Fastly

• Genuinely some of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with, I never started or ended a day with the dread that comes from working with tyrants or in highly political places

• WLB is top notch and the company values employee well being (wellness days = one Friday off per month)

• Generally good benefits and flex PTO that wasn’t hard to get approved, at least on my team

• CEO has stood firmly behind his commitment to DEI and marginalized people

• Compensation is really low compared to other tech companies, even Bay Area salaries were low, there is no bonus, and lots of comp is tied to RSUs which means your total comp took a big hit, on top of low base salary, if you joined in 2020 when stock was soaring.
• The 401k match is only $1000/yr.
• Despite what I think is a real value for DEI, the company isn’t doing a good job getting diverse representation into all departments and definitely not leadership roles. As a company that had half of its workforce remote prior to covid, you can pull candidates from every corner of the US, racial diversity shouldn’t continue to be a challenge, especially in non-technical roles.
• There are too many soft goals and deliverables, it seems like output or accomplished tasks are the measuring stick, not impact or results.
• I saw lots of people leave due to a lack of career progression.
• There are so many immature processes and teams for a company at this stage, this immaturity is further exacerbated by managers who want to “shield and protect” their teams from “overwork”, meaning they completely absolve their reports from doing their job and allow people to disregard certain responsibilities.
• It is not really clear about what the company is trying to become and how we want to position ourselves - we were re-branding ourselves as an edge cloud platform and security company at the same time, which is it? And as an employee, I barely understood what we meant by calling ourselves an edge cloud platform, how can our customers understand what we mean when we don’t? There are a lot of voices trying to shape the narrative of edge computing right now, refine our story so we can break through the noise.

Focus on hard metrics.

Better align teams to clear goals or priorities across departments.

Do a better job of hiring racially diverse people, because you’re not limited to the overrepresented groups usually found in the Bay Area.

Figure out the Fastly story and where the company and product should be positioned.