Ohai Chefs!

This week, the week before Chef Conf, I’d like to talk a bit about our team and our culture, and invite you to join us.

tl;dr

We have a spot on our Infrastructure Engineering team, and I hope you’ll read on to get a personal feel for our team and the huge cultural shift happening right now at Nordstrom.

If you are interested, please email me: doug.ireton at nordstrom.com

At Nordstrom, you have an opportunity to follow your passion

I’ve been working at Nordstrom for five years, first on the Windows Server Engineering team, then on Nordstrom.com as a developer, then as a build engineer, and finally on the Infrastructure Engineering team as a developer, working with Chef everyday. I’ve had opportunities to follow my passion, even when I wasn’t qualified “on paper”. My managers have encouraged me to pursue my interests, even when it meant leaving their teams. This is in strong contrast to other companies I’ve worked for, where I felt I had to leave the company to do something different. For example, at Microsoft in the late 90’s, I was forever stuck as a tester, with no opportunity to try my hand at development.

At Nordstrom, managers support you

This may sound cliche, but the management culture is built around supporting engineers, and removing roadblocks. Nordstrom actually draws their org charts upside-down so managers are on the bottom and engineers are on top. This is weird at first but managers are committed to their role supporting their employees. No manager will ever say they manage a team, they always say they “support a team”. This may sound cheesy, but I have seen it lived out for the five years I’ve been here and it’s one of the reasons I love working here.

At Nordstrom, you will have an opportunity to use and contribute to open source

Nordstrom, like most “enterprise” IT shops has up until recently been adverse to even using open source software, much less allowing engineers to contribute to open source software. About eight months ago, I started hearing that we were working on an open-source agreement to allow employees to use and contribute to open-source projects on behalf of Nordstrom. Once the agreement finally came out, I was pleasantly surprised. We are using more open source tools now and we view contributing to the community in the form of patches, documentation, IRC, speaking, etc. as a vital part of keeping those communities healthy. We have benefitted so much from the Chef community and it’s been great to be able to give back, and to have paid work time to contribute.

We also have a strong relationship with Opscode, which is only five blocks away from our building. We are regular attenders at the monthly DevOps meetups at Opscode and also attend the Opscode Community Summit in the fall and ChefConf in the spring. Recently, I had the opportunity to work with Adam Jacob and Chris McClimans on a continuous delivery pilot project for six weeks, which was awesome.

Our team is small and focused

Our team, Infrastructure Engineering, is only three engineers right now. I work with two other engineers who I have incredible respect for and enjoy working with, Jon, and Kevin. Our manager, Rob has a strong technical background.

We work in an open, collaborative environment and regularly bounce ideas off one another. We also have a 55” monitor on which we do code reviews, display our Chef Client run metrics (via StatsD, Graphite, and Team Dashboard), and keep up with DevOps Reactions.

Though we have a small team, we are working closely with other teams to spread the DevOps love. For the past four months, we’ve had a couple of other engineers from our web ops team embedded on our team, sitting next to us, working on automating our web server builds and configuration. This has by far been the best way to cross-pollenate the devops culture and knowledge of Chef, Ruby, Git, code review, etc. At this point, our web ops team has successfully picked up Chef, Ruby, Git, etc. and is running with it with only a little help now and then. It’s been awesome to see them run with it.

Though we have been primarily focused on automating our web servers, we have also written Chef cookbooks and recipes for a Hadoop cluster, SQL servers critical to our stores, and a WordPress blog setup for an incident status blog. There are new opportunities and challenges every week.

At Nordstrom, we are at the beginning of a cultural sea change

Up until very recently, Nordstrom has run a pretty traditional IT shop: big, heavily-planned projects, a preference for expensive, complicated vendor tools (Oracle, CA, Microsoft, BMC, etc.) and siloed teams. In the past 18 months we have been evolving towards a faster, more agile approach, but recently, I’ve seen a cultural sea change.

We had Adam Jacob and Chris McClimans from Opscode come in and do a Continuous Delivery pilot project with us for six weeks. We had weekly demos and by the end we had a working, prototype CD pipeline built which delivered code changes to our staging environment at the push of a button. It was eye-opening. That project has sparked an intense discussion around what it really takes to move at speed, to continually deliver customer features to prod instead of large batches.

More importantly, we are having the right discussions about the huge cultural changes required to truly adopt a DevOps culture. I have never seen leadership, from the CIO on down (or “up” in Nordstrom terms) more committed to setting Nordstrom on the course to DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and empowering engineers. It’s an exciting time to be here.

Will you join us?

We are looking to grow our team. Will you join us? We are looking for smart, passionate engineers who care about DevOps culture, contribute (or excited to be able to) to open source, and have experience with Chef, Puppet or other automation tools. As a team we are challenged to learn new things every day to make Nordstrom better. We care about metrics, we go to conferences (Ruby on Ales, ChefConf, Velocity, DevOps days this year), we love programming and solving problems.

Our whole team will be at ChefConf next week and two of us are speaking. Rob has a keynote, and I’ll be speaking about Chef on Windows. Two of us will also be at Velocity and DevOps Days in June. We’d love to meet you, and chat about the position. Feel free to DM us on Twitter or just meet us during one of the conferences.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I hope I’ve made a compelling pitch for why I look forward to going to work everyday. We look forward to meeting you.