People actually writing code? Or is this the domestic IT staff? FTEs or including contractors?
How many do you actually need?
How are the BevyUp and MessageYes acquisitions these days? Are these thing in use in production?
Someone tell me about the future.
The reason this company has software engineers is not solely to support a pretty website. Running a billion dollar business supported by tech relies on experienced engineers to manage a huge infrastructure of data warehousing, real-time analytics and thinking about how data driven decisions can be made for the years to come. Your question is valid, but the complexity of supporting such a large company with only 1.8k engineers is actually impressive. The company will be heavily relying on the infrastructure and data being built and collected today to keep them alive tomorrow.
The demand for luxury IRL store experiences is plummeting and the customer base that demands it is dying (currently at an even faster rate). The only good thing any investor can say about Nordstrom is "a pretty strong ecommerce platform". I'm not saying you're wrong when you say "Nordstrom is not a tech company", but neither was Sears... and that worked out well.
But Nordstrom is not a tech company. They sell shoes and nice things, that is all. The stores let them provide a luxury experience IRL as well.
A pure ecommerce Nordstrom would need maybe a quarter of the current staff in technology. What is it you propose to do? Like you would need all of these satellite offices and tech dev hubs for a [also useless] company like Facebook. I know, more magic mirrors! That will do it. Make a ... social ... video .. app with shopping ... and... RMS ...
And in the long run it's just a battle of different supply chains, whittling costs down to nothing.
Tech people have been useful, but they are not as important nor as intelligent as they think.
You're clerks.
That number should be doubled. Nordstrom will become a full blown tech company or it will not survive the decade. Department stores with a small team maintaining a little website and an outsourced staff maintaining servers are a relic of an old time.
Nordstrom needs to shut down full line stores that don't generate profits, invest in markets that can actually afford high fashion, and prepare for a reality where more than half of their revenue is generated through e-commerce. That means investing in more engineers at a high enough salary that the good ones don't leave for Amazon after a year.
Kaas Tailored news
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/mukilteo-furniture-maker-rises-to-providence-medicals-100-million-mask-challenge/
1800 is low. We need to bring this up to 5K. Stores are closed, non tech is non essential
Too many folks on Tech side that are either not productive or non-technical. Cut the PM role completely, let the engineers work with product managers directly. Nordstrom technology should not have more than ~1000 employees in total. Engineers and EMs are okay, BS starts from Director and above. Cut the lot!
I would open-source Personal Book, gift it to the world.
The future is Bleak.