Fast Enterprises reviews

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 - The technology you work with will likely be outdated unless you get relocated to one of the newer sites.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.

-ancient software that is only supported due to inefficient state governments that don't have any concept of what modern software is capable of, or maybe the market is just too small for real tech companies to bother entering so the only players are Fast, Deloitte, SAP and other accounting type companies that don't have much engineering capability. -work life balance is often either 60+ hours a week on a new project or you do barely any work on an old project that's basically over. When you're on a big rollout managers basically pressure you subtly to sacrifice everything else in your life (family, hobbies etc). Sometimes quite a toxic atmosphere where you feel bad if you want to go home or wanted to do something else on the weekend. I have seen some developers resort to bringing up things like "ah my kid needs to go to this thing" just to be able to leave. They are aware of this type of lifestyle so they do throw a rollout party where they thank your family members for sacrificing their lives with you so you could work on the project though. -flat structure so basically there is no title or career progression, you pretty much go from consultant to team lead and then maybe architect (one or two per office). I guess then if you stay 10 years you might become the project manager, then maybe another 20 you can get director title? 90% of the company are basically consultants with no real title though. -this isn't a tech company and management is definitely structured like it. Architects here probably wouldn't pass entry level interviews at relevant companies because I doubt they know any data structure besides an fda. All the software is proprietary so excelling here means you spent long enough learning the company specific system that isn't used anywhere else, and from a system design standpoint is pretty bad if they ever needed to scale (which they don't because each project is only going to ever be so big). From a technical perspective, if you work here 20 years you probably will not gain any relevant expertise that other companies would value other than some SQL knowledge. -management is a lot of corporate suits and "no we don't work from home" type people that have just been here for decades. They repeat the same koolaid every year at the annual party where you get wasted. Some managers are pretty nice but I have seen a lot of micromanagement, brown nosing and lower level managers throwing people under the bus to make sure they don't look bad to their managers. On the few projects where there is a partner (top leadership that's been around for like 20+ years), managers just either keep their head down or look the other way while brown nosing. -HR sends out about 20 emails a year to the whole company pressuring people to vote on glassdoor how great the company is so they can brag about it during recruiting. Lot of propaganda like this is spread around in general.