Fastly reviews

Please note that 100% of the following is my opinion and my perspective on the organization. I can only speak for myself and people I’ve spoken to. Because nothing in this company makes sense to me, I don’t have concrete facts to share, even if I wanted to. To begin – the elephant in the room – the layoffs. As expected, these layoffs did not impact executives or the vast majority of middle-management, but instead ICs with very little connection to business performance. Like many have said, the way the company did these layoffs was absolutely psychotic, even with their excuse of “we had to let the markets know at the exact same time” (which could be totally true, I’m not sure). I’m fairly certain the hunger-games-esque “you’ll know in the next 48 hours” was a reality-check for many within the organization, including myself. I think it totally demolished any remaining loyalty and morale in one fell swoop, not that I had much of that to begin with. Here’s what I’ve seen in terms of the fallout: - Lots of good, hard-working people who got stuff done are now gone. - Useless positions remain, with IT, Security, and HR incessantly and increasingly aggravating all parts of the organization. *Especially IT.* - More incidents in engineering, both in number and in severity - with customers noticing. - More people just disappear for hours at a time, not replying to messages, attending meetings, or fulfilling their obligations. - More lengthy PTOs being booked by everyone from super senior management down to individual contributors. - A flood of negative Glassdoor reviews from multiple different organizations within the company. - The complete destruction of morale and company spirit. - Sales team commissions being entirely gutted (please read “Business Review - YMMV” - they know what they’re talking about there) I hate to be exaggeratory but it’s truly an unforgivable, inexcusable, and unrecoverable dumpster fire in my eyes now. It may just be the part of the organization I’m in, but it truly feels like nothing gets done now. It’s an endless cycle of people talking about things, those things not getting done, and everyone then congratulating themselves on their massive failures. At this point, OKR meetings are humiliation rituals designed to extract the maximum amount of corporate-word-salad from middle-management as possible. After the layoffs, the entire organization is doing nothing but shuffling papers in the apocalypse. What is engineering working on? What is product planning? It’s almost comical how bad things have become - Some of the things people at this company are wasting their time on are some of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard in the tech industry. It’s becoming exponentially more difficult to believe in Fastly’s mission of “making internet experiences faster, safer, and more engaging” when we fall behind our competitors on every single one of those metrics at every possible opportunity. To illustrate that point, let’s look at Cloudflare, Fastly’s primary competition. They recently announced “Instant Purge” where they’re bringing 150ms purging to every account type. Aside from programmatic configuration with VCL (and who still wants to use VCL in 2024? No one I’ve talked to does), what moat does Fastly have left? I cannot emphasize enough how demoralizing it is to watch our competition announce all these useful value-adds, while Fastly is launching a “sustainability dashboard.” It’s embarrassing. I have to watch others innovate, while the best thing Fastly can come up with is a laughable cache layer for AI, which has already been obsoleted by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic three months after it launched. I then go look at the Fastly blog, and see that the most recent “Product” posts are 10/17 with a Fastly Command Line Interface update, 9/18 with a tutorial, 6/26 with a “Web Application Firewall simulator”, and finally 6/20 with the cringe-worthy “Special Developer Event” which was truly Fastly’s “jump the shark” moment. Don’t worry though, there is a blog post on 10/8 from someone coping with the fact Cloudflare now even beats us at “Instant Purge”TM (trademarked! That’s right Cloudflare, we have a trademark! You better watch out!) With Fastly’s quality of life declining, and our competition beating us at every turn, I now fully and wholeheartedly believe Fastly is a company that is looking towards a liquidation like StackPath and Edgio. There is simply no way I see Fastly pulling out of its current nosedive with its current leadership, who I blame fully for the demise of the company. To see the amount of damage they’ve caused, look no further than the numerous reviews left here since the layoffs. Yes, many people leaving negative reviews are bitter because they were impacted, but you’ll also notice a lot of the same complaints being raised long before the layoffs, and from those who still identify as a “current employee.” More damningly, I’d encourage both prospective and current employees to read some of the positive reviews. I think you’ll find that the recent ones seem a bit… off. This is not because they’re positive, nor that they started happening as soon as Fastly received the dreaded “Below industry average for company size” Glassdoor mark. I believe these reviews are suspicious because the language and approach they use seem near-identical to communications from Fastly’s executive team. Let’s be honest with ourselves, what individual contributor is writing “Keep communicating as honestly and transparently as you can” or “One downside is that some employees can exhibit a sense of entitlement, particularly in how they show up in Slack channels and online when discussing the company,” (funny that this one is the one the company chose to feature and have always show up first). What kind of contributor actually writes “One of the biggest reasons I love my role here is the sense of empowerment I feel to make meaningful changes that help move the business forward.” Only an executive could ask “If the place was so bad why not QUIT and be free to find a new company you were happy with?” It’s, in my opinion, extremely comical and very telling of where Fastly is as a business. It’s, at the very least, a severe indictment of the People Organization. Adding insult to injury, Fastly announced that they would no longer hold their traditional all-hands, and instead would hold two separate live AMAs with senior leadership. For those unaware, traditional all-hands would feature anonymous Q&As, and it appears that morale has reached such a low point that these questions being anonymous can no longer be permitted. And yet, even with the questions not being anonymous, the executives still refused to answer difficult questions, or were as defensive and spiteful as they usually are. The Chief Product Officer continues to answer questions in a manner that implies it is some personal attack on him. It seems like he thinks he’s above it and should not have to answer to the plebeian contributors. The CEO continues to give lame platitudes, to the extent where if he was not on video, I would assume his responses came from a large language model trained exclusively on mediocrity and being messed up by the company’s AI Accelerator. I’ll end by answering the executive who asked “if the place was so bad, why not quit?” The answer is simply the current job market. I truly believe most individual contributors would *love* to leave the company at this point, but do not want to deal with a job market that is much like Fastly itself: locked, stunned, frozen-in-place, and an absolute never-ending nightmare.

Leadership The board handed the reins to a first-time CEO who has run the company into the ground. Almost the entire C-suite has turned over since Nightingale came in. He has replaced them with exclusively ex-Cisco hires, which has become a comedy of errors. They have been wholly incompetent. They don’t understand the market opportunities/threats and have grossly mismanaged the organization. VP/Directors are as others have described… largely hangers-on. There are a lot of platitudes about ‘empowerment’ but no one is empowered to make change, it's just talk. It is a stagnant organization and its business prospects reflect that. Product: The company struggles to create and market licensable software so the product suite is significantly behind the market and now rarely wins competitive evaluations. It's now a rarity that Fastly is even invited into evaluations. In a mature market, there are few companies that do not have an existing solution in place, so new business requires displacing incumbents. Fastly is poorly positioned to displace incumbents because it can only replace a portion of the competitor’s functionality - the market knows this. Rather than build products that meet current and future client requirements, the executive strategy is to double down on their CDN offering. The challenge is that the CDN market is a commoditized, low growth, and low margin business. Every dollar that is competed over gains $0.75 for the winner, and CDN deals are barely profitable. The entire market is going through price compression and getting eaten by the hyperscalers. It's a terrible market category and they don’t have a pivot. (probably one reason no buyer has emerged for the company). In the past year, two competitors in the CDN space have filed for bankruptcy, Fastly can’t seem to see the writing on the wall. It has been a parade of do-nothings leading the product org. The security platform they acquired for $775M (cash/equity) is basically an afterthought since there is almost no one left. After declaring that “Fastly is a security company”, they are still working on integrating the two systems 4 years later! They’ve missed so many opportunities to innovate in the security space, but they’ve failed because there is no real executive support for the security team, no comprehensive product strategy, and scant resources dedicated to security. It's a shame because it was a solid product. The edge computing solution is a complete failure - no market traction whatsoever and it is pushed as the future of Fastly. The latest “AI-accelerator” will be amazing if it even bills $50 annually for the company. The sustainability dashboard is a reflection of how misguided this company is. Operations Fastly’s internal operations are ridiculous for a public company. Post layoff, it is a tire fire. Processes are engineered with choke points/unnecessary approvals everywhere so it takes forever to get anything accomplished, if at all. Slack is the default communication so internal comms are a maze of loose threads leading to no resolution. Culture There is a culture of mediocrity that permeates the entire organization. Winning is not the culture at Fastly. Accountability is not the culture at Fastly. If you like woke politics bleeding into the workplace, this is the right fit.. Sales Focus New comp plans in ‘24 were designed to drastically limit what salespeople earn. Of note: - Recategorized revenue into buckets w/different rates (all low by ind standards). Rates for new revenue from existing customers (ie enterprise sales) are incredibly low. There are reps who brought in seven figure deals and were paid low four-figure commissions (and then let go during layoff). - Targets for existing customer revenue are often > 3X the company's growth rate. (Ie reps are expected to grow accounts by huge margins with no new products/services). Targets for new logos are often > 8X previous year in order to hit the same OTE. - If a customer churns, new revenue is counted against that deficit (Put that in perspective of a product/company that is getting destroyed by competitors, reps never get out of that hole.) - Commissions paid in monthly increments. - Payouts are based on when the company bills. Billing dept is manual and unorganized, so oftentimes billing will not go out for months and almost impossible to verify for accuracy. - Quotas change twice per year, so payouts can be washed away based on new quota/territory revenue changes. - Reps are not protected financially for deals run through the channel. Instead, partner margin is forfeited by the rep. The result is a total collapse in the revenue org and it is 100% on Nightingale and his team. In reality, this was a program to avoid paying the entire sales organization. Fastly’s marketing is completely ineffective - very few leads, no brand awareness, and the CMO’s strategic emphasis on banner ad campaigns is puzzling. The sales org relied on the channel for new business acquisition. The CEO didn’t like paying the channel org, so he reorganized that team into a model that reduced their effectiveness in the field. The result is that the channel is now largely non-existent.