Fast Enterprises reviews

This company is a cross between an abusive family and a frat house. On my project, my manager had no social skills, and spent a large amount of his time yelling at government contractors and subordinates. Even though multiple employees complained about him to management, no action was taken, as he was one of the few long-term developers on the project. As a new-employee, you are expected to teach yourself how to use the system. This is due to the lack of senior developers, most of whom presumably leave for better jobs. The system is a dysfunctional nightmare, with code standards not being present or unchanged from the 1990s. Skills learned here are not applicable across broader industry. Therefore, few developers stick around for longer than a couple of years. This leaves the company being primarily composed of fresh college graduates from lower-tier schools. This is then reflected in the office culture, which placed a strong emphasis on binge drinking and drug use. Promotions and reviews were strongly connected to attendance of out-of-office events. We were expected to spend long hours at work, and spend lots of time at corporate events. I had a co-worker who successfully automated an aspect of work which was previously done manually. Instead of being recognized by management, he was shuffled to a project with lower pay for not being a personal friend of management. Backbiting and gossip were endemic. Fast tries to pressure new employees to leave positive reviews during orientation. If you are a current employee, please do yourself a favor and leave

Many of the cons of working for Fast are well documented, long hours, moving a lot, etc. I wanted to focus on something that I have not seen many people mention: The technical skills that you learn as an employee at Fast are not transferable to other jobs or companies, here are some examples: You also learn VB.NET, and let's be real, VB.NET is not widely used. Even saying that you learn VB.NET is a little bit misleading because you will never use a single .NET data structure. For some reason Fast has developed all of their own data structures that you are required to use, so you will not learn .NET working for Fast. Not only is it annoying that you are learning something that will not be helpful in future jobs, there is no documentation on how any of their proprietary code works and obviously you cannot Google it and as a new employee you cannot see their core code so you rely on other employees just explaining to you how to use their data structures and other proprietary code. After leaving Fast and starting at a company that actually uses .NET, I felt like I had to learn to program all over again. Many of my coworkers at Fast felt this way and people who have been there a long time know they do not have the technical skills to move to another software development type roll at another company. Only about 25% of the job is actually writing code in VB.NET, instead most of your time is spent configuring their system, which just means you are trying to figure out how to set up information in their database. For example, in order to add a button on a screen in their system, you don't do it in the code, you add a line of configuration to a specific table. To make that button do something, you add a line of configuration in a different table. Learning how those tables work and to configure them is 75% of the job. Again, no documentation and how they work. They have a proprietary code repository that they use and it does not work in a similar manner to any other code repository I am aware of (I have used Git and SVN). They do not do any unit testing on any code. The best experience you get is experience in SQL and I have no complaints about that.