Fastly Reviews

3.3

43% would recommend to a friend

(348 total reviews)
avatar

Kip Compton

60% approve of CEO

38% positive business outlook

Fastly has an employee rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 348 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Fastly employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

348 reviews
1.0
20 Oct 2024

Watch your back and get a lawyer

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Most of the time your salary will be paid on time. Most of the time. Most of the time the office has working wifi. Most of the time.

Cons

Fastly is a terrible place to work, with the worst engineering culture I have seen in my entire career. When something goes wrong in production, somebody gets fired for it. This means that people prefer to hide problems and point fingers very quickly. Middle managers try to hide incidents and move on quickly, while engineers try to shift blame to their peers. The memory of June 8th 2021 (when Fastly famously "broke the internet") is still fresh, yet no lessons have been learned. The founders and early-joiners have refused to "pass the torch" on ownership of various systems, and this means that many engineers have accountability without authority. I have seen C-level executives shout abusive insults at engineers during presentations, refusing to accept new constraints that didn't exist 8 years ago. These issues are minor however, compared to the intense paranoia within the company. Ever since the recent shareholder lawsuits were filed, a "see no evil / hear no evil" culture has grown. Managers will punish you for raising issues & concerns, especially when they affect the company. Tasks are often assigned verbally so that there is no record of performance degradation & bugs. Everyone wants to be ignorant on paper, so they can deny knowledge & involvement. Due to this paranoia, you often see people turning on unannounced recordings. Everyone is trying to protect themselves while gathering future evidence for whatever happens in the future. I made a habit of writing down notes during meetings with names & dates. The cherry on top of this is the forced positivity, which is reminiscent of North Korean celebrations. Expect the usual big-corporate pridewashing every year, with the usual X-history months celebrating diversity (without addressing the ethnic nepotism and casual sexism within various departments). If you are unhappy, they will fire you to improve morale. Sociopaths may enjoy working at Fastly, but if you are an honest person who wants to contribute to society, you should steer clear.

1.0
3 Nov 2024

Hostile and stagnant

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

If you're an e-celeb or a blogger and you spend more time self-promoting yourself than actually working, you might get paid for "thought leadership".

Cons

Fastly is a terrible place to be an engineer. Working for Fastly you won't have any authority or ownership over your work, as technical decisions are made by VPs and senior directors, while you are still accountable for any failures. Worse than this, if you try to build tooling to make work easier for yourself and your team, management will quickly intervene to stop you demanding to know "what problem are you trying to solve", and then enforce a terrible solution that maintains inefficiency. As an engineer in Fastly you will have no influence over what you build or ow you build it. This place is hazardous to career development, as your problem-solving skills will atrophy. The engineering culture is bad. "Technical debt" is a dirty word here, and mentioning it will trigger an outburst from the nearest manager (usually somebody who built up that technical debt and got promoted for it). Incident postmortems are shallow, as there is no distinction drawn between a trigger and a root cause issue. We build fragile systems that are easily broken, and we play "pass the parcel" to avoid owning the most critical systems, knowing we will lose our job the second we make a mistake... but management still won't tolerate words like "test coverage" or "resilience", or any attempt to make it easier to deploy & rollback changes safely. The end result is that we now have a fragile ecosystem of opaque systems that nobody understands (The recent layoffs exacerbated this). Fastly has failed to adapt to changes in our industry, and we have fallen behind Akamai. Services are gradually degrading, issues are piling up, and leadership destroyed any motivation to fix it. Don't join Fastly, it will ruin your career.

1.0
31 Oct 2018

Watch out here

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

decent startup mentality, good products and benefits.

Cons

Management is absent until the last week of the qtr

Viewing 1 - 3 of 348 Reviews

Glassdoor has 357 Fastly reviews submitted anonymously by Fastly employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Fastly is right for you.