Nordstrom reviews

1. Technical Inexperience, Apathy, Dogma, and Flip-Flopping - In my experience, those who don't actually know what they're doing like to talk big and mighty and like to create technical dogma without explaining why someone should do that. E.g., at Nordstrom, there have been huge initiatives to only use Google Cloud, or to only use Java, and there is a whole list of engineering standards that say "hey, use this" without ever explaining why. The ramifications of this are: a) inexperienced engineers or apathetic engineers of all levels will cling on to these and will back up these tenets/tools in their systems without ever questioning why, or if this tenet/tool is even the best for the problem at hand. I.e., there is minimal critical thinking involved and team design meetings will quickly devolve into "who can spit out this engineering standard or this AWS/GCP component the fastest?" b) If you're a new engineer starting your career here, you're not going to learn the design fundamentals unless they're explicitly laid out in these standards or your team has other experienced engineers who have experience outside of Nordstrom and can go against the grain c) As soon as there is a new tech leader who disagrees with the standards, a new mandate will be created and any old systems that strictly adhered to that mandate are immediately defunct, or at least out-of-compliance. Hence why the only mandate should really be, "use the best tool for the job", and Nordstrom doesn't seem to get that. And in general, there is just a lot of technical apathy and inexperience here. When you're at a tech company, everyone's on the same page and you can focus less on explaining every little detail and more on doing. It's the opposite at Nordstrom, and here is what happens: a) Be prepared to explain yourself twice, maybe 3x. Maybe this makes sense to the less technical PMs (which actually wasn't applicable at the tech companies, since the PMs were usually on the same page as you and because there was a higher ratio of engineers-pms than at Nordstrom, where there are a lot of PMs), but when you have to explain yourself to a dead-eyed engineer who doesn't care and says "sure" at the end of your pitch and doesn't really care about the system, you know you're probably in the wrong place. This adds up in time being spent in design meetings and explanations, having to constantly explain yourself when before you would just jump into implementation because everybody was on board, but this apathy also leads to my next point. b) Technical debt accumulates quickly - There is very little regard for the future and you will see a lot of technical debt accumulated from the start because engineers didn't care that much about how things will work as soon as 3 months in the future. Usually, you will see one or two competent engineers holding together the team which can get draining. c) Bootcamp Grads – Nothing wrong with non-traditional education, unfortunately there is a little too much bias for these grads and in my experience, these grads will have a lot less solid grasp of computer science fundamentals and take longer to hit the ground running as an engineer. I will leave it at that since I sincerely believe in non-traditional backgrounds and am happy that Nordstrom is pursuing this avenue, but as a more experienced engineer with a traditional background, the result of too many boot camp grads is that you will drain the E2s/E3s a little more as they have to teach them some fundamentals for a little bit longer before they’re ready to be comfortable with the tech stack and be comfortable with reasoning their thoughts, since they are very fresh to computer science as a whole and haven’t had as long to get comfortable with the domain. 2. The Forced Diversity Feels like "Separate but Equal" and There is Plenty of Work to Be Done - While there is a fair bit more diversity at Nordstrom than the average tech company, it feels like there is a long way to go in terms of acceptance of different people; I'll elaborate. a) If you're an introvert, good luck. Prepare to be accused of ulterior motives just for listening to some music on your headphones more than the rest of the team or listening a little more/talking a little less during meetings, or even occasionally being thrown under the bus for an issue because your coworker knows you'll be a little less quick to defend. At best, you'll get the "Why are you so quiet? Why don't you talk to me?" like this is high school all over again and people haven't realized that other people are different than themselves. If you're coming from a tech company, those companies lean a little more introverted anyway, so you won't see those issues there as frequently as you would here. b) If you're not in your 30s+/middle-aged, good luck. You'll occasionally hear your middle-aged coworkers taking the news a little too seriously and blaming millennials for a lot of things. If you don't want to come in to work at 8-9am like the older people have dropped of their kids at school, you'll be considered lazy, even if you stay later, and you'll have to mask your need to wake up a little later with mediocre company coffee (or have to buy it yourself). I'll never forget being at a hiring event where 90% of the interviewers were at least 40, yet they were complaining about ageism in tech and how affected they are by it and how they'll be forced out of their career soon. Maybe outside of Nordstrom that's a concern, but definitely not at Nordstrom; you will almost have "anti-ageism" here. Tech companies tend to skew young with flexible start times, so you won't find any of these issues there. c) If you're not of a common ethnicity, good luck. You'll notice that lunch groups tend to be of everybody in the same ethnicity going together. Even mandated team lunches will have people of one ethnicity grouped together on the same side of the table.If you're an uncommon ethnicity, you'll probably even go weeks at a time without seeing anyone that looks like you. And I'll just jump into the thick of things: you'll also notice that leadership tends to skew white, and the white members of your team will immediately become more buddy-buddy with leadership more quickly (which will probably lead to more career opportunities down the road). Moreover, it's self-fulfilling because even if leadership wasn't white, you will notice that the white people on a team will have opinions that more people will tend to listen to and will quickly be the go-to for most things. I have been to countless meetings where if a white person says something, it's deemed a good idea, and everybody nods in agreement; if a non-white person said it, it was usually ignored or occasionally seen as a bad idea unless they were extremely adamant about backing it up, or sometimes the people in the meeting waited for the white person’s approval before deeming if the non-white person’s idea was valid enough. I'll never forget being at a diversity event where we were learning about handling diversity in the workplace, I said something as a non-white person, was generally ignored by everybody in my group until a white person interrupted me mid-sentence, reiterated what I said, and everybody nodded in agreement and built off of his response for the next topic and gave him credit when we shared our thoughts. At a diversity acceptance event where we had learned 5 minutes earlier about making sure this exact scenario doesn't happen with URM, the irony was extremely palpable, and I was too speechless to say anything. And this isn't a knock against white people at all and this isn't a single person’s fault either, and really this can and does happen at any company, but this is a bit of a slap in the face when it's coming from the company that's stressing diversity, and it really has been a frequent phenomenon during my time here. d) If you're from a low-context culture, good luck. I don't mean just from a different country, I mean literally any city/region where you have to be more direct about things, i.e. have low-context communication, like a big city or the East Coast. Even if you were raised to say what you mean and mean what you say, you will only come to realize that your coworkers have any issue with you by their usual modus operandi: passive-aggressive comments or continuous "jokes" that are an attempt at confrontation masked by a "light-hearted" demeanor. And it's your fault if you don't pick up on that or if you try to be more direct, and you're in the wrong even though you're surrounded by adults who can't directly say what they mean except for the occasional explosion, which segues nicely into my next point. 3. Immaturity/Unprofessionalism - While coming from these big tech companies can be a little jarring seeing all the 22-24-year-olds jumping straight into the workforce and becoming little corporate robots, you have to give them credit that there is a pretty good sense of maturity there in terms of career: minimal gossiping (at least not at the workplace), minimal talk about polarizing topics like politics, and general professionalism. I'll elaborate: Even though the company skews older, there is still a lot of things I would consider unprofessional; my previous bullet point covers a lot of them. But there are a few more: a) Gossip - I've seen way too many 30/40-somethings gossiping. Everything from whispering stuff at their desk when the other person is out, to people whispering in the elevator as soon as the other person exits, to people literally whispering about someone behind their back because they assume the person can't hear because they have headphones on and giggling afterwards. b) Political/Religious Talk - For some reason, nobody at Nordstrom got the memo that you probably shouldn't bring up politics/religion in the workplace. I feel bad for the occasional person in the political/religious minority who has to deal with all of these talks. That's just stuff you leave at home. c) Emotional Immaturity - Like I said earlier, I've seen too many emotions expressed through continuous teasing/joking and for the occasional explosion when these pent-up emotions accumulate. I've seen middle-aged people throw adult tantrums over the printer taking too long to print, over a deployment failing, or even over food and who got the last appetizer. It's sad when I have to look at my 20-year-old coworkers on how I should act in stressful situations. Overall, it can feel a little bit like high school here where everybody isn't completely grown up. There is another Glassdoor review that states how Nordstrom Nice is a farce and this company is made of vain people who were once popular trying to get their own little popular clique at work. I would have to agree, don't let Nordstrom Nice fool you if you're into sincerity and action. 3. Ex-Amazonians - SLU caught wind that Nordstrom in general treats their employees better, so Nordstrom lately has been flooded with ex-Amazonians. This sounds good to combat my first point about technical apathy. Unfortunately, this leads way too often to coworkers who aren’t afraid to throw people under the bus, bash each other with old leadership principles, be biased for AWS for everything, be promotion-obsessed instead of results-oriented, and just a lot of anecdotes that start with “When I was at Amazon…” that don’t add to meetings. These coworkers don’t get that a couple years at Amazon doesn’t make you a genius and that if it was so good there, then you should have stayed there. So instead of embracing the Nordstrom culture, they just bring the Amazon culture. I’ll direct you to the NYT article for further reading. 4. Ugly Workspace - Walking into the Nordstrom office just feels like a building that hasn't been renovated since the early 2000s. Everything about it is uninspiring. It’s hard to feel like I’m a software engineer at a tech company when: a) I’m in a dusty office building with nowhere to sit b) I can’t find a pair of scissors in the supply room to save my life c) some of the office chairs don’t work d) it’s impossible to get a decent meeting room regularly e) I’m using old 1080p Lenovo monitors with other people fingerprints on them from before I joined f) on some floors, the only colors are brown and beige. You would think that a fashion company has a more fashionable workspace. 5. Open-office Initiative - One of the Nordstrom buildings had a couple floors recently filled with ex-Amazonians; I know because more people started cutting the elevator line and bumping into you to get to their more important meetings. If Nordstrom cared, they would have gotten those floors. Instead, they just decided to move everybody into an open-office space. 6. Too many Non-Technical People Making Technical Decisions – Fair bit of non-technical upper-level management and program managers making technical decisions. One ramification is that the engineer who is the most buddy-buddy with everybody will most likely get promoted even if he/she didn't deliver as much as a more technical engineer, just because he was able to convince the non-technical people that he/she's a good engineer. This also means that the program managers/higher-ups end up leaving a mess for the engineers to clean up and the occasional unrealistic deadline which makes you realize that Nordstrom isn’t immune to bad work-life balance, and actually makes you realize that Nordstrom still isn’t a tech company.