- High-pressure, fast-paced stick-it-together-with-glue-and-move-on culture. This is a questionable approach for a company of this size and leaves many projects half-completed.
- Engineering management is a dumpster fire. There is a lot of top-down direction about product (often with micromanagement), with little regard for two-way feedback and open dialog. Most of the directives from management involve responding to fires and changing directions constantly.
- Support for engineering from management is frustratingly absent. The feedback cycle is broken and managers are not given the autonomy to change many aspects of their team. This is a big one. Not feeling supported by your manager or feeling like your manager does not have the authority to change the team dynamics or structure is toxic to morale.
- There are no regular performance reviews. There is a quarterly process called "Collect & Reflect" where you choose people within the organization and ask for feedback. You are then responsible for distilling this feedback down and presenting it to your manager. It's unclear how the results of this feedback are used, but it definitely is not used as a form of performance review.
- Recent high attrition is concerning. Quite a few members of the executive team have been fired without notice or explanation or have left immediately after vesting for 4 years. I can only speculate that this is due to the culture of political posturing and backstabbing in a high-pressure, competitive environment.
- Transparency about decision making and team structure is poor. Often, changes are made within the organization without notice or regard for optics or the preferences of the team.
- Stripped down benefits compared to other companies of equivalent size. For example, they don't have a 401k plan for the first year of employment and after the first year, you can contribute to a 401k, but there's no company match.
- There is a serious disconnect between how management sees the company and how the rank-and-file employees see the company. At Stitch Fix, there is no HR department. They're called "People and Culture" and they're responsible for coming up with company-sponsored propaganda. They do a great job of communicating the company vision with a unified voice, but some of the messaging lacks substance and leaves very little room for dialog. Stitch Fix touts a culture of feedback, but does not really embrace new ideas or feedback from its employees. They send out a regular email to ask vague questions through an app that allows for anonymous feedback. Questions like "Do you feel like you understand the company vision" "How would you rate your confidence in your direct manager" and so on. However, the anonymous feedback mechanism feels like to too little too late. Many people I talked to said they provided scathing feedback via the only feedback channel they feel like they have, to little effect.
- Aggressive business goals without regard for quality and scaling the organization evenly to support these goals. For example: hiring more engineers will not solve more problems concurrently. It does not mean that twice the engineering headcount will be able to solve twice the business problems without significant effort put into how they work together.
- A major objective of one of engineering teams is to build a PaaS hosting solution on top of ECS that the whole company must use. This is a colossal waste of time, considering the glut of feature-complete and production-ready microservices infrastructure tools that already exist. This kind of thinking creates undue pressure on the engineers as management forces the engineers to cut corners in other places that have a real impact on other projects. It also limits the technologies that can drive the future of Stitch Fix, since only approved technology stacks can run on this platform.
- Directions and priorities shift on a daily basis. Many projects get abandoned for a higher priority project within the first week.
- There's only one product manager for all 100+ engineers. The original company mentality of "We only hire engineers with strong product sense" has managed to maintain a stronghold to this day.
- One member of the engineering leadership team (who shall not be mentioned) frequently gives detailed directives to specific employees about the work to be done. Much of this type of work is doled out directly, without regard for the many layers of management that exist to protect workers from the whims of executives. Weekly meetings (with a dozen or more engineers) turn into grilling sessions about why more work was not accomplished in a given timeframe, without regard for all of the other tasks an engineer might have been responsible for completing.
