Now the cons. Only reason why I'm writing this review, is because I heard a gossip that people at Spin are pissed of at me for leaving a review on Glassdoor. Its a negative review and since I just created the Glassdoor account, I could not have left it on the 9th of July :). However, this speaks for the people who start the gossips. There is quite a bit of people who like to discuss others and talk negatively behind the backs, some of them are even managers.
On top of that, company runs on favoritism, if you do things differently and try to apply changes to improve process and output without blessings from all the way to the SVP level - good luck. In my case I was seen as someone aggressive and someone who tries to do too many "unnecessary" things, because people are too busy to improve and they would rather drown in the work, than stop and review the changes offered and take on it with a better/more efficient approach.
Also, you may see yourself on the black list, for having too many ideas and being truly passionate, that will prevent your career growth in the long term because less competent managers will have problem with you outshining them. Hence, the expectation from the newbies is to keep the head down and work on what they are told to and work how they are told to.
Company invests a lot into technology, but invests without thinking about implementation process or gathering feedback from the people who are supposed to use it. So, they end up with cool 21st century tech being available and ignored, while people use 1995 technology on reporting. That goes back to my comment about working smart, not hard.
Salary is another tough topic, if you don't discuss your pay rate while applying for job, you won't get it up ever again. There are people who do identical job and have pay gap of $20,000-40,000! So, you see some people really struggle with life as they can’t afford basic needs at lower pay rate titles. And when they ask for increase to meet the market average, answer is "sorry, there is no money, but we will try our best".
At the same time, they have upper management team who live in a hotel, and fly back home to US every week for weekend. As a result of that, they end up working more, because they have no family, no home to take care of while they are here. This is great for the company, yet it makes the employees look bad, specially those who don't make even a market average pay for their jobs, as expectation on them is the same as on the upper management, and they have kids to take to school, dinners to cook, family to attend. This approach creates a "big boys club" effect. I personally saw a couple of managers who know me but never say "hi" to me in a corridor and avoiding eye contact because I am "lower" than them, yet they burst into smile and cheerfulness in front of these upper management team members.
Just be ready to be shocked when you see it, and don't take it personal. This is still a great place to work.
Spin is not investing into the talent, as they expect people to do their job forever, and that creates a constant flow of people coming in and out. The sad part is that the smarter ones leave faster.
Also, there is a title attached to everyone, doesn't matter what you do and how you do it. Nobody listens unless you have the right title, that creates a negative outflow of talented people because again, they are being ignore and put into a box.
Work load - a lot of complaints about that in reviews and its true. For example, an average demand planner in the industry does only 1/3 of work that a demand planner does in Spin Master. Spin's demand planners do on average do equal or more work than demand planning managers at other large multi-billion organizations.
Recognition of achievement - only exists if you are in the "favorite" employee group. I was nor recognized in any way for any of my large projects, even though I created them as a personal initiative and saved company millions of dollars at the end in human hours, data managements and error prevention.
