SPARGO reviews

2.8

38% would recommend to a friend

(73 total reviews)

Susan Bracken

54% approve of CEO

45% positive business outlook

SPARGO has an employee rating of 2.8 out of 5 stars, based on 73 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The SPARGO employee rating is 25% below average for employers within the Management & Consulting industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

73 reviews
4.0
Sep 23, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Relaxed Dress Code Fun Atmosphere Travel (for those that like it) Flexible Schedule Upward Movement Working Open Door Policy An experience at SPARGO is what you make if it. I had a nearly flawless experience with this company. My managers were amazing. During the few occasions when life got in the way, my supervisors were more than understanding. Be transparent and talk to your supervisors. Flexible Schedule does depend not only your integrity and work ethic as an employee, but also on feasibility of the request. I had the honor of moving up to a different position within the department and was fortunate to see upward movement for some of my coworkers as well. SPARGO does try reward those that work hard and show potential. There are lot of company wide events that are put on for morale. The environment is fun! I encourage future employees to put yourself out there and participate. Its a great way to get yo know the SPARGO teams.

Cons

I cannot stress enough that an experience at SPARGO is what you make of it. Personally, I resigned from SPARGO to accept a position with higher pay. I did not feel my former salary was enough to support my family. There were times when communication within and between departments seemed to be lacking. Really, as long as you know who to ask, you can find and answer to any question. There are also periods of time when turnover in key departments is at a high--I feel this may be due to the low salaries. At times of understaffing, yes--more work is distributed to those that management feels can handle additional tasks. This can be a bit overwhelming. But ultimately, it is up the that employee to speak up and tell his or her manager when the workload has become too heavy. There are too many and too frequently new faces in the HR department. It is imperative that the people who facilitate and protect my employee interests (benefits, payroll, etc.) are not just friendly faces or people that are"easy to talk to". Human Resources professionals should be experts at their craft. They should be able to confidently provide any information about my employee interests. Unfortunately, there are times when you leave the afore mentioned department feeling like you have just had an audience with the Wizard of Oz. I specifically mean that you (Dorothy) may be given a shell of a response to your inquiry that is more smoke, mirrors, and formalities than actual assistance and dismissed and/or told go come back another time more convienent to HR. All the while, behind the curtain, HR is scrambling to find you more helpful information they should have been able to accurately provide you when you initially asked. An employee should have confidence in HR--not feel a second option from someone more experienced is needed. This is certainly an area improvement.

1.0
Sep 21, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Team members are friendly for the most part, there are great folks that work at Spargo. Flexible work from home options after the first year of employment. There is an initiative to push to a new system that addresses many complaints in the Cons section. Unfortunately this been 6+ years in the works and the system still has a long way to go. Hopefully it will finish at some point to help move things forward.

Cons

The Cons I listed are mainly from a technical perspective. Again, Spargo has great people but these issues create a lot of frustration between team members and one's own job satisfaction. -80% of the code base is technical debt, this makes it hard to improve and maintain the apps. -Major scaling issues exist, there is a cluster of poorly written websites instead of a well built centralized system. -Many web apps are written in Classic ASP, it made my career feel very "dead end". -Internal apps are written in ES3 Javascript, the industry is moving into ES6 at the moment. -Lack of proper build and QA processes. Much work is done in an ad-hoc fashion. -Solo development on projects without collaboration, this creates alot of Bus Factor and hurts when people leave or are on vacation. -Turn around times can be unreasonable, 1-2 day turn around times are not uncommon. -Many members of the dev team work 50+ hours per week. This creates a poor work-life balance. There are weekend on-call rotations in addition to the said 50+ hour work weeks. Spargo's policy is that you need to be able to jump onto a computer within 15 minutes or less. Again, poor work-life balance... -Learning opportunities are few and far between because of the old tech stack and work volume. -The software side of the business feels like a loosing battle as few want to embrace new technologies that can solve existing business problems. -Training for new hires seems to be a sink or swim approach, instead of building people up and focusing on their strengths. This isn't intentional, there is just too much work on everyone's plate and it is very hard to spare the time to get trainees up to speed.

2.0
Sep 19, 2016

The Good and the Bad

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The people that work here are super nice and in general willing to help their co-workers.

Cons

This company is filled with people that do not want to be accountable for their actions. When something doesn't go right, there is the culture of finger pointing. I makes it very difficult to build teams that want to work together. They also do not want to invest the money in the staffing it takes to "get the job done". All companies have resource issues but this company is particularly light in the area of staffing.

Viewing 58 - 60 of 73 Reviews

Glassdoor has 79 SPARGO reviews submitted anonymously by SPARGO employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if SPARGO is right for you.