Thread regarding Nordstrom layoffs

Job listing suggests that the guts of inventory availability are in the process of being done as microservices in Go.

https://nordstrom.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/nordstrom_careers/job/Seattle-WA/Software-Engineer-2—Go—Supply-Chain-Tech—Fulfillable–Inventory_R-202884

Or they were done already and the team is extending them in clever new ways.

West Coast FC, East Coast FC, do they still need the one in flyover country? Is Cedar considerably larger than the others? I saw its expansion and early impl of automated cranes, but of course no one can come close to the sophisticated robotic automation and intense capital investment in any Amazon FC.

Good riddance! Their “supply chain” is a JOKE!!! They are light years behind AMAZON! The new generation of Nordstrom’s just invested in pure c-ap. The NYC store and the CA Supply chain are a joke. They lost it all. Stay tuned for The 2020 “financials“ funny papers.

If Nordstrom has re-worked the order/inventory internals, or actually deployed a new system (I have no idea) then you could still have the use-case where you promise an item from a store, which is then bought by a IRL shopper before Nordy staff can pull the item from the floor. But this is an edge case and would be accounted for with buffers or similar rules on store inventory counts. They should never overpromise items from strict on-hand warehouse inventory. If that’s the source of many of these cancellations, then, yeah, very embarrassing stuff.

Why did they drop the old Anniversary Sale color dots in favor of this harsh all-yellow theme? It is unpleasant. Reminds of the bad old attempt to deliver a “social” web store site with ugly headers in bold Bodoni font. I cried for weeks over that.

“Then they came for the sensible UI designers, but I was not a UI designer, so I did nothing.”

Btw, if your guy had had his act together, he would not have talked about his proposed solution, he would have prototyped it already against 20 hungry real-time software threads grabbing scarce items and demoed it for you to see. But people are so soft and lazy and weak nowadays.

Bleak is now wondering when he or she will have time to go downtown to shop the Sale at store 1. Will he or she ever lunch at the Grill again? He or she had the table next to Mr. Bruce once, which was fun. The older the Nordstrom the better, I say! Well except that Erik outshines Pete, always has, that’s hardly a secret, everyone knows this.

I can’t believe that this issue still persists, which is stunning because it’s such a customer service atrocity. Bleak him-or-herself proposed a real-time fix for this issue a full decade ago, true story, but the people who mattered at that time blew him or her off and ignored his or her ideas, which were of course prescient and sound. There is no good reason for false inventory order confirmations to exist in the modern tech world, and no excuse today for this silliness. How embarrassing!

Isn’t there a project to rewrite the order management softwares from scratch, in-house? With all those expensive software engineers loitering about the place, did they ever finish and release it? Or still running on the old system and the nasty bad stuff jerry-rigged on top of it?

What a mess! How could this still be? The jobs board blurbs suggested that Nordstrom was running on s-xy modernized architectures and superduper realtime messaging. They have principal engineers and data scientists now, you know. Nordstrom people even speak at industry conferences because they are so talented and smart.

Yes, it is a Good Thing to have the demand on the web store, that they are selling merch. The real test for Anniversary is whether shoppers buy regular full-price items as well. The entire pre-sale schedule, allowing different tiers of customers to shop early, is a workaround for the “first day of Anniversary” mad dash for the sale goods problem.

But I can’t believe that even with this that they still oversell items; the entire process should be precise and reliable down to a single unit.

Who will step up and save the company? Arise, ye visionaries! LOL, you could solve this problem in 2005 with EJBs — someone quick get on this!

Cancel Nordy - problem solved

That guy got cancelled