A third of Stitch Fix employees quit after new CEO ends flexible work hours
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
But they also buried the other big factor: They offered everyone $1000 to quit. They also didn't actually completely end flexible working hours, they just raised the minimum working hours to 20 per week and required that they be performed during core hours:
> employees would now be required to work at least 20 hours per week on a set schedule during regular business hours; their log-on and log-off times would be tracked, and stylists would at least temporarily no longer be allowed to become full-time employees. Those who couldn’t work within the new rules were offered a $1,000 bonus to quit
So it's not as simple as the headline makes it sound. It would have been helpful to know how many of those employees who quit were already working the minimum of 20 hours per week during core hours.
If they lost a lot of key workers, that's a big deal. If they lost a lot of people putting in a few hours here and there and those workers got $1000 for it, then this is a non-story. I suppose we can't really know.
From personal experience: Flexible work is great, but infinitely flexible working hours quickly becomes a huge pain. Without setting core hours and minimums, you end up with a long tail of workers who want to put in a couple hours here and there at weird hours. This might work if you workload is 100% asynchronous, requires virtually no training, and has minimal managerial intervention, but eventually the odd hours and inconsistent working schedules take a toll on everyone else who has to work around the flex employees. Constraining flex hours to certain windows and requiring a minimum is actually a very reasonable policy, IMO.
> While the new policy requires that stylists be available at least 20 hours per week, company guidelines reviewed by BuzzFeed News said they can be scheduled for as little as zero hours as “availability does not guarantee a certain number of working hours each week."
The company's executive has continually failed at PR though, which is hammering the stock price. Unbelievable that they're letting this narrative just persist.
As if it’s in their purview to control. Ask the poor PR folks at CFA (chicken QSR)
These are always equivalent in my experience. I've never seen a company that didn't use "core hours" to mean some large window centered around the middle of the day.
I've noticed that Buzzfeed News almost always intentionally buries these crucial details to create sensationalist pieces.
If the domain were banned from HN, I wouldn't be upset.
Your assumption of things aren’t close, and they didn’t lose employees who barely worked. They lost employees who have anything else going on between the hours of 8-8 between Tues-Sat, and worked the job for flexibility..
That's surprising. The only reason I've ever considered Stitch Fix is specifically because there might be a person with better taste than me on the other end.
An algorithm is just going to give me a mix of what's popular and what I've liked in the past, which is precisely the information I already had before coming to their service. Wouldn't people eventually realize they don't need to be told to keep buying things they already like?
I'd be more interested if they not only kept the people around, but doubled down on having consistent relationships and interaction between stylists and clients.
If the ex-workers in the article are representative, they aren't trained stylists at all; they're housewives and other normal people looking for extra income. Using StitchFix is basically letting your Uber driver select your wardrobe.
That's exactly the same thing a human stylist would do + making sure the outfit pieces look good together (Which I assume the algorithm is also trained to do).
As much as I want to believe that a human in the end would do a better job, I think an algorithm is capable of becoming a more accurate and dynamic stylist than a human.
Unless you want to be a trend-setter or do some artistic expression through your clothing. In those cases a human stylist does make sense. But for the regular Joe, I think a well trained algorithm can perform better than a human.
An algorithm will aim to make you look similar to what other people like you look like. It will not push boundaries or riff on creative 'happy accidents' because it can't.
A real stylist will do those things and more.
I don't know whether it's an age thing or just pure cognitive dissonance because people in tech have the hubris to think we can optimise and improve everything because technology, but this machine-learning nihilist thinking is profoundly sad.
> Unless you want to be a trend-setter or do some artistic expression through your clothing. In those cases a human stylist does make sense. But for the regular Joe, I think a well trained algorithm can perform better than a human.
And your comment:
> An algorithm will aim to make you look similar to what other people like you look like. It will not push boundaries or riff on creative 'happy accidents' because it can't.
Correct - I think that's what most people want. Style is defined at the high end to a very limited audience and derivative variations of it are built on further derivative variations as it flows down the classes until it so distorted it simply dissolves. Every turn of that crank is another group of people trying to look like other people (and thus offending the tastes of the group being copied).
That is a very clichéd haute couture definition — a la “Devil Wears Prada - Cerulean Top” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL-KQij0I8I
That trickle-down definition of style is relevant perhaps within some groups of people.
I think that most subcultures have their own highly independent styles, and within that you have people with their own independent riffs on the general subculture style.
Do you not think that many subcultures have their own style that isn’t derivative/trickle-down?
Other subcultures of course never break through.
Regardless, most clothing is purchased from retailers that mass produce things. You could probably tier rank them accordingly from designers to boutiques to small retailers on up to big box shops that you can find anywhere.
You see the same thing in other cultural artifacts like cuisine. Haute Cuisine doesn’t start every trend but it isn’t afraid to discover something outside the mainstream, riff on it, and then it works it’s way into the middle.
Although I believe there is creative merit in composing an clothing outfit I don't believe that merit is even remotely close to things such as designing the actual clothes or creating the drawings and art that goes into the clothes or designing the stores in which these clothes are sold...
So I stand by my original statement. I do believe an algorithmic stylist for the avergage person can be vastly superior than a human stylist, because the inputs that the former takes are not that different than the inputs of the latter. Furthermore, the reasoning is essentially the same:
People want good fitted clothes, that are in fashion and that go in accordance to what they like. I don't think there's a lot of room for creativity here. I'm sorry that it sounds like a machine-learning nihilist take, but in practice I don't believe there's a good match between what people want from something like Stitch Fix and what a human stylist can do for them.
I dooubt that someone who relates to clothing in an artistic way would ever use something like Stitch Fix, so my assumption is that for the average Stitch Fix user, an algorithmic stylist could give them the same desired output at a better cost.
An algorithm can aim to push boundaries and riff on creative 'happy accidents' in ways that people like you like. It's not even that explicit with typical supervised learning/recommenders. It will find things people like you like, whether that means pushing boundaries in ways those people like or just making you look like they like.
I feel the same as you do about ML being in too many places too confidently, but you're assuming a lot about the kinds of algorithms used.
> Creativity is the preference for low(er) priority edges in a graph
There is virtually no difference between an algorithm and a human except that the human may have better heuristics for what "works", which by definition is a form of bias and an algorithm can assess many orders of magnitude more nodes.
If Lee-Sedol the world champion at Go could be left dumbfounded by what he claimed to be a creative move, a move generated by a laptop performing monte-carlo tree search with an ANN doing pruning, and have his world shattered, then I don't see how anyone else could claim that algorithms can't be creative.
If we go by something like this [1]:
> Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. (page 396)
Then the tendency is reweighting of priorities of heuristics, the generation of ideas is walking the varius edges, recognizing is nothing but an evaluation of the new state, and alternatives and posibilities that may be useful is nothing but searching deeper within the graph.
Grand parent comment claimed that believing algorithms (and computers) can perform better than humans is hubris, I claim that believing humans are special, is hubris.
So a human (usually with a fashion background and retail experience) is going to be able to perform better in pretty much every scenario with their algorithm “helping”
It sounds like the stylist is provided data from an algorithm already any way and just fine tunes the selections.
Not only that they have a lot of ways to build out the style you already received which is great.
You can't be that mad at a company when it is so obvious what their value proposition and consequences are to a consumer.
OMG. The compliments. From co-workers, random people on the street and staff in stores. I was shopping for a nice watch for my wife, went to a place and was ignored but saw a watch, went back a few days later in my new clothes, and the same staff was super friendly and helpful. It really changed how I viewed the importance of style and fit.
People who are as picky as you outlined self-select out of services like this.
What they have that the customer doesn't, is knowledge of the space of products that may match your taste. They also know more brands than you do, and may match you with one that you weren't aware of. Like most services, we can do it ourselves, but we pay others because we don't have the time.
btw. how they treated their workers judging from the article is absolute appaling and another indictment of gig companies.
I'd laugh if the shareholders fired the CEO over a boneheaded move like that, since (at least in my mind) it would seem replacing 1500 people is not a good use of the organization's time and energy and such an exodus was self inflicted
It wasn't just quitting. They were offered $1000 in severance. Only a third of the workers took the offer.
It seems like they're trying to get consistency from fewer staff that are more focused on the job. And less costly to employ. That, or eventually replace them with algorithmic picking.
The company missed revenue targets, lost multiple senior staff, and the new CEO is from Bain capital. They're doing this on purpose.
That explains the introduction of black-box management-solely-via-P&L. If any position could be automated away, one would think that that sort of CEO could...
I can't help but imagine that Neutral Planet from Futurama would be the end result of that, constant model fit of the median until the market doesn't even cater to the outliers, and everyone wears the same grey jumpsuit.
Shopping algorithms seem really good at finding very similar items in my experience. That's great when I'm shopping for a cheap router, or some other commodity. When shopping for something like clothing, you frequently want VERY dissimilar items to compare, OR you want complementary, but differently categorized items.
Get rid of the human touch at your own peril. Especially when your business model is built on taste.
Looking at stitch fix pricing it is not cheap. It looks a lot like you would expect somewhere like Nordstrom's to price. It's worth noting that Nordstrom's is more than happy to have an employee act as a personal stylist at no cost.
Most people, almost by definition, have rather ordinary tastes. They will want to imagine that it's slightly better than average, but not outrageous.
I don't know much about fashion, but I see it a lot in food marketing. Restaurants differentiate themselves on trendy but safe choices. It works down from the high end: Gordon Ramsey splashes something with truffle oil, and a few years later you can get New Burger King Truffle Fries. A lot of "mom & pop" restaurants are just heating up things off of Sysco trucks.
I don't mean that to sound snobbish. People should enjoy whatever they like. I'm slightly turned off when it's marketed as being really innovative while smaller, more interesting things languish, but that's just the market at work.
As it applies here, I suspect that most people really could be very happy with algorithmically applied clothing. A truly personal stylist would be much more expensive and outside of most people's comfort zones anyway -- unless they did basically the same thing as the algorithm.
What Stitch Fix can offer is the illusion that you're being truly stylish without any of the risks. Which is a fine thing, as far as I'm concerned, if it makes them happy. That excludes a market which really does want a truly personal, human stylist, but I suspect that market isn't nearly as large, and even smaller if you ask them to pay what hours of attention would really cost.
If it's nothing more than "You mentioned that you liked the coat that [celebrity] wore, and this was a similar sort of look but in [color] you said you liked", that could potentially give people a really positive experience. Even if many people are wearing the same coat because the algorithm recommends it.
This is exactly the Stitch Fix approach.
Is it just the cost of scheduling these workers?
This seems like an inflection point for the company where their software is starting to be more useful than their employees. It's the equivalent of McDonald's replacing counter people with kiosks.
> “We knew from the beginning we were teaching the algorithm,” said an East Coast–based stylist who requested anonymity because she still works at the company. “We know the ultimate goal of Stitch Fix was to get rid of us.”
I have a hard time with the above statement. If you "know" you are training your replacement, or believe you are, and stay anyway, and then you get replaced/eliminated... that just seems to ignore the writing on the wall and being upset post fact when you had full knowledge of it up front, or so you say. It rings kind of hollow. I understand losing a job is an emotional gut punch, even if you're kind of expecting it.
Stitch Fix has market valuation as if they are a tech company (due to unique machine algorithm cloth matching).
Having 1,000s of employees is counter to that narrative and might make wall street reassess their valuation.
...and that is why the current levels of remote work aren't going to completely stick. I work remotely, but I also am not a "permanent" employee, so the fact that I can work for more than one company at a time is fine, because they haven't hired me as an employee. Most companies are not looking for that, or if they are it's a consultant/contractor, not an employee with benefits. If you're working for more than one company at a time, you're not an "employee", rather those companies are your customers. It's a different relationship. If you want that flexibility, you'll probably have to give up the (alleged) security that goes with being an employee, and just work as a consultant or contractor.
Most of these individuals don’t want this scenario, they would much rather have one full time job that paid the bill. But with minimum wage in the US basically being a glorified slave-wage, that’s not a realistic ambition for many people.