Fast Enterprises reviews

3.6

58% would recommend to a friend

(1,390 total reviews)
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Martin Rankin

69% approve of CEO

63% positive business outlook

Fast Enterprises has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 1,390 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Fast Enterprises employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
1.0
Nov 17, 2021

Dead End work

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Decent pay for those right out of college. Good health insurance. They do pay for your move and help handle the annoying hits of it.

Cons

There isn’t much room to grow within the company. Almost no transferable skills. Bonus structure is horrible, especially compared to other companies. They do not train their leadership and promote favorites instead of those that they should promote. This has lead to HORRIBLE site specific leadership. After the first year or so, get out. Your pay will skyrocket, you will have many more career opportunities, you will get more transferable skills, and you will be much more marketable. Seriously, don’t stay more than a year. You’ll get stuck and then after a few years you’ll be VASTLY underpaid. There is a huge drinking culture, so if you’re sober or trying to stay sober good luck! You’ll be ostracized. I cannot stress this enough to young professionals: Fast pays well right out of school, but after 1-3 years they underpay and you won’t be up to date on the latest technology.

1.0
May 13, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Easy interviews and easy to get hired. - Government contracts and revenues from them are quite reliable and last multiple years. This makes the business stable and minimally affected by economic downturns, which in turn provides great job stability. - Work is easy and you can coast after the first year without having to put in much effort upskilling. - Okay benefits. Health, dental, vision insurance are on par with tech companies and fully paid for (including dependents). - A 4 week paid sabbatical every 4 years. - 10 days of sick leave per year. 6 weeks of paid maternity leave. Only a measly 1 week for paternity leave though. - 10 days of PTO per year for the first 5 years and 15 days thereafter. Additionally, first 40 hours (= 5 days) of overtime worked every year can be banked to use as PTO instead of cashing it out. - 401k matched 50% up to 6% of salary. Mega backdoor Roth available. - Pay is pretty great for the places 80% of employees end up in.

Cons

- 80% of employees end up in places that have no semblance of a tech industry. Good luck getting interview calls (during non-COVID times) from tech companies in other regions if you end up in one of these cities. - Pay is below average for the remaining 20% compared to what real tech companies pay their employees in the regions that actually have a tech industry. - Minimal say/control over which city/project one gets assigned to. Plus most people are moved to a new site every 2-4 years. Exceptions are rarely made, the most common one being you are allowed to stay on your current site/project with a pay cut. - The work is not intellectually challenging after the first year during which you pick up most of the skills and knowledge needed to do the job. Work gets mind numbingly boring after that and it's just lather, rinse, repeat the same things over and over with different clients, users, and subsystems. - There are no transferrable skills one picks up to help grow their career. The consulting skills gained are elementary at best and nothing to write home about. The same and more can be gained at any real tech company worth its salt. - Tons of implementation consultants (ICs) that have zero education/training in CS or anything technical. That's how menial the technical work is. In fact, 70% of it is actually just configuration of the product. - Any code that you do write is not complex or complicated by any measure and is mostly just simple if-else statements and while loops. A high school or college freshmen level education would suffice to be trained to do the technical work. - Most ICs can't write even fizz buzz code to save their lives. Most architects are incapable of clearing the bar to land an internship at FAANG or tier 2/3 tech companies. Some of them are probably reading this right now and wondering what that acronym is. - Tech stack is outdated and anything technical is proprietary (right down to the data structure most commonly used!) and does not translate to career opportunities at any other company. Even the version control is proprietary. Facepalm. The longer you stay the more your technical skills deteriorate. - Crazy hours on active implementation projects. Work from home is frowned upon and you're regularly expected to work long hours in the office. This was pre-COVID, but fully expect this to resume once things are back to normal. Hourly equivalent of regular pay for the overtime worked, but that's peanuts for having to give up your life for the company. - Frustrating to be surrounded by people that either don't know or just don't care that they're throwing away their careers. This is further exacerbated by the fact that many ICs have no technical background but think they're software engineers now.

2.0
Dec 12, 2017

No room for technical growth.

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pay is great. Benefits are great. Great place to learn and implement SQL.

Cons

Fast used to have a family feel. Now that it is much larger, unfortunately it is losing touch. Don't get too attached to your co-workers as you will most likely never see them again (at least not more than every 2 years) after you or they move to a new contract in a new city. If you are looking for a company that encourages technical growth and giving you freedom to engineer new applications to solve problems, this is NOT the company for you. You are stuck using the tools the development center provides you and will only be working in the same system for your entire career with fast. The coding that 90% of developers do is very basic VB.NET that plugs into the greater application of GenTax. There is no room for you to innovate your own ideas and solutions outside of the very narrow and stringent guidelines dictated by the few in the development center.

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Fast Enterprises Response
8y
Thank you for your review. We hope you, as a veteran employee, have used the methods we make available to all employees to have a conversation around your feelings. With regard to your comment about FAST no longer having a family feel, with our steady growth we are intentionally developing new practices to help maintain our strong culture and to foster relationships with our one another as employees and with our clients. FASTies also need to maintain the relationships they have with one another outside of the opportunities the company provides to stay in touch. ‘FASTie Connect’, our mentorship program is an example of a new practice and this and was designed to provide support to new hires through connecting folks to a current employee, sharing advice, providing encouragement and feedback. As a senior employee, part of maintaining challenge is accepting different responsibilities, including being a steward for your team, project and the company. FAST expects you to generate ideas and come forward with the best way to keep the family feel that you feel strongly about. With regard to your comment about not encouraging technical growth and the lack of innovations, our software is always changing as you have surely experienced in your 8 years with the company. The new versions of the product, new managers we have implemented and our expansion beyond tax are a way we can allow FASTies to be innovative and suggest ways to improve the system for our clients. Our technology and methodology is intentionally built to be simple and understandable and built with a single goal of delivering on-time and on-budget to our clients. Challenge comes in many forms, usually around business processes and solutions and where FAST can simplify any tools or technical solutions, we will continue to do so. These new versions, managers and our expansion are a way we have been able to develop the training we offer to employees and we encourage growth through those opportunities. We hope you will have a conversation about how you feel a “lack of challenge”. We recognize that 8 years is long time to dedicate to a company, we expect that you will speak with your Project Manager, a Partner or HR so we can discuss opportunities for you to experience a change in challenge while still maintaining a good balance for your work and life at home. You can be a vessel to help maintain the fast family feel! We all play a part in what makes FAST so unique.
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