Pros
- Great introduction to consulting and large government IT projects; the consulting work can be engaging and fulfilling if you are a people person that is curious, sharp, and organized - Opportunity to work on things that actually impact people in real ways - Great pay, especially at the entry level, including paid overtime - Annual company+family resort trip (pre-pandemic, obviously) - Opportunity for frequent relocation, if you're interested in traveling around - Generally great coworkers To make this job work for you, go in clear-eyed about all the below cons for 1-3 years, learn everything you can, and always think about how you can package/market the experience. If you can make time for it, pick up/sharpen some more marketable skills on the side. People get trapped at Fast first because they get hooked on the money (the starting salary is much higher than in comparable jobs, for what you actually do), and later because they have lost their value on the job market. If you can avoid both of those traps, Fast can offer you a good opportunity.
Cons
Company - Top-down culture is cult-like and authoritarian - Leaders are not trained to lead people, nor are they evaluated on how well they do it, and they are all raised from within, so the effects of this compound over time - No processes, tools, or milestones around employee growth and development - Pay structure is inscrutable, arbitrary, and unequal - Org structure and small number of roles prevent meaningful career growth - Mandatory relocations on short notice Day-to-day work - Poor work/life balance: heavy workloads, high stress - Lopsided distribution of work and accountability - Inadequate training and documentation - Little room for innovation, experimentation, or creativity Technology - Aging, bloated, byzantine core product - Very little exposure to transferrable, industry-standard tools and technologies: Fast has built its own systems for source control (no Git/GitHub), issue tracking (no Jira), document management, project management, and just about everything else - Limited scope of development work: most developers are constrained to writing business-layer plugin code (Visual Basic) in Visual Studio, writing database scripts in SQL Server, and editing granular configuration settings. - No automated testing tools, and the architecture doesn't lend itself to building them: lots of time wasted clicking around manually testing One last thing On this Glassdoor page, Fast has listed its revenue (in the Company Overview section) as $25-50M. A single client is likely to pay $50-200M over a few years for one new implementation (Google any press release announcing a contract won by Fast, or see the ones posted on Fast's website); many clients do multiple implementations in succession; maintenance and support fees are billed afterwards on an ongoing basis. Fast's website lists 70 clients total; projecting from all that, this company's revenue is closer to $1B than $25M.
