Software Programmers Should Never Have Dress Codes

Sure, it's a little silly to insist on suits for someone crawling on the floor (I still remember in incident with a skirt, an awkward cable, and a customer tour coming in at the wrong moment). But if you work in an industry where it's the standard, how hard is it to leave a jacket and tie at work in case of meetings? Really...

Another personality defect is ego assertion and I'll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to myself, ``Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad time'. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this. When a slot appears, they'll rush to find someone to slip in, but they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven't mistreated them.'' Answer, I wasn't dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that - I wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people.

You should dress according to the expectations of the audience spoken to. If I am going to give an address at the MIT computer center, I dress with a bolo and an old corduroy jacket or something else. I know enough not to let my clothes, my appearance, my manners get in the way of what I care about. An enormous number of scientists feel they must assert their ego and do their thing their way. They have got to be able to do this, that, or the other thing, and they pay a steady price.

Most likely not representative of places that require a dress code, but an anecdote nonetheless:

My first full-time job after dropping out of college - and moving 600 miles away from friends, family: pretty much every one I knew - was at a small (~100 employee) direct marketing firm building landing pages in a dingy office.

They required slacks and a tie every day except Friday - when The Powers That Be deemed it good for morale to allow us to wear a polo shirt. Everyone was required to follow the code - from the designers building ads to the salespeople cold-calling universities.

It was simple work, and I yearned to be promoted to the actual development group - they got to work in PHP and C++, while I was stuck with plain old HTML, CSS, and a smattering of JavaScript. Until I found out what kind of code was responsible for a majority of the company's revenue. One of their salespeople had apparently picked up a PHP book quite a while ago, and suggested to management that they move away from cardpacks and start generating leads online. He was crafty, and made them sign a document saying the code was owned solely by him. He wrote the software that drove the lead generation platform, and a few months later quit. They hired him back at twice the salary to come in once a week as a consultant to fix bugs.

And bugs a plenty there were. Of course, the three developers in the next pod weren't allowed to touch the Holy Grail of Lead Generation. It was owned by the contractor. There were severe, showstopping bugs cropping up nearly weekly while I was there - bugs that would cause clients to drop us. And that was once I came on board - they'd been using the same PHP file for the previous 7 years or so. And the contractor would always tell us that it was our (the designers) fault for corrupted lead data.

One of the developers in the next pod found a security hole in the server one day, and grabbed a copy of the php file. All 14,000 lines of nested if blocks that it was. Every "bug fix" was simply a switch at the bottom of the file, with one case for each of the accounts that ended up having bugs.

Every time we suggested ways of making the process of getting a campaign out the door faster and more efficient, management would tell us: "OK, if you want it done - come in on the weekend." The CTO couldn't understand what an API was.

I haven't worked at a place that required a tie for any of the employees since then. When it comes to small businesses, at least - from this experience and several of my acquaintances' - if there's a dress code, run very, very far away. It's usually an indicator that you're expected to be a cog in the machine - not a curator of the machine.

(The direct marketing firm was bought out by a competitor about three months after I left, who had even worse lead generation software. It folded six months later).

Do you have any idea how juvenile and tasteless you look in cheap jeans and sneakers? Do you realize how much dramatically better you look with proper shoes and well cut wool pants? To give up that advantage just indicates idiocy to me.

Many programmers have trouble reconciling the fact that the "real world" doesn't conform to their ideals and actively try to reject it.