Pros
Sparefoot is a great company with great people. I worked at Sparefoot as an Application Developer from October 2014 to December 2015 (1 year and 3 months). I left to move to the north-east to be with my girlfriend. - Career Growth: After joining, I was quickly given more and more responsibility to start conducting technical interviews, help the formation and onboarding of a new team, and design more and more impactful solutions. These opportunities directly resulted from me expressing my interest in taking on more responsibility and wanting to get more involved. Sparefoot is not a place where you can coast and expect to be given more responsibility and career opportunities. It's a place that requires self-starters to put in their full effort every day to better themselves and the company. This effort is recognized in weekly meetings and rewarded with additional responsibility and additional opportunities for growth. - Fast paced: The product and development culture is designed to move very fast. The philosophy is that Sparefoot should constantly be conducting data-driven experiments and build upon the "wins" that drive increased conversion rate and traffic. As a result, on the consumer side, minimum viable products (MVPs) are often encouraged over carefully thought out solutions because there's a chance the test will not win and the code will be thrown out or refactored into another test. It can be a lot of fun to produce a lot of code and new functionality quickly and see the impact on users. However, this does imply that if the test wins, this code should be implemented properly. Sometimes it does (certainly if a developer pushes for it), and sometimes it does not. - Culture: I would describe the work culture at Sparefoot as laid back, but also hard-working. There is definitely a drive to do more, produce more, and move faster. However, work-life balance and work culture are important as well. It’s common to grind away on a piece of code, and then once finished, play a game of foosball or ping pong, or grab a drink at CU29 after work. There are also many company-sponsored events and happy-hours that provide many opportunities to interact with everyone in the company outside of the normal day-to-day. Everyone is friendly and always willing to help. - Receptive to Feedback: Since Sparefoot is data-driven, leadership is very receptive to feedback if you can provide clear, testable hypotheses about what could work better. As an example, the SEO team, product team, and engineering team worked on a hypothesis that conducting traffic tests similar to A/B tests would result in increased traffic. The teams worked closely to put an MVP together and prove out the concept. The result was a testable, reliable process for increasing traffic that was adopted by the teams. - Great product managers (PMs) / owners: Though there is always pressure on PMs to meet their business goals, they are willing to hear about and address the technical concerns (tech debt). They swiftly deal with any road blocks and facilitate communication between teams. They maintain and prioritize healthy backlogs and are happy to have Devs add to it too. After starting my new job where the company is much smaller and does not have any product managers, I can really appreciate all of the great work that the PMs do at Sparefoot. I learned and matured as an engineer and a leader more at Sparefoot than any other job I had in the past. I was very sad to leave knowing there was more to learn about and grow in my role.
Cons
- Sparefoot requires self-starters who are motivated to grow their skills and their career. There is not a well-defined track to success. - Be prepared to express technical concerns to your PM so that the team can address them (he/she will not know the concerns without your input). - Because speed is prioritized, some bugs will be introduced into the production environment. Make sure you are ok with this and are willing to debug and fix the issues.