Comment by emgeee

I was an engineer at Fast for over a year and wanted to clarify a few points-- - engineers did have access to data and could write their own queries to check revenue (but few people did until the article came out). - the strategy leadership decided on was to go after massive enterprise sellers which would, in theory, result in step-change functions in revenue. Many people knew about the low numbers but were willing to let the strategy play out for a while. There was a lot of excitement internally around closing the first $1B+ seller - Internally, the culture was something akin to "toxic positivity" which meant that we weren't willing to discuss failures or misses in a productive way - The company spent a lot of money on marketing events including sponsorship deals with the Tampa Bay Lightning and the rumored million dollar concert by the Chain Smokers. People are talking a lot about high engineer salaries but IMO those were far from the biggest problem (possible biased view)

The story is a lot more complicated and nuanced than the headlines you read in publications but I will say that Fast was full of really talented folks who I'd be happy to work with again. For me, a big lesson I took away from this experience is the perils of an overly positive fully remote culture. It's very easy for leadership to hide things from people when information doesn't easily spread across different organizations