Satisfied with job but not with management - Software Developer Fast Enterprises Employee Review

3.0
Jul 16, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Fantastic product. There's a reason Fast is #1 in the industry. The software can achieve everything our clients need, and it's always being improved. - Great tools. Development is made easy by all of the tools available to us. If a process can be improved or a development task made easier, we'll make a tool for it. - Rewarding work. The software you work on gets used by millions of people all over the world. - Projects are always successful. Every rollout has been on time and on budget. Your work matters and will actually be used. - Paid overtime. If you have to put in extra time, you get compensated for it. However, some employees take advantage of this and put in consistent overtime when they don't have urgent tasks to justify it. - Annual trip. Everyone in the company and their families get essentially a paid vacation. There are meetings to go to, but it's mostly an opportunity to get to know other employees and catch up with the ones you already know from different projects. - Amazing partners. The partners are easily approachable and seem to really care about their employees. They are still committed to making the company successful after 20 years.

Cons

- Lack of management. The senior developers at the Development Center are great developers, but none of them are willing or capable of managing. Developers are assigned tasks and can get help working them, but that's the extent of their involvement. There are no clear expectations or feedback. There's a salary adjustment every year, but we aren't given a performance evaluation or any feedback about how we can improve as developers. - Inconsistent work effort among developers. The 10x developer may be a myth, but 1/10x developer is not. There a few developers who take liberty with management's lack of expectations and produce far less than they are likely capable of. It's discouraging knowing your coworker is being compensated similarly to you while devoting a significant amount of their time browsing Facebook or texting on their phone instead of getting (more) tasks to work on. - Poor mentoring. Brown-bag lunches and code reviews are encouraged on site to build developer knowledge and ensure code quality. None of that is done at the Development Center. All that seems to matter is getting your tasks done. - Poor onboarding process. New hires are lucky to get taken out to lunch by a few developers. It's rare to be even introduced to the full team. - No team-building. All of the events are focused around new hire orientation and only a few developers end up attending. There's been one team lunch for the development team in the past few years. - Unclear policies. Dress code is supposed to be business casual, but some developers wear t-shirts and tennis shoes. Some employees leave at 4 pm while others are told they can't.

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Fast Enterprises Response
8y
Thank you for your review. If you have not already, we’d like to welcome you to have a conversation in confidence with HR, a Partner and/or your manager at the HQ. We appreciate this type of feedback and the ability to have a constructive conversation around how we can improve employee’s work life, what we are currently doing around these topics and how we can ensure we keep employees satisfied. We also encourage open communication with your manager regarding your performance. FAST has an open-door policy and we are happy to discuss why you were awarded your specific adjustment. We are consistently working to improve our feedback, mentoring and on-boarding processes across FAST. Based on employee feedback, recent efforts have been made to host more team-building activities for our HQ team. We realize that it is important to provide opportunities for our HQ team to create relationships and engage with their coworkers like FASTies do on project sites. We have also begun implementing activities such as the step challenge, diaper drive and volunteering to encourage FASTies to work together for a good cause. If there are any ideas that you would like to suggest we would love to hear them! As it relates to employee expectations, lack of mentorship and/or management – FAST values those with strong ability to work independently as well those who can lead within small groups. There are a variety of tools used to manage work and we have started to train and will continue training both managers, mentors and employees on using these delivery tools. If any employee believes policies are unclear or otherwise being unfairly applied, they should talk directly to either their manager, a Partner or HR to discuss and to help provide this feedback for people. Thanks again for your review!

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