SPARGO reviews

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.

That review about cliques and a “mean girl” type atmosphere is absolutely true. Everyone gossips and rumors get spread quickly. Each department is pretty segregated and there’s no proper internal communication for work related items. A lot of mistakes happen because the departments don’t talk to each other like they should when making big changes. The CEO and a lot of higher ups are stuck in their old world type views and aren’t willing to introduce newer work customs other than casual dress. Some departments get more special treatment than others and even some teams within the departments do too. Work From Home needs to be more available. Most people, at least in manager positions, can do 90% of their work from home, but it’s not allowed but one day per week. Pay is also below market value. There are a lot of inconsistencies with the rules of the company. And the inconsistency is usually between departments. Management plays favorites and will keep awful employees on just because they’ve been there forever or they’re good friends. The company also seems to go through periods of high turnover, or at least it did in my department. This made workloads extremely inconsistent too.