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.
