Fast Enterprises Reviews

Pros

- Meaningful work (The things you touch have a tangible and visible impact) that is recognized and appreciated - Great pay and benefits (OT is paid for as well, which is extremely rare in the industry) - Moving to different places can be an enjoyable experience that keeps things fresh

Cons

- Your experience can vary depending on your location. Most PMs are given free reign to run their project as they see fit. So, there is lots of variation in how things are done. This can then either positively or negatively shape your perception. - While fun initially, moving around every couple of years can get exhausting eventually. - Career growth within the company is limited since they primarily work with one technology that's leveraged across their product line.

Pros

- Good benefits (401k match, insurance, PTO, sabbatical, etc.) - Paid OT - Good salary (see cons for caveats) - Moved to new location every few years - Good relocation packages - Great coworkers and clients

Cons

- No transferrable skills for many in company, not really a development role, despite many being called "developers" - Being expected to move every few years, quality of life changes, breaking connections, having to adjust, cost of losing assets (housing, maybe cars, etc.) - Salary is relative to Denver CO; this could mean you live like a king in one location, but eat ramen at your next location - Differing expectations across different locations; you will work with a new team, new managers, and new project managers. Client demands could be different, 80hrs a week at one location vs 40hrs a week at another

Pros

- Allows me to combine my passion for helping communities with my interest in technology, and affinity for building relationships and learning about others - Leadership that genuinely cares about its employees - Corporate philosophy of providing value to clients, and doing so with integrity

Cons

- virtual work has made life easier in some ways, but sacrificed team relationships and the benefits of a social work environment. Employees work in isolation more.

Pros

- Compensation is top notch - Most FASTies are great to work with - Everyone on the project has the opportunity to make a big difference - The Product is good and definitely improves the lives of our clients -Overtime is paid

Cons

- Every site is different. Depending on site leadership, you may have an excellent experience or a horrible one. - A lot of the decisions about the core product are made by people who have not worked on a project site in over a decade. While they may look good on paper, they often diminish the usefulness of the product and make things more difficult for project staff. - It seems like there have been a lot of very good and experienced people being fired lately without much explanation. - People are often pressured into being leaders without a pay raise, even when they probably shouldn't lead or don't want to. - You have to move a lot, and it's always a huge pain - the third party that coordinates everything is awful. - Team building budgets aren't what they used to be. - There's a lot of long hours expected at certain parts of the project - Testers and trainers are leaving at an alarming rate, and are not being replenished, meaning that there is either more work for fewer people or a lower quality of training.

Pros

Great team outings and team building.

Cons

Can be long hours and constant moving

Pros

Like many other reviews on here, this is a good job if you know what you are getting into. This is not a job where you will develop your technical skills, but rather degrade them. It's much more of a business consulting job with a side of coding, rather than a software development focused role with a side of business standups. Understanding this is key. - Initial pay and benefits - Ease of getting hired - People you work with

Cons

- No growth opportunities - Limited and outdated tech stack - Pay growth and ceiling - Work life balance

Pros

Lots of Great people work here. Hybrid &flexible work options for some positions (not all). Very good pay and health care. Occasional travel, incl. fun trips/ Occasional fun teambuilding activities

Cons

Not enough vacation time – this the worst vacation time I’ve ever seen and it doesn't increase after being there for a year or even 2 years. you do get a nice sabbatical you get every 4 years, but I’d rather have more vacation time every year. Heavy drinking culture and pressure to party... Younger people often aren’t taken seriously, their knowledge isn’t valued as much. This company has been around for a long time so it’s often difficult to get them to try new things

Pros

It is definitely not a typical dev job, but within a year you will be an expert with the software and have the opportunity to lead increasingly large projects. It’s a great experience for anyone interested in product/project management. Benefits are great - good health/vision/dental, 401k match, COLA if sent to expensive cities, gym reimbursement. Overtime gets you more vacation and is paid out at your standard rate. If you do work a bunch, you’re at least paid really well for it. Paternity leave just got bumped up to three months. Once you have a couple of years in, it’s much, much easier to get to a site you want to work at, and management will help you out (enough people don’t want to move, it seems, that being willing gives you a great chance of getting to even the best locations). Some clients are amazing. My last site had an edm client group that would invite everyone out. The site before had a guy who would host weekly barbecues.

Cons

If you aren’t open to traveling or having a job that is only partially traditional development, this isn’t the gig for you. Recruiters at least try to make that point abundantly clear ahead of time. Despite what others have said - I think wary career progression is great if you want to be a manager. You’re given major responsibilities very early if you want. Once you do the initial steps though (team lead) there’s not much direction on how to progress further (architect, project manager). Every site is different, so every experience is different. Some sites have a ton of work, others have nothing to do.

Pros

Money. Some fun outings if you don’t mind the fratty culture of some sites.

Cons

Toxic management at all levels. An exact quote from one lead was “think of it as work-life integration, not work-life balance”.

Pros

The money is good, you get paid hourly for overtime, and you'll meet a lot of cool people and do some cool outside of work things with them. But those positives are almost weaponized because you don't want to let people that you're friends with down by not working overtime and getting things done. If you're making money for it, you might as well show camaraderie and work overtime with them. Also, the software stack is finally moving in a modern direction. C# will probably be more useful than VB.NET in your future endeavors, but you probably won't be doing cool things with coding. It's better than 5 years ago, at least. As a tech team member, you'll get pretty good at SQL (especially if you get assigned a lot of tuning issues), understand the basics of software architecture and enterprise level application management, and hone problem solving skills.

Cons

The main issue with my time spent there was the overtime. In the initial interview, I was asked if I was fine with occasional overtime (which I was), but in retrospect, "occasional" was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. About 8 months before a project starts to roll out, overtime will start to be encouraged from your project manager/team lead. And since everyone else is doing it... you'll find yourself sucked into it too. I got the whole "I can't require you to work more hours, but you should probably be working more hours" from my PM during a review, which is just terrible. You get paid your hourly rate for all overtime, yes, but if there is a necessity to work overtime across pretty much every team, then something is horribly wrong with the project structure as a whole. To compound this, the longer people stay with FAST, the higher the likelihood is that they'll be fine with working obscene amounts of overtime. This adds pressure to you as a new hire to do the same. It's easily the worst part of working for FAST. FAST does roll out mostly on time and on budget, which is definitely worthy of commendation, but the secret sauce is the after hours work of young professionals who don't know how to effectively set boundaries. Believe me, I was one of those. The software is another sore point. It's... not good. And everyone knows this at the company, but with commercial off the shelf software, you have to make some sacrifices I guess. (Side note: this isn't trying to discount some of what's in the application. The developers working at headquarters have done some pretty cool stuff, and kudos to them, but as a new hire you DEFINITELY won't be working there). As a new hire, you'll mostly be building out interfaces and filling out config for reference tables, while trying to gain enough of an understanding of the architecture to bend it to your will. It's not a good experience working with the software. For tech team specifically, the overtime issue gets worse (especially in the couple months before and after rollout). One year in, and I was easily working longer hours than my PM. Also, beginner tech team members are practically useless for the first 6 months to a year because not only do you have to learn the application and architecture, you also have to learn the solutions to site issues and get really good at frantic problem solving. To learn effectively, you have to have a really good team lead who is willing to put the work in to train you. I was lucky and had some good leads, but this is definitely not a guarantee. Tech team training mitigates this somewhat, but if new hire training is like catching water from a firehose in a teacup, tech team training is like trying to do the same at Niagara Falls.