Pros
Future of the Company
SpareFoot is experiencing solid YoY growth and has essentially no competition. The consumer marketplace for self-storage is theirs for the taking and there is a lot of opportunity for growth.
Family, Diversity, Inclusion
SpareFoot has a high number of parents in the company. As a parent myself, I've appreciated the flexibility needed with kids and a working spouse. This includes working around daycare pick-ups, drop-offs, & closures as well as doctors visits, vacation, healthcare benefits, and more. I also find that because there are so many other parents at SpareFoot, I get a lot of support from my co-workers when emergency family situations come up. Families are also incorporated into company events. A few other call outs: SpareFoot is among the 3% of Austin Companies with Silver-Level Mother-Friendly Worksite Designation and has an established Breastfeeding Support Policy. The Women of SpareFoot is an active group with the mission: "To empower women at SpareFoot to meet and exceed their goals through advocacy, development, outreach and awareness." SpareFoot has created a Diversity & Inclusion Task-Force with the mission: "To aid in budgetary decisions and provide proactive guidance related to culture, diversity, and inclusion." These groups have recently sponsored events such as 'Women who Code' and 'Blacks in Technology.' They have also brought in guest speakers, run a book club, and more in support of diversity and inclusion both at SpareFoot and in the Austin tech community in general.
Career
SpareFoot is a great place to develop as an engineer at any level. There is a clear process around moving from a Junior engineer through Sr, to Staff, & Principle. The management team has clearly laid out performance and technical requirements at each level and will help you identify gaps and fill them so you can advance. Compensation levels are mapped to performance levels, therefore, it can be clearly articulated what it takes to accelerate your compensation beyond simple market rate increases. The environment is collaborative and senior engineers are humble; junior engineers get a lot of great mentorship and development from them. The team is small, so you may eventually advance beyond the immediate needs of the company and therefore decide to move onto another opportunity; but when that happens, you are better prepared and qualified to do so because of your experience and growth at SpareFoot.
Tech
The engineering team is firing on all cylinders. It's a nimble team responsible for much more than what a team of its size could normally support. I'm impressed at how many applications & tools the team is able to support. There are dozens of sites, services, APIs, integrations with 3rd parties, B2B and internal applications, search algorithms, A/B testing, data pipeline, AWS architecture, email and marketing automation systems, SalesForce and Zendesk integrations, billing and collections, and more. Focus has allowed the team to stay on track and work on only the most important things. The company is 8+ years old so SpareFoot Eng is tackling tech debt head on. They have established sensible defaults for tech standards and patterns, hold regular architectural workshops, and established platforms and application chapters to define and drive engineering best practices. These efforts have resulted in increased maintainability and scalability as well as performance & speed improvements that have delivered real ROI to the bottom line. It's these technical and organizational strategies have allowed a small team to own and produce so much. SpareFoot has a 1st-rate CI/CD pipeline that allows the small team of devs to deploy to prod up to 50 times a week, sometimes more.
Cons
Some folks who are in their 1st professional job at SpareFoot take it for granted and don't fully appreciate all the perks or culture. More experienced employees know that it's usually not this good and really do appreciate all the benefits of working there.
The current building has a poor layout and it leads to some groups feeling isolated depending on what department you're in. You're either on the 1st-floor or the 4th-floor. This separation has led to a lack of understanding about what some groups do within the company. Resulting narratives cause an unnecessary distraction because, from what I can tell, nearly all departments are high-functioning. That being said, SpareFoot is actively looking for new office space and I have full confidence that the new office will be great and better aligned with the values of SpareFoot.
