Working for Akamai August 25, 2007
It’s a little odd for me. For reasons beyond the grasp of my conscious mind I
can see myself staying at Akamai for a long time, and in my experience this is a
very atypical thing for a programmer. We tend to be corporate nomads, moving
from company to company every couple years, looking for new projects to
captivate our minds. Until Akamai the only programmers I’d encountered who
stayed in one place for very long were like people going through the motions of
work and life. They continued where they were because it paid the bills and they
couldn’t think of something better to do. But, while Akamai has plenty of new
faces like mine, I keep encountering people who’ve been here for four years,
seven years, since the beginning, and they’re happy. They’re not
just working here, they honestly seem
happy to be working here. And in many
ways it really seems like a “corporate family” , something I previously thought
was a pipe dream of “upper management” types.
What’s even more intriguing about this is that day to day life in Akamai isn’t
tangibly different from most other software companies of our size. We no Google
with game rooms, washing machines, or any other home away from home type things.
We’re bursting at the seams with cubes and the fanciest “perk” is bagels on
Wednesday mornings. I sit by the little kitchenish area of our floor and the
“water-cooler” conversations are the background sounds of my day. They’re smiles
and greetings, impromptu problem solving, and hearing what others are working
on, talk about new cars, and evening classes, but rarely ever frustrations.
What is is that Akamai is doing that maintains these smiles?
For me, a little bit of it is luck. We’ve a good team, with really diverse (and
good) personalities, a fun challenge, and a good manager, and that’s a great
place to be.
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