Pros
Compensation includes a crazy awesome guaranteed bonus plan that was recently extended deep into the engineering organization. 2016 is the first pay cycle that the engineers are receiving these benefits. The huge amount of attrition leaves big holes to fill in the management ranks, making it easy to escalate through the ranks. The Nordstroms seem like genuinely nice people with great values.
Cons
It's hard to say where to start. This company, considering the Seattle tech market, is a backwards example of the bygone years of manual process and slipshod behind-the-times tech. There is no one with a clean vision of where to go, as the business knows nothing about modern retail besides "get wallets into stores" and the technology leadership stalwarts are largely non-engineers promoted through the ranks from retail jobs. The technology platform is so entrenched in cruft and accumulated filth, it's years behind where other big companies' infrastructure was a decade ago. IT was caught off-guard by AWS, the website still takes a coordinated 5-day effort to release simple changes, and the supply chain and inventory system is still a knot of mainframe and packaged vendor services. A pattern that keeps repeating is now starting again. Bold company-wide initiative is titled (this time it's "Technology Operating Model", replacing "Technology rEvolution", replacing "Tech Team of the Future!"), promoted as the only way to save Nordstrom, and rolled out with fear, firings, and phony fanfare. The initiative includes out-of-reach goals and a 3 year timeline. Upon realizing the "old dog / new tricks" conflict that will forever plague this organization, another bold initiative replaces the former one 18 months into the prior 3-year plan. This TOM is costing the company more in mistrust and uncertainty than they'll ever gain in whatever efficiencies they think they'll get. The tech ideas are great, rooted in the proven success of our competitors, but the implementation is sloppy and responsibility is being given to people with zero experience outside of comfort-zone Microsoft jobs. Still interested? Prepare yourself to work alongside an overwhelming majority of poorly skilled contractors. The place is crawling with Infosys contractors who are trained on coding, testing, or ops (never more than one) for 6 months after graduating from engineering programs in India. When I say engineering programs, it's any kind of engineering. Chemical, civil, etc... everything qualifies and no tech skills are required to make the cut. These people are insanely good at making a 10-minute task stretch out over 3 weeks, and the hourly time & materials billing affords them $100 million per year. If you're a manager with an open engineer position, it's mandatory that you look for an Infosys contractor before hiring someone smart and available. It's a long held rumor/theory that senior leaders in technology are receiving kickbacks from Infosys, which prolongs this insanity into its 2nd decade. If you like automation, you're going to have a horde of detractors with incentives (indentured to Infosys to maintain visa & green card progress) to keep the company's primary processes as manual and worker-intensive as possible. Listen. If you're considering a job here, only do so if you're looking to make a jump in your title. If you're a manager and want to be a director, this is a great place to do that. Attrition is so high and the tenured people are so out of touch with the rest of the industry, people are promoted just for talking a good game (which is why there are glorified sales clerks atop each division). Get in, get promoted, and get out. It's worked for hundreds of people in the last 5 years and it'll work for you. Otherwise, especially if you're coming from somewhere that produces technology as a product, the work is going to make you want to kill yourself.