Pros
Fast pays very well. New hires are paid $80,000.00/year. They also pay you over time for anything over 40 hours. The benefits at Fast are outstanding. I did not pay anything for healthcare and we had very low co-pays and deductibles. The coworkers I had at Fast were smart, hard working people. Fast helps to foster a sense of community with your coworkers by paying for a lot of activities for employees and their families.
Cons
Many of the cons of working for Fast are well documented, long hours, moving a lot, etc. I wanted to focus on something that I have not seen many people mention: The technical skills that you learn as an employee at Fast are not transferable to other jobs or companies, here are some examples: You also learn VB.NET, and let's be real, VB.NET is not widely used. Even saying that you learn VB.NET is a little bit misleading because you will never use a single .NET data structure. For some reason Fast has developed all of their own data structures that you are required to use, so you will not learn .NET working for Fast. Not only is it annoying that you are learning something that will not be helpful in future jobs, there is no documentation on how any of their proprietary code works and obviously you cannot Google it and as a new employee you cannot see their core code so you rely on other employees just explaining to you how to use their data structures and other proprietary code. After leaving Fast and starting at a company that actually uses .NET, I felt like I had to learn to program all over again. Many of my coworkers at Fast felt this way and people who have been there a long time know they do not have the technical skills to move to another software development type roll at another company. Only about 25% of the job is actually writing code in VB.NET, instead most of your time is spent configuring their system, which just means you are trying to figure out how to set up information in their database. For example, in order to add a button on a screen in their system, you don't do it in the code, you add a line of configuration to a specific table. To make that button do something, you add a line of configuration in a different table. Learning how those tables work and to configure them is 75% of the job. Again, no documentation and how they work. They have a proprietary code repository that they use and it does not work in a similar manner to any other code repository I am aware of (I have used Git and SVN). They do not do any unit testing on any code. The best experience you get is experience in SQL and I have no complaints about that.