Pros
- Pay: Needless to say, the pay at FAST is great for the work you're doing and the experience they require. Especially in your first year, where many sites will go easy on you and prevent overloading you with ovetime and toxic work culture, FAST is a great place in the current CS job market to work for a short while, maintain a good work-life balance (hopefully), and make good money while you're there to establish your finances as you enter the workforce. - Great Benefits: The benefits at FAST are really, really good. As in, you won't need your parent's insurance if you're under 26 good. People consistently applaud it, and I will too. Please maintain this, as it clearly has helped a lot of your employees' quality of life and productivity at work. - IC Culture: The culture among ICs is often very friendly and cooperative. FAST's hiring, due to being a consultational/software role, focuses a lot more on behavioral interviewing than most CS roles. As such, the new hires at FAST are often not only pretty good at what they do, but they're also often mature, friendly, and easy to work with. Obviously this isn't a universal case, but I found the people I met at FAST were often great people to work with. You'll hear from many people that they made good friends during their time here that they stayed in touch with afterwards. - Travel opportunities: While FAST's work is government-based, most sites are going to be in state capitals. That meaning, not central tech cities like most CS jobs will often take you. However, many of the cities are affordable, good to live in, and have plenty to do. Also, if you hate the city you're in, you can leave with FAST and there are some avenues to request this be done. If your idea of travelling is to immerse yourself somewhere for an extended time rather than a short vacation, FAST is really good for doing that in America and a few other places in the world. Additionally, short-term relocations become available as you are in FAST for a longer time, and are an experience more akin to what you see at other consulting firms, with shorter stays at client sites that are fully covered by the company. - Relocation assistance: My experience relocating with FAST genuinely made me overestimate how good I was at moving. The services FAST use to move you are overall hassle-free, come at no charge to you, and made me forget that moving can honestly be a nightmare. Additionally, FAST makes an effort to fund its employees relocation with a generous stipend to offset any additional moving costs. Good job FAST :D - Paid overtime (bonus time system is fair). The bonus time system is overall a fair one, where working overtime will feed those hours back to you at a pretty reasonable rate. It makes working hard for a project feel more appreciated, and incentivizes employees to meet deadlines and perform well due to the incentives bonus time provide. - Overall, from what I saw as I was leaving and what I see from employees still in FAST, there are two main takeaways from FAST, despite the clear issues we'll go into. 1. There are efforts being to made improve in management. Slowly, but there are people in every level of the company working diligently to improve things, and they are making change happen slowly but surely. I think FAST has the potential to not only bring people in, but genuinely retain employees through fair practices and mutual interest in growth, which it needs to improve on. 2. There are a lot of genuinely kind, hard-working people in this company who want to do good. While it's grown a lot in the past 15 years and has faced growing pains from this growth, I think the hiring team and HR have made clear steps to cultivate a workforce that is excellent at teamwork and communication, in the younger level especially.
Cons
- Diversity, Equity, Inclusion: FAST has improved in this regard, but it is still notable that you will be hard-pressed to find more than 10% of most sites to be people of color or non-male, much less both. - Tech Debt: If you are in Computer Science because you love the field, this will be your biggest thing to know with your work. Many of the skills you learn while working are soft skills at best and are not very transferable once you leave. If you are going to take your skills here to another job, you will have to stretch that resume a good bit to make it sound like you've been coding, and there are many deeply-embedded roadblocks to how the company works that make it harder than just coming in on your first day and saying "Actually, I'd prefer if any tasks that were more coding heavy were assigned my way". It can be genuinely hard to get your hands on code here. - Management. Merit/raises were highly based on how your management liked you, rather than on your objective skill and accomplishments. This is coming from someone who did receive that favoritism from management and noticed the harsh discrepancy in treatment. Some employees received notably worse treatment based on how the management as a collective had decided to view them, despite their efforts to meet standards and improve. It took notable stepping up from team members aside from management to defend an employee from being overloaded with work. While this is not a common occurence, and does not occur at every site, know that office politics will be a thing at some sites, and it has been toxic in my experience. - On-site/remote work - the partners highly value a on-site approach, and as such have alienated a large number of their work force. Due to this, we see many reviews on here blasting them for the same thing. While the field of consulting benefits from in-person interaction, it is important to note that the most recent push involved fully in-office, regardless of the policies of the client we are working with. That meaning, you as a consultant will be sitting in a government office 5 days a week, while the government employees you are working with will be working remote for 3 days a week. When this is the case, it's no longer a matter of maximizing efficient, but of having unnecessary control over your employees for seemingly no reason. It's hard to defend this decision from any angle, even a financial one, considering the office space the consultants are now taking up for no reason. - Flat structure / Partner model: While FAST portrays the partner model as a good thing, allowing clear feedback, flexibility, and little red tape, the truth is that the partner model creates a very clear dichotomy between the people who make bank at FAST and have all the deciding power (Partners, Directors), and the other 2000 people. This is not new for the corporate sphere, but the flat structure makes it so that the ladder you can climb is much more akin to a large wall you just need to bide your time to jump over. Often, your decisions on how to move upward in the company will be primarily one of "if I do this, X partner will see it" and hoping you gain enough rapport with the upper echelon.
