Pros
The people were generally great to work with—good teamwork, good humor, and flexible scheduling. I was given autonomy to do my work and was well supported by my team. When COVID hit, I felt like my team and I were very well supported in immediately transitioning to WFH. The DEI initiatives also took steps to make the culture more inclusive.
Cons
If you are an employee of FWI, they will bend you until you break and pay you way below industry standard while they’re at it. During my time there, FWI’s strategy was to, above all, protect the company bottom line. That meant keeping more money in the company by underpaying existing employees and not backfilling roles when people left. They backfilled roles and promoted people just enough to be able to say they did, but promotions weren’t paired with a raise that would pay them commensurate with the market. And, of course, whether you were officially given a promotion or not, you were very likely given more work and responsibility over time—just not more money. The strategy was to keep teams lean to save money in the short term. This was a really demoralizing space to work in. I’m not sure why there were still so many issues there when the company leadership took multiple employee surveys over time to anonymously get feedback on problems and solutions. They knew what the problems were. I suspect the solution in many cases involved them spending money, and they wouldn’t do that. There just were not enough team members there to offer excellent customer service for a complicated product in a chaotic environment. There were countless times when I needed to get a question answered—typically to solve a customer issue. I’d get passed from person to person and never really get an answer. “Nobody knows” was pretty much the status quo. A failure of leadership to support putting processes in place led to overworked employees having no idea what was going on and not knowing where to go to figure it out. And where the passing off of tasks was done intentionally, there was no accountability for it. I can’t recommend working there. The company was revenue-centric and disorganized to the detriment of both employees and customers. My mental and physical health have been much better since I left.