Pros
As so many others have mentioned, the biggest thing Fastly has going for it is the people. We have really built a tight knit family of genuinely supportive people, many of whom I’m certain I will maintain relationships with for years to come.
Cons
I can’t stay quiet anymore. The situation at Fastly before the layoffs wasn’t great. Since the layoffs, it’s really bad. Most of us who survived are sad, angry or both and we’re just here biding our time until this employment market turns around. As so many others have pointed out, the executive team is heartless, incompetent and apparently incapable of owning their failures. Instead they chose to scapegoat a sales team for not being able to sell a product that the market isn’t interested in and a product team who was without a leader for the better part of a year because their leader was ousted due to having no CEO with a clear vision. All of this while ignoring that the current CEO and CPO have no clear vision. The CPO’s only brain child thus far has been AI. WOW! Now there’s an impressive plan that no one is thinking about (and that doesn’t provide a compelling reason for prospective customers to leave their current vendor). And the CEO thinks that more aggressively selling the product that no one wants is the key to riches and avoiding Fastly’s stock being d-listed. I can’t keep quiet about how my former colleagues who were laid off have been treated. SO many questions to HR were simply ignored, eTrade accounts weren’t exempted from the trade window closing so each person had to call to get their accounts unblocked (because things aren’t stressful enough when you just got laid off), they couldn’t keep their laptops even if they were 2 1/2 years + old (close to the 3 year mark when every employee can keep them). Employees who had long tenures with Fastly didn’t receive any extra consideration in the form of severance for time served so whether you worked at Fastly for 9 months or 9 years, you got a month of severance and money to pay for 3 months of Cobra. Just enough that in a bad job market, most people would take it and agree not to sue Fastly in exchange. There wasn’t even any job placement assistance. It’s obvious that the leadership team don’t read these reviews because if they did, they would know how tight knit so many of us who work at Fastly are. They would understand that in laying off our friends and colleagues, they didn’t just make them disappear. We still talk to them and we’re doing what we can to help them find new jobs. We’re helping them to network and we’re sharing lists of everyone who was laid off that a couple of former Fastly recruiters put together. At least one founder has been helping. That’s what’s special about Fastly - we’re tight and we’re always there for each other. So when HR treats people who were just laid off really badly, most of us hear about it -- so being heartless is just another terrible idea in a series of terrible ideas spanning nearly 2 years because there’s no shred of a salvageable culture left. One of the people submitted a claim for benefits since everyone was told that all of their benefits would be in place until the end of the month of their last day. Fastly apparently denied that claim and told that person that the benefit had actually lapsed on their last official day of employment. That is just a straight up lie. Several of us read what everyone was given. Fastly should pay that claim but once again, HR can’t manage to do the right thing. I swear, I’ve never seen less empathy in an organization in my life. I want to thank the person who wrote the review that pulled back the curtain on the people team. It was really illuminating and explained a lot of things that we’ve all been seeing for a while now. I want to let that person know that most (maybe even all) of the “helpful” votes on that review came from current employees. You saved us the energy of wondering if someone good was going to replace the terrible head of HR that just left. Now we know to save our energy since there’s no chance that will happen. Another review from this week mentioned the suspicious positive reviews that went up after the layoff. I really appreciated them because they’re way more telling than the critical reviews are. What kind of psychopath refers to recently laid off former colleagues as “bloat”? What kind of psychopath tells someone who has spent a good amount of time describing how little reward there is for people who work hard because their craven leader is focused on playing the Hunger Games to just “QUIT and be free to find a new company you were happy with”? The kind of psychopath that is still playing the Hunger Games, which has come up a couple of times now because it’s so on point. My favorite one though is the one that randomly talks about the former CEO who hasn’t been with the company for 2 years, but has no opinion about the company, current CEO, or business outlook. I can’t figure out why no one has found your contributions helpful, even though they seen to be so “popular”. These are the big strategic thinkers at the helm.