Killing Me Fastly - Anonymous employee Fastly Employee Review

As noted in other reviews, Fastly suffers from not having strong executive leaders which continues to erode culture, employee morale, trust and overall company confidence. None of which is going to rebound anytime soon. Company cultures have a tendency to change as new leaders are brought in, and that held true in 2022 when Fastly brought in a new CEO who failed at bringing in strong C-Suite members. One disastrous hiring misstep was the selection of the Chief People Officer. That is the epicenter for all of the issues mentioned in the other reviews: culture, a lack of transparency, and poor management. The first needless blow to Fastly’s culture happened in February 2023 when the Chief People Officer made a confusing and opaque statement regarding a shift to hybrid work. Fastly had always been remote friendly, even prior to the pandemic. That statement intentionally left everyone dumbfounded about Fastly’s future of work policy. When managers understandably asked for clarification, they were told that the number of times a week their team members would be required to be in the office would be entirely up to them. Most of the managers and their teams were almost entirely remote at that time so they naturally thought that they could continue to hire remotely if they wanted to since no one on their team was near an office anyway. And then job postings all went up requiring applicants to live near office locations and referrals were being rejected for not being located near an office. That forced the TA business partners to answer questions based on information that they were given that hiring mangers were not. That was completely unfair to them. The head of the People org has no respect for the people in her organization. So the company was left to basically infer what Fastly’s work policy would be and everyone just sort of accepted that there would only be hybrid hiring moving forward. About a month ago, some poor woman gave a 10 minute presentation to the company on “the future of work”. She spent 10 minutes saying absolutely nothing that was understandable. No one could figure out what was being communicated or why it was being brought up when everyone had already accepted the status quo. Again, the head of People demonstrated that she had no respect for a member of her team by putting her in front of the whole company and embarrassing her. This all could have been avoided if the Chief People Officer just clearly communicated; (1) how hiring was going to be done moving forward, (2) how many days per week each employee would be expected to come into the office and (3) most importantly, clearly communicate with existing remote employees where they stand in terms of their futures with Fastly instead of leaving them to speculate about their job security and prospects for promotion. All of Fastly’s internal communications are awful. This is why transparency comes up so many times in these reviews. I used to refer to them as Orwellian until it occurred to me that Orwellian communication would have propagandistic attributes. Fastly’s internal communications are created only to obfuscate and confuse with no clear subliminal message. I would love for every Fastlyian to try something that I tried: Go to ChatGPT and type in the prompt, “write a confusing 200 word memo about a new hybrid work policy”. Seriously, go ahead and try it. The only material difference between what ChatGPT spits out and what Fastlyians are used to is that the ChatGPT memo is more clear. And for those horrible communications, the company is spending (in my estimation) $1.5M a year in payroll. There are 4 mostly very senior people in internal comms being paid to write that drivel. That is the same number of HRBPs in the company. By no industry standard, does 1 HRBP to nearly 300 employees make sense and yet, they’re paying 4 people $1.5M to keep everyone in the company confused while touting transparency as one of its values. They hired the 4th member of the comms team to report to the head of People when the hybrid work rumblings started. BTW, none of those comms people were laid off so Fastlyians who survived the layoff can look forward to more overpriced obfuscation. Instead of fixing things, Fastly’s approach under Todd’s leadership is to create smoke and mirrors. The loss of transparency is not a culture shift that needed to happen and it was a major blow to Todd’s trustworthiness very early into his tenure as CEO. The other major problem lies with the way the head of People runs her organization. I kid you not, it’s run the way a terrorist leader runs their organization. Each cell (department) has access to very limited data presumably so that they can’t take down the whole organization or something? I’ve never seen anything like this in my whole career. Teams don’t have access to information that they need in order to do their jobs effectively. Access to information is siloed. As a result of the way everything is set up, none of the teams under the People team umbrella trust each other and they guard their information like squirrels guarding their nuts. The People team at Fastly are all competing in The Hunger Games against each other and the company suffers for it. When each team is playing the Hunger Games against each other and they don’t have the data they need to make productive decisions that are in the best interests of the company, they make decisions that are in their own self interest. Fastly has an issue with underperforming managers. Both people leaders that manage business partners think that their teams’ job is to keep managers happy and to give them whatever they want. That is definitely not how those teams should function in a healthy company of Fastly’s size. The job is to partner, strategize, educate and coach. And if a manager doesn’t recognize that people partner’s expertise in their field, that’s a pretty decent signal about how they manage both down and across. The approach isn’t to appease. It’s to investigate and provide resources to help address any issues. Fastly implemented a talent management program last year. There is absolutely no mechanism with which to identify poor performing managers in this process. Employees can’t anonymously evaluate their manager, which is the only way that they would be able to be honest because of the power imbalance. Feedback from cross functional managers isn’t required. The only feedback a manager gets is from their manager. Sometimes their manager is also problematic so there’s no way to identify and assist poor performing managers. Everyone knows that there are issues with managers at Fastly but no one is stepping up to help. This approach is one that is taken at companies with 10k or more employees and it’s really born out of necessity. When a company gets that big, identifying teams or pockets of the company that need additional resources becomes difficult and really isn’t the People team’s focus anymore. But that’s not normal or healthy for a company with 1200 or even 3000 employees. This “go along to get along” attitude from the People team is a huge factor in the current state of Fastly. At this stage of a company’s growth, the People team should still be focused on maintaining a great culture for everyone, not just catering to all managers, especially when you know that the company has an underperforming manager issue. The leader of the People org was never suited for this position because she’s only ever worked at giant, oldie timey evil megacorps. The sales organization has always seemed to have a disproportionate attrition rate. I say “seemed to have” because I wasn’t in the cell that was privy to that data, nor do I know if there is a cell looking at that data. If there were, the iceberg that Fastly just hit would have been spotted at least a year and a half ago and resources could have been put into solving the problem. The sales org happens to have the most amenable (and therefore feckless) people partners in the company. Those feckless partners are endlessly praised and promoted for their fecklessness. Here’s the reality: if the goal is just to please people, you can save at least a million dollars a year in payroll by hiring junior level people across the board in those roles. If they’re not going to partner, advise, coach and educate there’s no reason to pay for depth of experience. The most frustrating part is that Fastly has an incredible Talent Development partner that gives really productive training sessions. She is being tragically underutilized because no one is identifying all of the people in the company that could benefit from the development she can offer them. Several reviews mentioned nepotism and unfair promotion practices. Let me share what goes on within the People team and how they treat their own. On my team, promotions were given out solely on the basis of personal relationships and were so divorced from performance that we were living an episode of Silicon Valley. The most egregious promotion was given to someone who mastered fecklessness and catered to every whim of even the poorest performing managers with a smile and a fair amount of flirting (I suspect). That promotion was ostensibly given on the basis of a program that our manager tapped this person to run. There was one town hall where the Chief People Officer proudly announced that program had saved Fastly $800k. The truth was that precisely $0 was saved from that program at that time because that person hadn’t done anything that the whole team wasn’t doing on a daily basis. As I write this, that program has saved Fastly approximately -$200k. It was all smoke and mirrors created by someone at Fastly who preceded the Chief People Officer, but fits in with the new culture perfectly. The thing is that this program could have been real if our manager had just taken an accounting of the skills and experience on our team but that is not how incentives work in The Hunger Games. It’s just easier to create smoke and mirrors to enrich yourself than it is to do what’s in the best interest of the company. That person who was promoted by the way loves to punch down at people they think are less important than they are in order to avoid taking responsibility for their mistakes. Our whole team is aware of this behavior. Their manager has heard about this several times but has been nonplussed because of how great they are at fecklessly managing up. So deliberately punching down is not a barrier to success on the Fastly people team as long as you manage those optics do your part in The Hunger Games. My next promotion injustice story is intertwined with an example of how poorly the people team treats its own so bear with me. One of my colleagues who is an absolute rockstar was recently moved into a different role because their role was eliminated. This person was the backbone of our team and many of us couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t been promoted for their exceptional work. This person told me that our manager did try and get a promotion through for them. Something didn’t sound right about that to me. So they got moved into another role that really seems much smaller in scope and complexity compared to what they had already accomplished for Fastly. The announcement regarding this move was bizarre and felt more like a hostage video than a joyful announcement. My colleague that was being transferred didn’t speak during this meeting. Only the head of Chief People Officer and new head of our department spoke. They both had a celebratory tone and touted “internal mobility” but there was clearly something off. This person’s new role was small and they are no longer managing people, which is a shame because they are the only person who actually developed and mentored anyone on our team. That person has never opened up about what happened but it’s obvious to several of us that they were treated pretty poorly and just shoved into a role that just filled an immediate need on the people team with no thought to that person’s career path and absolutely no understanding of everything they had already done for the company. Their resume was now going to look like they’re an under performer because they’ve been at Fastly for years now with no promotion and they’ve now been moved into a much smaller role. Back to the promotion situation. Our manager left to move into another part of the people team. I thought that this was going to be a great opportunity for them to create an actual partnership between our two teams since they had been on our side of the house and could provide insight to their new team. Instead, what became clear to a few of us in a matter of weeks was that this person was going to represent their new district in the Hunger Games as enthusiastically and ruthlessly as they represented ours. It was all very disappointing but it also made me realize that I very much overestimated this person’s ability to think strategically. That person promoted 1 more person on our team as they were on their way out the door to start their new role. That promotion was ostensibly made within the parameters of the “rules”, which are that you have to demonstrably expand your role in order to be promoted. Not only was that obviously not true since this person didn’t expand their role, but rather switched into the role that they were initially favoritism-hired into. But in order to justify that promotion, that person was given credit for a whole lot of work that my colleague who was just sidelined did. The person who was promoted didn’t know the first thing about starting the program they were credited with starting. I realized that my colleague who never got promoted was probably robbed of a whole lot of credit that they deserved, including the strategy behind all of the amazing things that our team had done to streamline and automate our functions and increase our productivity. Giving her credit for that would mean that our manager would have to acknowledge that they weren’t the strategic mastermind that they worked so diligently to present themselves as and they would have to relinquish some of the credit they very likely helped themselves to. My colleague, the hard working, brilliant beacon of light on the team who was focused on doing what’s best for the company was marginalized and used to prop up less talented people. I share that story because it’s the most egregious example of what every day felt like on the People team for anyone who was just focused on doing a good job for the business. There were several of us who were treated the same way to one degree or another. We felt valued by the great managers we supported but we were completely disregarded by our leaders who were focused on the smoke and mirrors that would make them competitive in The Hunger Games. That’s what goes on in the People org at Fastly. And that is a big part of the reason why the company is in the situation it’s in right now. Todd could have gotten most of what he envisioned when he took over as CEO of Fastly, minus the fall-in-line culture that is toxic to a company at Fastly’s stage of maturity if he was just less arrogant and created checks and balances for himself. No one believes that these are good people anymore since they didn’t forfeit their salaries to save the company, the way good people would have done. The smoke has cleared and the mirrors are broken so everyone can plainly see your arrogance and your incompetence.