Costco IS (IT) is not a good place to work at all. Don't do it!
Pros
-Cheap food at the corporate cafeteria. This may be a negative if you are trying to lose weight, as many, many employees typically gain a lot of weight after starting to work at corporate. People I worked with called it the Costco 40. -Cheap benefits compared to most companies. -No real accountability so you can basically come in and do nothing all day if you want. This is a huge con though if you want to actually get work done since there is a lot of dead weight.
Cons
-Management doesn't really care about you, and doesn't listen to feedback at all. We had an employee survey that, after many promises, was never given serious consideration by management. After repeatedly saying they would release the results, it was swept under the rug and no official response ever came out of it. The main response was to hire a different survey company, who released results that Costco IS had the worst results of any company they had ever surveyed. I also found internal documentation showing that management had paid for cultural consultants to come in years ago for an assessment. The consultants summarized all of the issues perfectly and management chose to ignore all of their feedback. Costco management has a culture of doing whatever they want at the expense of their employees. Costco management as a whole also has a reputation of being a good-old-boys club. Just Google "costco management sexism" if you don't believe me. Management is filled with suck-ups who really don't care about you, and only want you to fall in line. -Management is for the most part not technical at all, and this really hurts the IT organization. It wasn't uncommon for management to transfer from the warehouse to IT. The running joke was that we had bakery managers running things. -Costco IS has a culture of awarding tenure over ability. They don't care if you work hard or not. All that matters is how many years you've worn a Costco badge. This is reflected in the parking, vacation, 401k and other policies which reward people who have worked there the longest. It doesn't matter if you have 15 years of experience prior to working at Costco. You won't be taken seriously unless you've been there a really long time. Speaking of vacation, it is totally non-negotiable. You start with 2 weeks of vacation up until 5 years. The 401k is the poorest of any that I've ever personally seen with a maximum $500 match for the first year. They basically treat you like a warehouse worker even if you work in Corporate IT. -Parking absolutely sucks. They have an insane reserved parking spot system that rewards employees who have been there 15+ years. At one point it was so bad if you weren't at work before 7AM you weren't getting a parking spot and would have to shuttle over. -There is a real lack of accountability. It doesn't matter if you only work 5 hours a day, as long as you are able to man a chair for core hours, you will be receiving a paycheck. I saw people cause multi-million dollar outages through negligence and they were not punished. I never saw anyone getting fired for anything and it was really bad. -Working from home is strictly prohibited, unless you are a contractor. They repeatedly wouldn't allow us to work from home, but at the same time they were willing to allow it for contractors. This felt like regular employees were being punished while contractors were being rewarded. -The on-call rotation was the worst I've ever been a part of in 15 years. When you are on-call expect to be paged at all hours of the night. You won't be able to have a normal weekend because you will be repeatedly paged for the dumbest reasons. -Technical debt is a huge issue at Costco IS. If you're big on 1990s IT concepts this is your place. Things like the cloud were in their infancy and were already being misused at Costco. There was no serious planning, and no vision by anyone in the IT department with any real power. -The pay and benefits were very poor for the Seattle area. This really needs to be addressed because they will have issues recruiting and keeping the quality employees they are going to need to modernize Costco IS. -The Costco IS office space really sucks. My team was in a huge 2 story building that is an extremely large open space. The cubical walls are only about 3 feet tall and people's voices carried for miles. If you were trying to get any serious work done, you would basically be required to buy expensive noise cancelling headphones. The building also featured totally inadequate parking. At one point people parked across the painted line and got towed. It wasn't a good place to go to every day at all. It also smelled like mold in that building, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some serious problems with it.