Akamai reviews

Their technical leads have poor leadership skills which harm their reports and destroy productivity. Instead of positively motivating their reports, they resort to playing mind games. They will not be open to listening to your inputs especially if you don't fit the mold of a "serious professional." They withhold information to maintain an advantage over you and use that knowledge at the right time to undercut you and make you look foolish. They talk in pseudo-technical terms to try to intimidate/impress and confuse; fortunately people who are really technically competent see through this posturing. The onboarding process and the people involved result in an unnecessarily excruciatingly painful training experience. They rely upon you picking up on rushed, poorly explained training and expect you to learn via rote memorization. There is no careful explanation of the product passed the corporate training which is not adequate if you need to develop on the product. The "mentor" has no patience, is not good at explaining things in a manner that can be understood, doesn't understand that everything they know will not be known by the other person unless and until explained properly. Eventually (after a few sessions) they will blame you for not knowing things that you couldn't have possibly have known (product internals which you can't look up anywhere). There are videos of a former employing giving training, but the managers and trainers call that person "an idiot" so not sure the videos are relevant or even useful especially seeing how long ago this training was given. The documentation is poorly written. It's clear it was never reviewed for clarity, or accuracy. They do not use modern tools and methods to document the product. There are operational issues. Though I hired on as a data scientist my real day-to-day job was working as a support person addressing customer issues with the product which are numerous. Customer issues were often described poorly which made it difficult to address the issues in a timely fashion, especially in light of the bad training. There was an explicitly stated expectation that these issues needed to be resolved in a day and there was pressure applied to make this happen which was counterproductive. Whenever I had issues with my manager, how I was being onboarded, or how I thought daily operations transpired I would try to bring these issues to the attention of someone in the org to try to help resolve them. I was ignored. My efforts to resolve my issues were to no avail. This needs to be fixed! Some employees have very poor communication skills yet they are put over you to train you and have authority over you. Akamai really needs to take a hard look at this and make sure that there are not any language barriers interfering with productivity of the company and be realistic about who can train and/or manage whom based on the communication skills of its employees.

ignored by management managers just trying to look good for executives