Arista Networks reviews

- Engineers who joined in 2012 or before (henceforth referred to as loyal employees) are massively underpaid - Loyal's are sticking with the company in a hope that underwater stock options might breath a new life soon. Company is taking advantage of this mindset and not paying them enough - Areview: The appraisal process is not transparent in rankings to the employee. What is the point of the appraisal if an employee does not know his rank which determines the entire compensation? There is no clear motivation for an employee to perform better than he is already doing because he is unaware of his current ranking and bonus/hike he can expect for higher ranks - Even though company management brags about how compensation and areview go hand in hand. The managers/directors "pets" (note: these are not the same loyal employees) get paid more because managers/directors tamper areview ranking to make sure they get paid more. - Peer bonus (or pea nuts) is the biggest joke! Most often a not deserving candidate gets the peer bonus. People who add bugs in code and quickly fixed it, when the customer gets impacted, qualify for peer bonus. While someone who never added any bug and always did a quality job has lesser chance of getting the same because he just did what was expected from an Arista Employee. - The management has started hiring managers directly from other companies (at least in some offices. Thankfully not in HQ). It has stopped recognizing internal talent (including loyals) and promoting them. - There is no career path or growth for an Engineer

During interviews, Arista proudly touts that every employee is afforded time to do interesting work with teams employing rotating job schedules in which every employee takes turns at the interesting aspects of software engineering and the not-so-interesting aspects of software engineering. What actually happens is that team managers come up with multiple ways to describe bug-fixing and rotate the same 2-3 employees through different "projects" that are all the same maintenance work. If you're not one of these 2-3 employees you might enjoy working on interesting projects and learning new things. At Arista bonuses and raises are determined by the "A-review/peer-bonus" system, in which every employee rates their colleagues based on their perceived contributions to the company. Naturally this tends to favor the same employees who are getting the interesting projects since nobody cares about fixing bugs. If you don't get a good a-review, then you aren't getting any bonuses or raises that year. So you can waste your life away by working hard and cleaning up other peoples' bugs, and *maybe* after a couple years you *might* get slotted into a project visible enough that your coworkers *might* notice what you're doing and you *might* get a peer-bonus or something. Alternatively you can fill out a job application at one of Arista's many competitors and get a much larger pay-hike now.