I've worked in IT for the retail sector and I'd never, ever do it again. I was a Dev/System Admin/System Engineer/DBA/Network Engineer & Help Desk person. I needed a job rather desperately and took the first one that was available to me which at initial view I thought was promising.

As an example, if you worked on call which was restored 1 in 3 weeks, you didn't earn anything extra in wages on the days you were on call. But instead I earned 0.5 hours of TOIL for every hour that I was restored on which was from memory. 07:00-20: 00 Saturday, Sunday and Public Holidays. And 07:00 -> 09:00 and 18:00 - 20:00 Monday to Friday.

I would get calls at all hours because we supported retail stores in New Zealand, Australia, US & Canada. We had local staff in those areas but for the gaps in follow the sun support we had the on call person fill that role.

This might have been a good deal if you didn't get many calls. But for the larger part it was a full time day of work on Saturda, Sunday and Public Holiday when _no one was working_ except the on call person. And on an evening and first thing in the morning for shop close and open you frequently got calls before and after your shift started. All for 0.5 hours for every hour worked!

This doesn't even begin to cover the problems we had with retaining staff (understandably) and an absolutely awful work environment. My manager did his best to foster a positive work environment but the C levels clearly had no desire to do anything but bleed their staff dry.

Wrapping up my tirade, it wouldn't surprise me if this was the standard across the retail industry for IT staff and developers. Based on those I've spoken to outside of my own personal experience, this seems to be close to true. For all the glory that Costco holds for paying higher than average wages, I'm certain their IT department fucks over it's staff in a way that closely resembles my own.

Also, to be clear, your experience was working in IT at another retail company, not Costco? I'm not sure why you would expect these to be the same: as the article explains in detail, Costco's model lets it do some things very differently from, say, Walmart.

I didn't work in either of those chains. I'm replying to a comment directly above mine where OP says, they knew some one who worked in IT for Costco and their conditions were terrible. As was mine for another large, multinational retail chain.

Costco are great in comparison to say, WalMart or Kmart/Target/BigW in Australia. But I assume they're under the same pressure to penny pinch as any other retail organisation because of their incredibly small margins for profits.

That's an old myth.

Because of COLA (and on top of that, pensions), the public sector in California pays more than private jobs now, aside from FANG.

I once asked my dental billing technician (yeah that's really a thing in the USA), "Who got the best benefits?"

Answer: "Oh, public employees are royalty."

As an example here's a senior (1043) network engineer position with the SF Dept of Technology:

https://www.jobapscloud.com/SF/sup/bulpreview.asp?R1=PEX&R2=...

Salary is listed as:

$59.49 - $74.83/hour; $10,311.00 - $12,970.00/month; $123,734.00 - $155,636.00/year

I can tell you that a few years ago at megacorp (not FANG) my base pay for principal ops monkey was more than the top end of the 1043 and 1044 scales. We were not known for above average compensation. In general while we hired into the principal role I think the city tends to aim more for senior (1043) than principal (1044).

Here's the SF pay scale database:

Principal programmers (1064) top out at $149k. Infosys managers (1071) top out at just under $200k. That's not particularly competitive.

Megacorp also provided me with the best 401k I've seen (Vanguard with access to institutional shares), 401k match, stock options, and decent insurance.

I once asked my dental billing technician (yeah that's really a thing in the USA), "Who got the best benefits?"

Answer: "Oh, public employees are royalty."

This still matters so much more for unskilled labor. Working in tech you're already going to have access to heavily subsidized health insurance. 401k vs pension is a matter of debate. I'd prefer a defined benefit situation like a pension, but a 401k with a decent match (we got up to $7k or so) isn't really a deal breaker

The city (due to some combination of local, state, and federal laws) will dock 2% for retiree health care, and 7.5% for your pension.

https://sfdhr.org/classification-compensation-database

http://citidex.sfgov.org/cgi-bin/dhr/findClass.cgi?class=&ti...

[0] https://www.thestreet.com/technology/costco-thanksgiving-day...

Trying to opt out was futile. Each message had an unsubscribe link. The landing page worked, but whatever was supposed to handle the form time out or 500'd each time. Hold time at the Costco call center was 10+ minutes... to unsubscribe from opt-out garbage. Unsubscribing from the membership itself was a bit of a comedy routine where the manager kept suggesting I keep the membership and patronize their warehouse (instead of the one I signed up at).

It's fair to say I agree that Costco would reap benefits by investing in their IT infrastructure.

I would absolutely believe that they don't want to try and compete with the tech sector for talent, and their management doesn't have the same understanding of tech that they do of running a warehouse business.