Fast Enterprises Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Pros

Easy Work Good People to work with

Cons

Mostly Proprietary software Focus more on hours worked than work produced Poor work-life balance, uses company paid events to offset this Does not use any industry standards, will not allow you to grow as a developer Flat company structure, movement to team lead is common, but doubles responsibilities (at least) with no significant increase in pay or compensation Stuck in their ways with little hope of every updating practices

Pros

- Impactful: The work I do every day directly (and generally quickly) impacts the community I live in. - Challenging: Problems faced by government agencies are often unique and solving them with software configuration allows me to use my creativity, experience, and problem solving skills daily. - Great people: I love the people I work with and they teach me more and more every day!

Cons

- Work-Life Balance: It can be maintained (I have gotten pretty good at it!), but it takes a focused effort to do so. I suspect many demanding jobs are the same way. - Feedback Escalation: Trying to escalate feedback or issues up the chain of command can be challenging, due to our decentralized nature I believe.

Pros

-They take care of their employees (great pay, benefits, bonuses, etc) -All of the people FAST hires are really chill -Lots of events and lots of free booze and food (if that's your style) -They pay for overtime (you will be doing a lot of it)

Cons

-You will NOT grow your technical skill. You WILL stagnate. -Again, FAST does not CARE at all about your skills and abilities. All of their tools are in-house. You will not develop transferrable skills. Want proof? Look at all their replies to glassdoor reviews. They always say something like "We don't train you for other jobs". FAST goes out of their way to make your work as specific to their company as possible. -FAST hires college grads because you don't know better. Don't get lost in the dollar signs. If you care about software engineering and need this job, don't stay more than 2-3 years. -You will work, A LOT. FAST does not care about work life balance. Working 7 days a week before a rollout is not unheard of. They will squeeze all of the work out of you that they can

Pros

- Compensation and benefits: Fast's starting salary is hard to beat for new grads unless you're working for Big N companies (Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.). Yearly salary adjustments keep your compensation high and I've known people who get 8%+ every year along with bonuses. Overtime is paid which is extremely uncommon in tech. - Fulfilling work - You are given a large amount of responsibility to implement solutions for our clients. Sometimes you are the only person on your team tackling a large business need for the client, such as implementing an entire tax return in the system that is filed by millions of individuals or businesses yearly. Since we work onsite with our clients, you get see your work actually being used. - Engaged leadership - The partners aren't sitting back and cashing in. They are involved daily making sure the product is evolving in their vision and that client projects are coming along successfully. - Relocation - This opinion varies for everyone but being able to relocate means you can retain your skills while working in a different place with a different team and client. If you don't like your placement for some reason, you know it's not permanent. - Product - Fast has never implemented a solution that has failed or been replaced. Fast is a leader in its niches for a reason. You know what you work on will go into production within a year or two whereas other companies will fail to deliver over a period of five or ten years.

Cons

- Lacking professional development - Fast doesn't provide funds for outside education, such as online courses or graduate degrees. Fast teaches you what you need to do the job but little else. - Lacking industry tools - Other than the IDEs, nearly every other tool is built in house. You're not learning Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc. This makes it harder to transition to other companies but is understandable because Fast wants you to stay around. - Experience varies - Your experience varies depending on the client and project team you're working with and the place you are located. Some clients are awesome while others can be more difficult to work with. Managers may not be qualified to be managers but are in that position because of their years of experience. - Work/life balance - There is a reason Fast pays overtime. It's expected you will work overtime at any project you are at. Fast sets aggressive deadlines and release dates and has never failed to deliver or be replaced. Employees have to be willing to put in the work if they are behind schedule. If you are continually making progress effectively, you usually don't have to work an excessive amount of overtime. Making mistakes and bad decisions means you may work overtime to clean up or redo your work. It's hard to take vacation around releases because you are responsible for so much and if your areas are having problems you need to be around to fix them.

Pros

It’s decent pay for out of college

Cons

They don’t care about employees, sexual harassment is unaddressed, no work life balance. You’re either working 80 hours overtime or there’s nothing for you to do

Pros

- Great introduction to consulting and large government IT projects; the consulting work can be engaging and fulfilling if you are a people person that is curious, sharp, and organized - Opportunity to work on things that actually impact people in real ways - Great pay, especially at the entry level, including paid overtime - Annual company+family resort trip (pre-pandemic, obviously) - Opportunity for frequent relocation, if you're interested in traveling around - Generally great coworkers To make this job work for you, go in clear-eyed about all the below cons for 1-3 years, learn everything you can, and always think about how you can package/market the experience. If you can make time for it, pick up/sharpen some more marketable skills on the side. People get trapped at Fast first because they get hooked on the money (the starting salary is much higher than in comparable jobs, for what you actually do), and later because they have lost their value on the job market. If you can avoid both of those traps, Fast can offer you a good opportunity.

Cons

Company - Top-down culture is cult-like and authoritarian - Leaders are not trained to lead people, nor are they evaluated on how well they do it, and they are all raised from within, so the effects of this compound over time - No processes, tools, or milestones around employee growth and development - Pay structure is inscrutable, arbitrary, and unequal - Org structure and small number of roles prevent meaningful career growth - Mandatory relocations on short notice Day-to-day work - Poor work/life balance: heavy workloads, high stress - Lopsided distribution of work and accountability - Inadequate training and documentation - Little room for innovation, experimentation, or creativity Technology - Aging, bloated, byzantine core product - Very little exposure to transferrable, industry-standard tools and technologies: Fast has built its own systems for source control (no Git/GitHub), issue tracking (no Jira), document management, project management, and just about everything else - Limited scope of development work: most developers are constrained to writing business-layer plugin code (Visual Basic) in Visual Studio, writing database scripts in SQL Server, and editing granular configuration settings. - No automated testing tools, and the architecture doesn't lend itself to building them: lots of time wasted clicking around manually testing One last thing On this Glassdoor page, Fast has listed its revenue (in the Company Overview section) as $25-50M. A single client is likely to pay $50-200M over a few years for one new implementation (Google any press release announcing a contract won by Fast, or see the ones posted on Fast's website); many clients do multiple implementations in succession; maintenance and support fees are billed afterwards on an ongoing basis. Fast's website lists 70 clients total; projecting from all that, this company's revenue is closer to $1B than $25M.

Pros

- Great Benefits - Relocation FAST works you hard but you get paid for that effort. Pay is higher than most positions of similar work, especially for right out of college. They give you ample opportunity to move around the US and, if you're with the company long enough, out of the country, and they pay for most if not all of your moving expenses. Additionally, if you like the bar scene, FAST's favorite after work activity is happy hour on the company's dime.

Cons

- No management training - Very little transferrable skills for software developers - Poor work-life balance - Inner circle One of my biggest issues is there's next to no management training. FAST is organized on a horizontal structure, meaning you don't really climb in your career through promotions. I'm not complaining about the difference between vertical and horizontal organization. My issue is that this means they tend to make people who have been with the company longer managers, whether they have good leadership and communication skills or not. And these people aren't trained, they're just given a group of coworkers to tell them if they're doing right or not. Sometimes the managers are good, sometimes they aren't. Furthermore, any complaints against managers are generally ignored (at most, managers are given a slap on the wrist) because they can't afford to lose people who actually know their systems. This leads me to point two. Important note: this point really only pertains to those who are seeking a career in software development. If you’re a math major or some other non CS major who just needs to make a few bucks to pay off student loans, this is an fine choice. With that out of the way, FAST software includes homebrew solutions for their entire system, from source control to simply how to store data. The reasoning is because the founders didn't like any solutions before so they built their own. Fine, that’s a noble story, but when every other major software company uses open source tools and common objects like Git or simple linked lists and arrays, it’s very difficult to progress in your career meaning you get stuck until you retire. Not to say you can’t be creative. You do gain some SQL knowledge and general problem solving through Visual Basic. But if you want to move on, you’re usually only qualified for low level positions elsewhere. Point number three, FAST’s motto is work hard, play hard. This really means work until you’re exhausted, then get back to work. They do pay overtime (at time, not time and a half), and claim that it’s optional barring meeting deadlines, however, I found that even on production support (not upgrading, not building a new system, just supporting a current active one). You’re still expected to get an amount of work completed that requires overtime. For the life half of this “balance”, they tout people who have spent their out of work time playing games, hiking, exploring the world, but in reality 95% of teambuilding activities end up being happy hours, especially when the owners come to visit a site. Like I said in the pros, if that’s what you like, boy do I have good news for you. If that’s not what you want, don’t you dare skip it, cause that’s how you get looked down upon in the company, which… Leads me to point four. FAST is one of those companies that considers all their employees a part of the Fastie family. I now have issues with the “family” concept in company culture because of FAST. If you want anything, whether that’s to move to a specific place, not move from your current location to get some stability, or even just a decent raise, you need to show that you’re a Fastie. What does this mean? This means you spend as much time as you can doing work, working overtime if you have to. You show up to all the “teambuilding” happy hours, especially when the owners come by so you can schmooze. You stay loyal to the company for years no matter how they treat you. The family culture is honestly toxic especially with how big the company has grown. Far too many people are now outside of the inner circle that’s there’s no point in calling the company a family.