Fastly reviews

Please note that 100% of the following is opinion and my perspective on the organization. Because nothing makes sense to me at this company, I don’t even have concrete facts to share, even if I wanted to.

 To me, Fastly is everything that comes to mind for a failing, arrogant, slow-moving exercise in office politics and middle-management. Gone, in my mind, are the days of innovation, and the only efforts that seem to remain are the dreaded “work around the work” of policies, procedures, guilds, and committees. Teams, in my experience, deal with so much rot that it takes months if not quarters if not years to accomplish the simplest tasks. When asked a question, I find most people on most teams have to scramble just to find information about the products that their teams own! To be clear, I don’t blame these team members *at all*, I blame prioritization by those who are so afraid of commitment that they will seemingly never fix problems and instead, as another reviewer puts it, just “shuffle papers around” — what a great way of phrasing it. Instead of investing in keeping the lights on, many (though not all), seem to sweep the problems under the rug and keep adding OKRs. Fastly appears to me to be the kind of company that will take months to establish guidelines for this "meta-work". Promotions, from my perspective, seem to be a complete coin flip and based on how many times the committee has seen your profile picture in Slack. It is a company that employs e-celebs, and, in my experience, they will never let you forget it. They seem to spend years on high-intensity projects only to go “whoops! nevermind!” They’ll blow who-knows-how-much on a “Special Developer Event” where they announce a hilariously-late-to-the-party “AI Accelerator.” I’m guessing that last one was just to juice the stock price, but I’m pretty sure at the time of writing that the stock price went down after that announcement. Maybe the market isn’t irrational after all. Fastly, in my opinion, is a company that will undergo massive layoffs and turmoil in the current economic climate (and after they burn through all their cash), and rightfully so. While the company has quite a few high-profile customers, it doesn’t seem to have made a difference after reading its latest earnings report (and subsequent stock price nightmare), and I personally see no end in sight (even though I am not in-the-know regarding any future announcements from the company). What I can say is that if launching ridiculous products like the AI Accelerator is more important than actually challenging our competition by being at all competitive with our offerings, or even just getting all of the policies/procedures/rot out of the way, then the light at the end of the tunnel is one dim freakin’ bulb. I fear for the day that the chickens come home to roost and find a nest that is crumbling, rotten, and irreparable. Perhaps marketing and product can come together and craft a meaningful free trial that rivals our competition. Maybe they could rethink the “$50 of free traffic” deal, which is horrendous for measuring usage, instead of just seemingly rebranding their existing free accounts as some grand announcement. Seriously though, we’ve had free accounts for years, and it’s almost like we just re-announce it every year and hope the markets take note. Maybe I’m just not in the know of what exactly is new, but if an employee is confused about it I’m sure the general public will be too. Maybe we could offer a decent self-service platform with a pay-as-you-go model, with well-defined limits and overage costs. I’m not a businessman, but that seems like the bare minimum. Fastly right now, even with “self-service offerings” is, in my opinion, still way too dependent on sales, services, support, and whatnot — just compare the user experiences of Cloudflare and Fastly. Unfortunately, we probably *can’t* fix any of this because it would never make it through the what-feels-like-hundreds of committees required. I often worry about who will be the first to go if Fastly burns through all of their operating cash. It won’t be the executives, the ones whose only results seem to lie somewhere on the spectrum between “**** up” and “massive **** up” (if they even bother to do anything in the first place.) Instead, it will probably be the few good managers that actually enable their teams to get work done and shield their teams from the 17th weekly product analysis security summit insight community champion review committee. It will probably be quiet no-name engineers who appear to do nothing but put out what-seem-to-be-constantly-multiplying fires. If only any of them had published a book or hung out with celebrities, maybe their fates would be different. Every LinkedIn post comments about Fastly’s people. While there are absolutely great people who must have committed grave sins in a past life to get stuck here (or they just have families to support or mortgages to pay, such as myself), there are a surprising amount of people who I avoid like the plague. Not to get political, but Fastly has exactly what I would expect of a company headquartered in SF, and does the stereotype absolutely zero favors. It’s not that the causes both the company and its employees take up aren’t important, far from it, but in many ways activism seems to be more important to the company than actually improving the business. You can do both, many companies do, but Fastly doesn’t seem to be able to. Fastly appears to have chosen one over the other, and guess which one I think they picked? I cant even blame Todd all that much for all this. In my opinion, he’s 50% Wall Street plant, 50% lame duck, and I’m pretty sure he just wants another exit: an Aspen home or a place on the Vineyard. Fastly, to me, is not a Content Delivery Network (CDN), but a Pay Package Delivery Network (PPDN) for those with connections in the “big tech” industry. Many give Todd props for never selling Fastly stock (outside of the sell-to-cover transactions), and I suspect (but am 100% guessing) that is because he’s been placed at the helm to guide Fastly through an acquisition, where his shares would then translate to a stock of much higher value. Of course this is all 100% speculation, but I can’t come up with another flattering excuse for this executive team’s horrendous performance. The other executives seem like they’re straight out of that Silicon Valley show, caricatures for the most insufferable people in the industry. To me, they feel extremely smarmy and elitist, with the new Chief Product Officer seemingly being spiteful against the company’s employees for worrying about things like the stock price (you know, part of the income we rely on to feed our families). The Chief People Officer, meanwhile, seems extremely busy trying to figure out how to get people back in the office. I think they just have to figure out how they’re going to replace at least 10-15% of their workforce before they finally enforce RTO for everyone. It’s not that I can blame them, if Fastly truly believes “AI Accelerator” and the “Sustainability Dashboard” are worthwhile initiatives, then something has to radically change to avoid a chapter 11, and RTO may be the last card in the deck. I think it all stems from my opinion that Fastly so desperately wants to be a company that’s taken seriously. Fastly is so serious about becoming innovative enough to beat our competition, but it doesn’t seem to have any of the insight, self-awareness, or leadership to do so. To me, it’s a car wreck you can’t look away from, but it’s unfortunate that it may have a very real impact on our jobs. So where does that leave us? I’d like to direct you to a review on Blind, from someone who sounds like sales or product: “”” Personally, I like my title and salary. There aren't a whole lot of other tech companies where I could hold my current position. Might be able to get better TO elsewhere with less responsibility but why risk it? It's not like the jokers in HR here can effectively terminate for poor performance. I spend 2-3 weeks per quarter traveling "on business" (gets me away from the family) and the rest kinda vaguely shirking responsibilities and giving half answers. Look, l've got alot of other stuff going on in my life right now. Recently, l've made a pact with some of the other leaders here to heap praise up on one another so we can all get unwarranted promotions next cycle. Things are looking up overall; how about that $12 FSLY price ya?? “”” Wow. Also, it’s $7 now, not $12. As snarky as that post is, I cant help but find myself having similar feelings. My work has essentially boiled down to the following: - “When I try to get anything done, I just get bogged down in bureaucracy and annoyed beyond belief.” - “If enough time passes, after a while the project will just get silently killed or priorities will shift” - "Is getting promoted at this company even worth it? Do I need the added annoyance of more responsibility for a paltry raise?” It’s not a healthy mindset by any means, but there doesn’t appear to be any accountability, any urgency, any focus, anything that would actually keep a company chugging along in a normal economic climate. To that point, from my perspective, cracks are appearing. Fastly’s stock price has dumped 95+% since all-time highs, 70% since February. I am not over-exaggerating when I say this is cryptocurrency or "meme-stock" territory. Who would ever trust a stock like that to be a serious part of any compensation package, never-mind invest in it willingly? Well, like our friend above said, I’ll keep collecting that paycheck, and I’ll keep performing that serf role as everything seems to continue to death-spiral — it’s honestly not a bad deal compared to what others in the industry are going through. But once the chickens finally come home to roost, or they ever enforce RTO, it’ll finally be time to leave.