Engineers will like it here. - Software Engineer Storable Employee Review

4.0
Jul 30, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good people on the Engineering team. I thoroughly enjoy working with the people on my team. Catered lunch every day and occasional sponsored happy hours. The SpareFoot Engineering team follows modern best practices for the most part: Agile development process, pair programming, code review, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Open collaborative environment. As an engineer on the team you are given a lot of autonomy to impact change. SpareFoot invests in developing engineers. Every engineer receives one full paid conference or training of your choice per year. SpareFoot also brings in experts to lead workshops. They recently brought in a Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) trainer from Europe to lead a 3 day workshop.

Cons

SpareFoot's mantra is "try it, fail fast, then iterate". While this is fun for a bumper sticker, the reality is it can be trying when product strategy changes out from underneath you. Even when the new strategy is the correct strategy the big changes in direction can be distracting. SpareFoot is not a new company. Over the years it has accumulated a lot of different ways to solve to solve similar problems. Component teams and containers exacerbate this problem. Polyglot development is often required to implement a single feature as you jump between Node.js, PHP/Silex, and Lambdas written in Python. The team is in the process of standardizing tech and moving to cross functional feature teams. SpareFoot lives on the edge. For example, we probably jumped the gun by a few months in migrating everything to Docker in production. We experienced a few months where things were breaking regularly. The platform has stabilized now, but there were a few extremely unpleasant weeks. The SpareFoot culture has grown up as the as the median age has increased by 10+ years. Not a con for all, but sometimes I miss the small, young, fun, start-up antics.

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Storable Response
9y
Thanks very much for the feedback - I'm glad to hear your experience with SpareFoot has been so positive! In response to some of your suggestions about areas to improve, it's important to keep in mind that SpareFoot moves quickly and changes things around in response to market conditions and new insights. That adaptability is what we need in order to win and will continue to be core to our future. That being said, we definitely understand that we need a small set of things to focus on which is why we recently rolled out our four company-wide initiatives. In terms of our team structure, as you mentioned we are working hard to transition from component teams to cross-functional teams and standardize our components when necessary. This will take some time but we see strong progress ahead of us. On a related note, we have been further to the left of the adoption curve than many companies with respect to Docker and containers. While a lot of effort was put behind the move we strongly believe that migrating to a container-first architecture was the correct strategy. As you mentioned, the vast majority of the stability issues that plagued us early on have been solved. Finally, the culture continues to evolve as we mature as a company. We truly appreciate your perspective and will constantly challenge ourselves to keep winning while maintaining the fun environment that makes us such a great place to work. I definitely encourage you to keep providing feedback through culture surveys, Q&A and to just come chat with me anytime something comes up.

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Strong onboarding experience and initial support from leadership Clear expectations and alignment during the first few months Positive, collaborative team environment early on Opportunity to learn and grow in a fast-paced environment Supportive culture prior to leadership changes

Cons

Significant decline in overall team experience after leadership transition Director stepped into the role without direct experience in the function, leading to gaps in effective management Leadership initially presented as supportive, but this did not reflect long-term behavior or management style Constant and frequent changes to priorities, expectations, and processes, creating instability and lack of structure Efforts to remain adaptable, positive, and supportive during ongoing changes felt taken advantage of rather than recognized Inconsistent and contradictory feedback — verbal feedback was consistently positive, while written documentation did not align Lack of clarity around performance expectations, making it difficult to understand what success looked like Noticeable shift in management behavior and communication over time, particularly toward the end of tenure Concerns around being managed out rather than being supported or developed Attempt to initiate a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) that broadly covered the entire scope of responsibilities, rather than specific, actionable areas for improvement Misalignment between day-to-day performance feedback and formal performance concerns raised Perceived favoritism toward newer team members, specifically white male employees Observed comments and behaviors that felt culturally insensitive, particularly in reference to offshore (India-based) team members, creating concerns around inclusivity and respect Overall lack of transparency, consistency, and equitable treatment in performance management

4
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