Pros
(and I've worked at a lot of them by this point)
- Leadership actually gives a toss about what happens to the employees, not just the bottom line, and takes actions to support that. There's a decent amount of communication and messaging from them, and chances to submit anonymous questions to them, etc.
- Company started doing remote/hybrid work long before the pandemic, so they'll stay that way (which is also why there's an "events" team, like one of the other reviews was dunking on - if you're a person who's worked remote at other companies before, you know how much it can suck for people in-office to get disproportionate perks/ignore remote employees. Fastly does a decent job of making gestures that include everyone)
- Business doesn't just dump old features in favor chasing down the new hotness, like some larger tech companies, and cares about customer support experience and such
- The people. Seriously, the people. People in Fastly engineering are very smart AND on average some of the nicer and most leave-things-(and other teams/people)-better-than-you-found-them people I've worked with, and that is a sight for sore eyes in tech.
Hilariously, those reviews that are so mad about Fastly caring about diversity (god forbid that people not all be/think/look the same), vaccinations (oh no, science! how dare!), and the people (that free wellness day that you enjoy so much probably wouldn't come from a company that didn't care as much...or if you like that day off, maybe you don't care as much about closing deals as you say you do, bud), are great endorsements for why Fastly is a pretty good place to work.
If that means a tradeoff with being the most STONKS!!! place in tech, I'm fine with that.
Cons
- It does feel like leadership is finding its feet under them about how to be a public company: balancing revenue vs. maintaining good business ethics, growing vs. improving culture/process, and navigating its first non-trivial acquisition. Sometimes it feels like there's an increase in process/red tape but not an increase in actual order yet. Some of that feels like common American corporate culture growing pains in general, though.
- Contrary to the ironically-triggered "too diverse!!" reviews, even if the reviewers personally didn't benefit from it, Fastly isn't immune to the tech tendency to sometimes promote and protect people who AREN'T "diverse and inclusive" and don't deserve it. There have been a number of leadership changes in engineering over the last few years, and it's been a net positive, but there's definitely a couple of those not-so-deserving ones being a headache.
