Pros
-Pay and benefits are great. -Coworkers have largely been pretty incredible people. -Social culture outside of work was fun (Pre-pandemic). -If you try, you can pick up enough technical skills that can be transferrable if you join another company. If you are more interested in pure software engineering than doing the mix of development and consulting, fast probably isn't for you. A lot of large enterprise software companies are going to have varying degrees of this, whereas in smaller companies you probably will see a lot more use of the various familiarity with common SaaS/tooling that's asked for. You do need to take some initiative if you want to pick up on that stuff though. -Some people have noted their managers were not the best, I've had pretty positive experiences with all of mine, but this is something that is going to be project/location dependent. -Can be a really good option for less technical people who didn't necessarily major in Computer Science or the like. -FAST has had pretty incredible company-size growth over my time here, and that just speaks to the companies prospects for the future and the dominance they have in their market niches. -Ultimately at the end of the day, we want governments to have better, more modern software, that can provide us with faster services, and more services. I definitely got some warm fuzzies every time we had a major rollout. I'm glad I was able to contribute to that in my time here. The work does help out a lot of folks in a lot of states.
Cons
-Burn out is extremely common due to demanding hours. The better you are at the job, the more work and expectations will get placed on you. -Salary adjustment and bonus structures are arbitrary, and people do play favorites. Performing highly above your coworkers one year to earn a strong raise will place that as the minimum expectation for the next year, so you can go from being the best worker one year, to still being the best worker but receive an average to below average review. This in turn puts more pressure on you to work increasing overtime and take on more work and responsibilities. Again, this leads to burnout. -Other reviews mentioned this, but even when you end up in leadership roles in charge of other developers there is no pay difference or incentive for taking on those extra responsibilities. -Relocation (can be a pro), can potentially have you end up in less desirable locations depending on where you want to live. FAST does give you a little bit more control over this now, but that often comes with costs to your salary or future raises. -Typical project cycles have months where you will be bored to tears where essentially no development is happening. -Very easy to get pigeonholed into certain roles. This definitely can stagnant your growth and professional development. -Because FAST hires such diverse majors, you often see a trend where you can easily pick out who was and wasn't a computer science/other technical major, and that shows in the code. Sometimes this leads to processes being designed poorly and causes maintenance headaches later on. -Code reviews should happen more often than they do. For anyone reading this, don't be intimidated by having your code reviewed, they should be structured in a positive way that benefits everyone reviewing it with the goal of helping everyone sharpen up their skills. -Post pandemic culture is largely nonexistent. As mentioned in other reviews one of the big benefits was the large company event, which was cancelled the last 2 years with nothing to replace it. It was always intended as a thank you to the employees/their families with recognition to the effort and long hours we put in. Largely this just re-enforced the rising level of unappreciation for us over the last 2 years. To be fair we did get a t-shirt I guess... -Another note on the culture, a lot of the events have the alcohol flowing on open tabs, so if that isn't your thing you may not enjoy some of the events as much as others (so for some this could be a pro). -While communication is good between leadership and employees, it isn't always great and sometimes things fall through the cracks that can leave people blindsided or unaware of when important things on the project are happening.