Pros
- Great pay and benefits for recent college graduates - Opportunity to travel. As a new hire, you get to choose 3 locations that you would like to move to and 3 locations which you would not like to move to. Then they have a team pick where you will end up but you will likely not move to any of the locations that you prefer. It is all dependent on where you are needed, and I have personally seen people get moved after about 6 months to a year, but on average it seems like 2-3 years per location is typical. - Your coworkers are young, intelligent and fun. - Company events are well thought out. Both company wide events and site specific events were fun to go and they happen frequently.
Cons
Disclaimer: Your experience greatly depends on what site you get assigned to, the client's behavior on that site, and the team manager assigned to you. This list of cons may or may not be applicable to your experience at Fast. I know people who have spent their entire career here and have no intentions of leaving. I am writing this long list because I want the company to succeed. I enjoyed my time here but there are too many things that went wrong for me to want to stay for longer than a couple of years. - No career growth unless you want to be a team lead. Team leads are very overworked and underappreciated. - Most of the work you do is fixing issues that were overlooked by other employees. Very little development is required unless you are on a site in active rollout. Code reviews are way too brief and should happen more often. - The technology you work with will likely be outdated unless you get relocated to one of the newer sites. This might change as more sites upgrade to C#. - On top of the technology being old, most of the tools you use are proprietary. Because of this, you will find yourself having to study outside of work in order to have a chance in interviews later in your career. Again, this might change as more sites upgrade to C#. This is one of my biggest complaints though. It can make you feel like you're not learning much on the job because it cannot be applied elsewhere. - I experienced harassment from other Fasties on a few occasions because I did not want to go for a drink after work, or wasn't in the mood to go to an event. There is a bit of a fraternity-like culture here which can be a pro for some people, but definitely a con for me. - Inside the office, it felt like there was an us-versus-them mentality between Fasties and state workers. This is not great because a healthy relationship between a client and a consultant is so important for getting meaningful work done. I was told in the interview process that the reason why you relocate is so you can have a closer relationship with the client but this was not my experience at all. - Work/life balance can be non-existent. This is true at other tech companies too though. You will work a lot of overtime despite them saying it is not mandatory. - The lack of vertical growth in the company as a developer causes the pay to become less competitive over time. While the yearly bonuses are nice (same with the cost of living adjustments), they are rather arbitrary from what I have seen. - Feedback is non existent on some sites. Lots of lies saying that it's part of the culture at Fast but that has absolutely not been the same experience that I've had. I have gotten useful feedback only a few times in the past year but it should be way more frequent, more formal, and more detailed. This can lead to some developers getting into their heads about whether or not they are doing a good job.