Pros
- for the right role and performance, pay is excellent - amazing scale which can teach a motivated engineer tremendous skills and techniques
Cons
- toxic culture and extraordinarily political. teams sabotage each other to ensure that their competing ideas win, it seriously happens all the time. - sadly, people play on Tom's personality to get projects done or tanked - many in senior leadership are clueless, or willfully ignorant, about what is happening in their teams. - Good ideas, especially those based in industry best-practices are often ignored or discounted because of Not Invented Here, or early inventor syndrome - because Akamai's tech was truly so great in 1998, they struggle to let go of parts of it that now have been leap-frogged, leading to a bizarre state of advanced and very cludgy or backwards and outdated technology - and not just for legacy systems, but even new work. - As an example - the VP in our office showed up to work less a couple times a year - only when bigwigs would visit. Effectively delegating his entire job, even direct reports wouldn't be able to reach him for weeks at a time, he never did perf reviews or gave feedback - nearly non-exisistent leadership for his teams - but he talks just enough of a good game to leadership to somehow get away with it for years now.