As someone who wears jeans and t-shirts to work almost exclusively, this comes off as old fashioned and probably not terribly topical anymore.
That said, he's not entirely wrong. What you wear absolutely affects how other people perceive, treat, and judge you (rightly or wrongly). Good to always be mindful of what your appearance says to other people, whether you care what they think or not.
What many don't realize is that i goes both ways. They might be dressed nicer than us, but I'm going to assume they're sleazy salesmen like just about everyone else that still wears a suit. I'll assume that no one half way competent works at the company, because we work in a competitive industry and the best people have options to work in better environments.
I'm sure most of us here have worked with enough useless consultancies to know that there is no correlation between dress and ability. It's not even a class symbol anymore, the biggest group of people that wear suits to work are in retail these days.
When you say suit, do you include sports jackets/blazers? I ask because I do see a few people who choose to wear those as a fashion statement. It's not something super popular, but you see it here and there.
This has always been important to me, and it's one of the ways that I mentally distinguish my "I'm going to go out and be professional" me from my "I'd rather not be working" me. When I tie my tie, I'm thinking about my customers and my employer. When my tie comes off, I don't think about them anymore.
So you know there's no correction between dress and ability but you're going to assume that people who wear suits are bad at their job? Seems like a poorly supported assumption.
You're right, correlation was not the right word to use, perhaps "positive correlation" would have fit better?.
I have found a correlation between dress code and competence, places that focus on the former can't afford to be picky with the latter in such a competitive market. The more talented can usually get paid just as well at more relaxed companies.
I used to laugh at stuff like this, then at orientation the place I was working with said "The best way to show your personality is through your socks." I noped right out of there.
I love Burleson and his small-horses, I cannot believe he made hacker news ;)
Guy is really old school, raises mini horses for fun, and literally shows up in Google for any Oracle error ever. He is long tail SEO before there was such a thing...
I agree that this comes across as pretty old-fashioned although many of my sales compatriots routinely dress more conservatively than I do these days. The dress codes for a consulting company I worked for 15 years years ago were fairly conservative but not this conservative.
For what I do, even traditional business casual starts to look more like being a "suit" than I prefer.
[ADDED: As someone else said, do read to the bottom. This is a commentary on what clients are looking for.]
This attitude is probably closely aligned with why the federal government can't find good help, and why start-ups struggle to attract federal contracts.
True, but following this guide to the letter will make you appear boring, overly conservative and unfashionable. Even people who still wear suits regularly would probably be well-advised to branch out a bit from a plain white shirt, black shoes and a conservative tie every day.
I do consulting work with scientific and engineering firms and I'll contend that it still largely holds. For me, the trick wasn't to look at how the engineers dress. Rather, it's how management dresses and they tend to adhere to moderately strict rules for dress. At the end of the day, they're the ones that sign my contract, so it's important that I communicate to them that I understand their rules of conduct.
In case anyone is interested, Alan Flusser's book, "Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion," provides a good background on the history of men's formal dress and why certain things are the way they are. Certainly, we can disagree as to whether it should be important, but clothing is a language, so we might as well understand what we're saying in a particular context.
Not true, it's just changed. Now you are expected to come to work sandals jeans and a t-shirt. If you have the gall to wear a button up and kakis, oh the horror! I've personally been judged for "dressing up" in inexpensive button ups and kakis. So I ended up dressing down.
Actually, if you study the history of clothing (etc) , that isn't what it is about at all.
It is a signalling of a maverick industry so powerful it can succeed without the approval or gatekeeping of stuffy banks etc. It is a huge middle finger to The Establishment.
Think of how YC began with the idea of two guys in a cheap apartment seeking to be ramen profitable. I will suggest it is no coincidence that I have read that Paul Graham is fond of (iirc) cargo shorts and sandals. It's a hugely self entitled position that his personal comfort matters vastly more than the opinions of gatekeepers.
There are good psychological reasons for enforcing it as an industrywide standard. You don't want people eroding that mindset of the industry or altering that social contract.
> It is a signalling of a maverick industry so powerful it can succeed without the approval or gatekeeping of stuffy banks etc. It is a huge middle finger to The Establishment.
> There are good psychological reasons for enforcing it as an industrywide standard. You don't want people eroding that mindset of the industry or altering that social contract.
If you dig into these two paragraphs a bit, you’ll see they’re incompatible. You’re just trading one establishment for a new one, which is evidently just a susceptible to gatekeeping and biases as the old one.
This dress code provides great insight into the culture/personality of BC (and why I would never want to work there), particularly this part:
> If you have been working all night and have an early morning meeting, you can use an anti-inflammatory hemorrhoid cream (e.g. Preparation H) to quickly shrink those unsightly puffy bags under your eyes.
Sometimes that's just consulting. Your goal is always to make your company look good to the client. You already flew out and forfeited your week to be on site for those sweet sweet billable hours. You have to be done by Friday because that's when you go home, so you get out of the client's office at 6-7 (always after your boss leaves), and you have the choice to sit in your hotel room bored or keep going. You finish working at 3am, but have to be in before your boss looking fresh, so you iron everything, shower/shave, and do it all again.
And if you work on site at a bank on the east coast, you better have a nice suit. Otherwise nowadays you're usually fine with slacks and a button down at most places.
Honestly it can be a lot of fun, in small doses (do that every week for months and you realize why not everyone is a consultant though)
Everything about this is so overdone for 2018. I understand you should be a bit on the conservative side and not do outright stupid things (flip flops for e.g.) but this is just too much.
(I had a hardcore Oracle guy once walk in when I was at a Bank - there was a product issue nobody was able to solve. This person had a pony tail, white t-shirt, blue jeans and sports shoes. Charged a ton of money for his 3 days and by the time he was gone things were measurably better off. Nobody was minding his attire - and it was 8 years ago.)
Oddly enough, in stuffy industries not adhering to the dress code is a strong social signal that you're good enough to be able to flaunt it.
I used to work in telecoms consulting, which is fairly buttoned up: usually dress shirts, slacks and nice shoes, although us engineers were permitted to dispose of the tie and open the top button. But the best engineer in my company -- the guy who'd be flown in by private jet when needed because the billing systems were dropping $1m/hour on the floor -- maintained a steady uniform of ripped jeans, ratty T-shirts and permanent 3-day stubble, and the clients would always fall over themselves with gratefulness when he showed up. Not because of what he wore, of course, but because he was "the real deal" and very good at actually fixing problems, instead of talking about them.
Oddly enough, in stuffy industries not adhering to the dress code is a strong social signal that you're good enough to be able to flaunt it.
This is classic countersignalling behaviour: By refusing to pay the cost (financial, time, and comfort) of dressing up, you're communicating that you're not afraid of being mistaken for an interloper.
permanent 3-day stubble
I really want to know how to do this. My stubble goes from 0-day to 1-day to 2-day to 3-day and then back to 0-day...
> I really want to know how to do this. My stubble goes from 0-day to 1-day to 2-day to 3-day and then back to 0-day...
I achieve variable-length shaven-stubble with "Amazon: Panasonic Beard and Mustache Trimmer and Hair Clipper for Men". Once-over with the main clipper (sans attachment) is like a 2/3 day (but it looks a little uneven), and then the mustache trimmer to achieve a 1/2-day.
Avoiding zero-days is a priority of mine, also, so I felt compelled to share. Good luck!
To ride on this, I get pretty consistent results similar to this with hair clippers from Walmart and the smallest attachment they come with. I didn't even really think about it, but I'll probably get a "Beard and Mustache Trimmer" as my next one.
If you're in an urgent need for a 3-day beard, a trip to Walmart and 3 days will do it.
Now I think of it John something--Beresniewicz--who had written a book or two on Oracle, used to turn up at conferences with a pony tail (or perhaps braid) to the small of his back. He was neatly dressed, but not formally.
While the rules are stodgy, they generally line up with mainstream men's business fashion guidelines. Charcoal or navy suits, pressed white shirts, conservative ties, a pair of captoe oxfords (Allen Edmonds or better, black and/or brown)
While I appreciate and agree with the point that people judge others by their looks, I'm just going to put this out there:
When you socially optimise for superficial appearance, you'll both work for clients who value superficial appearance and attract employees who optimise for superficial appearance.
Not a day goes by that I don't thank god I don't have to work for a consultancy, though I do often dread that I'll have some brought in and have to deal with the particular kind of moron employees they attract.
Dress codes are just a coded way of communicating that you conform to a particular social group’s norms. On Wall Street, it’s Zenga and Rolex. In Palo Alto, it’s T-shirts and Allbirds. In Tokyo, it’s gaucho pants and beanies. In stuffy old consulting companies, it’s stuffy “business” garbs from the 1990s. In other words, it’s just local fashion.
I'm not anti-professionalism, and have come to appreciate putting in some effort at work for clothing thoughtfulness, especially among people with more authority. But it's interesting to see how skilless roles like bankers and financial consultants focus on this stuff to weed out people they don't like. Interesting opposite to the idea of a merit based system that they pretend to uphold.
“Skilless roles like bankers and consultants”. Are you 12? Are you kidding? You should approach things you don’t understand with more respect than that.
Before you get out your pitchforks, this page is from 2001. He's made updates and added email commentary since then but it's reflective of a very different age from someone (Don Burleson) who was very much considered "old fashioned" back then too.
When I was at Apple, we had a consultant who insisted on coming into work dressed like a professional consultant. The rest of us were in T-shirts, shorts and jeans, sandals or tennis shoes or hiking boots, a typical hacker crowd.
She wasn't getting much traction. It was awkward to have a "suit" in meetings, even though we knew she was an excellent engineer. A couple of us suggested that it might help for her to dress down. Finally our director (a woman, if it matters) took her aside and had a chat. A few days later the consultant started coming into work in jeans / t-shirt and so forth, and her interactions with us went a lot better.
The hacker in me wants to feel vindicated. But really it just shows how shallow we can be.
In any event, I am never, ever going to wear a tie or a suit to work.
I speak at a lot of technical events even though I come from the product management/marketing side. The standard business casual--khakis and button-down oxford shirts--had felt comfortable to me forever. These days I feel I really should ratchet things down to a "tribal" T-shirt or at least a polo so I don't seem so generically corporate at many events.
I almost never wear a tie these days though except for certain big stage events.
Yep, dress to the social norms. If your company and the onsite people differ then wear what everyone else is wearing and hang a suit up if you have to visit the brass.
At one point in my life, a person showing up wearing a suit was a big warning (e.g. government worker). I then went to work at a place that took its dress code a bit seriously[1].
Although, if a person is with a consulting company that is in the business of pushing out IT employees expect them to all wear suits and convince your management that they are serious workers and you are sloppy workers. The management tribe likes suits.
> At one point in my life, a person showing up wearing a suit was a big warning (e.g. government worker)
If you really want to freak people out, wear business casual, put on a BRAND NEW clean high-visibility safety vest and fresh, clean hard hat without any stickers and show up to a major high-rise construction site with a clipboard and DSLR camera. Have done this a few times (planning fiber construction/riser paths).
I can see where that would be a "oh, great" moment.
I was in a rural area. What a lot of people don't get about government site visits for grants is that there is a bit a pecking order. The upper officials get to go to "cool" places like Hawaii or New Orleans during Mardi Gras, or any number of interesting places during an event. Now, the screwups and very low level folks get to go to North Dakota. If you ever wonder why some folks in rural areas hate the government, then take a look at the kind of person DC sends our way.
I would be happy to wear a tie if I don't have to. I need to practice tying a tie to remember how to do it. Also, some time ago I learned how to tie a bow tie and it's a cool skill that I want to maintain.
I got a FinTech job once and felt it was my moment of opportunity to wear my suites once in a while. There were no customers, though and everyone wore relaxed clothes, so it just turned funny.
I was told they'd had a suit up Friday one time where one engineer had protested (in jest) and had worn a Goofy costume underneath his tuxedo.
I like to suit up sometimes because it makes me feel good, but acknowledge that we're social animals who mostly want to fit in.
Dress clothes and peer pressure suck. Nice clothes don't.
Also not on xmas celebrations office parties? Once a year i typically wear a suit to work, the day of the xmas drinks/snacks. Just so other people i do own clothes that don't have a hoodie. :D
I've received significant social friction just trying to wear wool pants and a button shirt with a collar, to an office job. Seattle is an incredibly casual city/region. Coworkers at a major ISP ridiculed me so hard I had to go home and change into a t-shirt and jeans. After taking a contract at another very large company, I was again ridiculed for my outfit. I'm not even wearing a tie - just the coat and pants seem to offend people.
Things are so casual here that I know an engineer who never wears socks, and wears Birkenstocks through the winter.
> Major ISP
The people with 'enable' on the core routers for the largest ASNs in the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland region are also the ones most likely to show up to work in an old ratty NANOG t-shirt and cargo shorts. If they're not working 100% remote.
It seems excessive by today's US standards (but not Japan or some other places) but as long as it's not over the top and or excessive for the position, and they are up front about it, I see no problem with it.
I mean, why shouldn't a Metal band, for example, require their roadies to wear leather and spikes or spandex and hairspray if that's their thing.
100 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadThis is pretty insanely regressive.
https://abovethelaw.com/2015/02/judges-want-women-lawyers-to...
That said, he's not entirely wrong. What you wear absolutely affects how other people perceive, treat, and judge you (rightly or wrongly). Good to always be mindful of what your appearance says to other people, whether you care what they think or not.
I'm sure most of us here have worked with enough useless consultancies to know that there is no correlation between dress and ability. It's not even a class symbol anymore, the biggest group of people that wear suits to work are in retail these days.
I have found a correlation between dress code and competence, places that focus on the former can't afford to be picky with the latter in such a competitive market. The more talented can usually get paid just as well at more relaxed companies.
Guy is really old school, raises mini horses for fun, and literally shows up in Google for any Oracle error ever. He is long tail SEO before there was such a thing...
For what I do, even traditional business casual starts to look more like being a "suit" than I prefer.
[ADDED: As someone else said, do read to the bottom. This is a commentary on what clients are looking for.]
In case anyone is interested, Alan Flusser's book, "Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion," provides a good background on the history of men's formal dress and why certain things are the way they are. Certainly, we can disagree as to whether it should be important, but clothing is a language, so we might as well understand what we're saying in a particular context.
...so you mean out of style?
It is a signalling of a maverick industry so powerful it can succeed without the approval or gatekeeping of stuffy banks etc. It is a huge middle finger to The Establishment.
Think of how YC began with the idea of two guys in a cheap apartment seeking to be ramen profitable. I will suggest it is no coincidence that I have read that Paul Graham is fond of (iirc) cargo shorts and sandals. It's a hugely self entitled position that his personal comfort matters vastly more than the opinions of gatekeepers.
There are good psychological reasons for enforcing it as an industrywide standard. You don't want people eroding that mindset of the industry or altering that social contract.
> There are good psychological reasons for enforcing it as an industrywide standard. You don't want people eroding that mindset of the industry or altering that social contract.
If you dig into these two paragraphs a bit, you’ll see they’re incompatible. You’re just trading one establishment for a new one, which is evidently just a susceptible to gatekeeping and biases as the old one.
It still refuses to curry favor with the old establishment.
> If you have been working all night and have an early morning meeting, you can use an anti-inflammatory hemorrhoid cream (e.g. Preparation H) to quickly shrink those unsightly puffy bags under your eyes.
And if you work on site at a bank on the east coast, you better have a nice suit. Otherwise nowadays you're usually fine with slacks and a button down at most places.
Honestly it can be a lot of fun, in small doses (do that every week for months and you realize why not everyone is a consultant though)
Zumwalt, as Chief of Naval Operations, was responsible for the roughly ten-year span when sailors were allowed to wear beards, outraging the naval counterparts of Mr. Burleson here: https://news.usni.org/2014/10/23/brief-history-grooming-u-s-...
(I had a hardcore Oracle guy once walk in when I was at a Bank - there was a product issue nobody was able to solve. This person had a pony tail, white t-shirt, blue jeans and sports shoes. Charged a ton of money for his 3 days and by the time he was gone things were measurably better off. Nobody was minding his attire - and it was 8 years ago.)
I used to work in telecoms consulting, which is fairly buttoned up: usually dress shirts, slacks and nice shoes, although us engineers were permitted to dispose of the tie and open the top button. But the best engineer in my company -- the guy who'd be flown in by private jet when needed because the billing systems were dropping $1m/hour on the floor -- maintained a steady uniform of ripped jeans, ratty T-shirts and permanent 3-day stubble, and the clients would always fall over themselves with gratefulness when he showed up. Not because of what he wore, of course, but because he was "the real deal" and very good at actually fixing problems, instead of talking about them.
This is classic countersignalling behaviour: By refusing to pay the cost (financial, time, and comfort) of dressing up, you're communicating that you're not afraid of being mistaken for an interloper.
permanent 3-day stubble
I really want to know how to do this. My stubble goes from 0-day to 1-day to 2-day to 3-day and then back to 0-day...
> I really want to know how to do this. My stubble goes from 0-day to 1-day to 2-day to 3-day and then back to 0-day...
I achieve variable-length shaven-stubble with "Amazon: Panasonic Beard and Mustache Trimmer and Hair Clipper for Men". Once-over with the main clipper (sans attachment) is like a 2/3 day (but it looks a little uneven), and then the mustache trimmer to achieve a 1/2-day.
Avoiding zero-days is a priority of mine, also, so I felt compelled to share. Good luck!
If you're in an urgent need for a 3-day beard, a trip to Walmart and 3 days will do it.
When you socially optimise for superficial appearance, you'll both work for clients who value superficial appearance and attract employees who optimise for superficial appearance.
Not a day goes by that I don't thank god I don't have to work for a consultancy, though I do often dread that I'll have some brought in and have to deal with the particular kind of moron employees they attract.
/superficial generalisation
Those roles are hardly skilless.
When I was at Apple, we had a consultant who insisted on coming into work dressed like a professional consultant. The rest of us were in T-shirts, shorts and jeans, sandals or tennis shoes or hiking boots, a typical hacker crowd.
She wasn't getting much traction. It was awkward to have a "suit" in meetings, even though we knew she was an excellent engineer. A couple of us suggested that it might help for her to dress down. Finally our director (a woman, if it matters) took her aside and had a chat. A few days later the consultant started coming into work in jeans / t-shirt and so forth, and her interactions with us went a lot better.
The hacker in me wants to feel vindicated. But really it just shows how shallow we can be.
In any event, I am never, ever going to wear a tie or a suit to work.
I almost never wear a tie these days though except for certain big stage events.
At one point in my life, a person showing up wearing a suit was a big warning (e.g. government worker). I then went to work at a place that took its dress code a bit seriously[1].
Although, if a person is with a consulting company that is in the business of pushing out IT employees expect them to all wear suits and convince your management that they are serious workers and you are sloppy workers. The management tribe likes suits.
1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3015677#3015969
If you really want to freak people out, wear business casual, put on a BRAND NEW clean high-visibility safety vest and fresh, clean hard hat without any stickers and show up to a major high-rise construction site with a clipboard and DSLR camera. Have done this a few times (planning fiber construction/riser paths).
I was in a rural area. What a lot of people don't get about government site visits for grants is that there is a bit a pecking order. The upper officials get to go to "cool" places like Hawaii or New Orleans during Mardi Gras, or any number of interesting places during an event. Now, the screwups and very low level folks get to go to North Dakota. If you ever wonder why some folks in rural areas hate the government, then take a look at the kind of person DC sends our way.
I was told they'd had a suit up Friday one time where one engineer had protested (in jest) and had worn a Goofy costume underneath his tuxedo.
I like to suit up sometimes because it makes me feel good, but acknowledge that we're social animals who mostly want to fit in.
Dress clothes and peer pressure suck. Nice clothes don't.
Things are so casual here that I know an engineer who never wears socks, and wears Birkenstocks through the winter.
> Major ISP
The people with 'enable' on the core routers for the largest ASNs in the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland region are also the ones most likely to show up to work in an old ratty NANOG t-shirt and cargo shorts. If they're not working 100% remote.
It's a way to show that you "get it" and are part of the same tribe.
I mean, why shouldn't a Metal band, for example, require their roadies to wear leather and spikes or spandex and hairspray if that's their thing.