How’s the comp at Nordstrom for Senior developers? How are bonus and RSU distributed?
Please don’t go to Nordstrom. If you want your career to wither away and slowly die, you can at least do it at a place like Zillow.
Why do you say so? I have an offer from Nordstrom for a senior dev position, so curious...
Most of the worst engineers I’ve ever worked with in my career have either come from Nordstrom or got picked up by Nordstrom. In fact, calling them engineers would be an insult to the profession. Do any of you remember that epidemic of the last generation where you had software test “engineers” who couldn’t even touch-type? You know, the hunt-and-peckers? The H1B housewives (and sometimes husbands) who couldn’t do anything without a UI and a button to click? They all ended up at Nordstrom.
Nordstrom offers stock at Senior 2 and Principal levels. I am at 142k base, 35k bonus, 5k profit share. This is for Senior 1.
Pretty close - I’m at Sr 1 and get a base of 149k, 40k target bonus and 7k profit share. I heard some Sr 1s get stock too though the amounts are pretty low (<10%)
Do you guys get RSUs? How is it vested?
I was an Amazon employee for 1.5 years and now I'm at Nordstrom for about 6 months. I could probably answer your question better. First to all , to answer your question OP. Nordstrom will pay you about 80% of your TC compared to Amazon. This is team specific, but I work about 50% of time compared to Amazon and most of it is fun. There is simply much less Ops load and maintenance here, because this is a smaller company. I got a base of 135k and bonus of 15k. Unfortunately there's no RSU component. It depends on how you negotiate. You will mostly get a target bonus of 20 percent. To answer other people, Nordstrom has surprisingly pretty awesome tech stack. The team I was hired in is to 'modernize' their old tech stack and it'd freaking amazing work. Ofcourse there is no internal resource or sage or wiki, broadcast, awesome internal tools and all this good stuff. I do miss a lot of fun community from Amazon. That's the price of working at a smaller tech company. The quality of engineering and engineers are very debatable. When I joined, everyone in Amazon I knew went through 4-5 round of tough onsites and it showed. People were generally smart and had good attitude and coding was pretty good. Now a day? Not so much. Dumb idiots got hired without meeting a single person. They gave two online tests (which were leaked) and got in. Some of the people haven't even talked to person, not even an HR, before getting in. And it showed. With Nordstrom it's a bit hit and miss as well. For one, they hire a lot of contractors. And they can range from dumb fucks to decent. However the full time employees have to go through proper interview loop and they are usually bunch of smart people. Surprisingly, their onsite have medium to hard leetcode questions. I was asked DP and a bit of graph problem as well. The best part, however, is they the work at Nordstrom feels just that. Work. I work, I go home, I workout , spend time with my girlfriend, and I'm generally very stress free. On most nights I look forward to tommorow's work. My time in Amazon felt like I was part of a cult. The leadership principles just felt like commandments you have to follow to be a part of the cult. Who the fuck knows what dive deep is. It means different things to different people. Everything I said is of course team specific. So take it with a grain of salt.
Jesus I feel like I’m taking crazy pills for not liking amazon for this very reason and everyone around me found it normal to be in the office at 8pm on a Friday only to work from home some more. People in their 20s stress eating with high cholesterol. You are making me consider Nordstrom because I’m sick of the alpha nerd contest that amazon is and if most tech people look down at Nordstrom that’s good news since they’ll stay away and I won’t have to deal with them at work.
That’s a pretty good summary overall. No company is awesome and very few companies are awful. Nordstrom has a decent tech stack and there is a consistent push to modernize, but that didn’t stop the site from crashing two years in a row during the anniversary sale. Notdstrom is hit and miss. I have friends there who will never leave, and others who are desperate to escape. Work life balance is better than Amazon, but there are a number of M$ castoffs in leadership who would like to bring back the good old days of monolithic software development. It all depends on who you ask.
How are your bonuses this year? My spouse is Senior and worked like crazy this year. Expected target was no where near what they received! Managers kept changing, definitely going to look for other opportunities.
You will be able to negotiate if you have offers from other companies. There are bands in senior level so no one answer for your question. Not all levels get stock. But in general they offer good package if you have other offers. I highly recommend having other offers.