In 2011, Nordstrom acquired Los Angeles-based off-price startup HauteLook. (“Haute” rhymes with “moat.”) In 2014, HauteLook launched NordstromRack.com, and the company is now known as Nordstrom Rack | HauteLook (NRHL). Nordstrom (in Seattle–this photo is of the downtown Seattle store) has had a software engineering internship, but this summer marks the first time they’ve had one in Los Angeles at NRHL. So four other computer science students and I were fortunate enough to spend our summer learning the ropes at NRHL’s downtown Los Angeles office.
Our first day of work in June. The office manager demonstrates her calligraphy skills at the intern welcome breakfast.
Breakfast was served along the windows in the main kitchen/break room.
Fellow intern Sarita uploads photos we took next to the NRHL sign.
My desk is the one on the end with the backpack next to it.
There was a plethora of food over the summer, from Amazebowls breakfast during our first week, to seemingly endless pastries, to a kitchen stocked with occasional snacks, to a variety of restaurants, casual eateries, and food courts downtown with delicious food.
We took a field trip to Seattle for the last two days of our first week of work. Seattle interns are housed in this dorm, where we all met for social hour on the roof after spending the first day there getting started on a hackathon. (The hackathon took two days. My team developed an app that allows you to upload a photo and see what Nordstrom sells that looks similar.)
They gave the five Los Angeles interns their own rooms at the Crowne Plaza in downtown Seattle.
The view from my room.
Sarita and I explore the food options at the social hour. I was really tempted to go to Bamboo Gardens after dinner, but unfortunately they fed us too much good food.
I think my favorite NHRL intern field trip was the one to the warehouse in San Bernardino. It is a 1,000,000-square-foot warehouse, one of the largest climate-controlled warehouses in the country. (Employees used to work in the Inland Empire heat with just fans for cooling.)
Several Los Angeles employees took this bus out to San Bernardino for the warehouse tour.
On the warehouse floor. My team’s manager led the warehouse’s tech tour. We started upstairs with a whiteboard session, then walked the floor. He could walk up to employees at any station in and know exactly how their job worked and what their responsibilities were, which I found impressive.
Merchandise arrives through these truck doors, then is sorted and shelved in the appropriate places.
Workers hand-pick items from the shelves and put them into gray bins to be packaged into each customer’s order.
Putting orders in shipping boxes.
In order to get ready for holidays 2016, the warehouse is installing a lot of new equipment.
Shelves waiting for holidays this year. A big part of my team’s responsibilities is to make sure the warehouse software can handle the rapid growth from one holiday season to the next.
The first five NRHL interns at the Fourth of July picnic.
I enjoyed working in downtown Los Angeles more than I thought I would, partly because there are so many exciting food options so close to each other, and partly because there is always something interesting downtown. One afternoon we heard a loud explosion that rocked the building. Apparently someone left a suspicious device in the metro station across the street, so the bomb squad came out and blew it up. (It later turned out to be a hoax device.)
The building often hosts events like painting and pizza on the lawn, climbing the stairs to the top of the tallest building in downtown, or repelling down our building for charity.
In August, after the interns had given their capstone presentations to leadership, we took a final field trip to a Dodger game.
The Pirates schooled the Dodgers. After three innings, Sarita turns to me and says, “This is boring. They are just standing around. Let’s go get food.” Well … okay, yeah, that’s true, let’s go.
Did you know you could get Dole Whip outside of Disneyland!? (Or outside of St. Augustine, Florida, if you saw my previous post.) They had two flavors, served in either a pink or blue mini Dodger helmet.
Dodger Stadium is one of the more vegan-friendly stadiums in the country. They have veggie burgers, vegan hot dogs, vegan cookies, and vegan nachos, although it is quite a journey to find them, depending on where you are sitting.
At the end of the summer we had a graduation event where we gave our presentations again (this time to all of tech), and had a cupcake party. They gave me a vegan red velvet cupcake and an offer for full-time work when I graduate in May. I accepted the offer last week. So you are officially reading a blog post written by a NRHL software engineer (who is really thankful that this “I know! I’ll go to Utah and do computer science!” gamble paid off and who is really excited to go live in Los Angeles and work at a job she already discovered she loves). Anyway, it was a good summer.
Since I was in Utah when I accepted job, I had a celebratory lunch at Vertical Diner: a taco salad and THE chocolate shake, which was better than I remember. I ate every bit of it.
More from the warehouse field trip. After being hand-picked from shelves, items travel in gray bins to sorters. A sorting employee will pick up an item, scan it with the device on her wrist, and place it with the correct order. After orders are packaged in shipping boxes, they are stamped with the label machine. Finally, labeled boxes are sorted into the appropriate truck.