to take credit for so many things in order to get brownie points and they still wouldn't promote him. He had a penchant for always being right and arguing with everyone. Because they ran out of people to promote, he eventually got the management job and we all congratulated him. But eventually, he made my life so bad that I didn't even want to be at work any longer and I put in my 2 weeks notice. My peers and my customers were so confused as to why I was leaving. You have your customers sad that you are leaving, meanwhile your boss is ripping on you in 1:1 meetings, quizzing you on things that you had in training years before and passed and don't use in your day to day job. I tried to say something, but HR isn't your friend. They are looking out for the #1 and it's not you. When several people quit their jobs in a period of months, huge red flags should be going up.