Funnily enough, all the programmers I know who "don't care about dress" also will say that they have negative perceptions of people turning up in a suit for a programming job.

They care about dress, they just want people to conform to a very casual dress code. Which would be fine, if they admitted to it. Instead, they say they "don't care about dress".

If there's no connection, then why does it matter how the other person dresses? They're an employee. Unless you're hiring them to hire everyone else, in which case it may matter because you need their judgement to match yours.

While there are many points in your post that I agree with, we really should stop worrying about how people dress.

If it's a developer sitting behind a computer screen all day long with zero customer contact whatsoever, he really shouldn't be forced to wear a certain dress code just to satisfy someone's standard of professionalism. Such feelings are in similar spirit as "woman should not wear trousers" a few decades ago - there is just no rationale behind it other than conditioning by society.

That puts into words my vaguely-formed concept of why I defiantly wear dress pants and expensive shirts (+ suit and tie for interviews) even when working at a tech startup with 20-somethings in (carefully chosen) worn jeans and t-shirts.

If clothes don't matter, why am I being judged because I value aesthetics, not excluding the clothes I wear?

I´m a developer and I´ve been atempting to code better for the last few decades. ( Never got me unemployed/bad employed, by the way )

"For a group of people constantly trying for improving development ability, I’m surprised more aren’t trying to develop their dress."

Maybe they´re to busy with the kernel to mind the shell. I´m glad inteligence gave some people power to chalenge traditions, prejudices, judgments...

"You are building the future, so dress like it." Suits are the future ? Silly me, I always thought they´ve been around for a loooong time. Maybe the future will be more about substance than appearance. Maybe the future will be about respect for diversity. Maybe some people are just afraid of change. Maybe having to really conect with somebody else for what he/she IS and not the uniform he/she wears is too frightening.

I´m not religious but I think Christ said something about the big bosses of the time looking like tombs: very fancy on the outside, rotten on the inside. It´s somewhere in the bible.

Ah, last but not least, being comfortable makes my mind really free to go. Probably releases some neurons to more pleasant/significant/important tasks.

I´m a developer and I´ve been atempting to code better for the last few decades. ( Never got me unemployed/bad employed, by the way )

"For a group of people constantly trying for improving development ability, I’m surprised more aren’t trying to develop their dress."

Maybe they´re to busy with the kernel to mind the shell. I´m glad inteligence gave some people power to chalenge traditions, prejudices, judgments...

"You are building the future, so dress like it." Suits are the future ? Silly me, I always thought they´ve been around for a loooong time. Maybe the future will be more about substance than appearance. Maybe the future will be about respect for diversity. Maybe some people are just afraid of change. Maybe having to really conect with somebody else for what he/she IS and not the uniform he/she wears is too frightening.

I´m not religious but I think Christ said something about the big bosses of the time looking like tombs: very fancy on the outside, rotten on the inside. It´s somewhere in the bible.

Ah, last but not least, being comfortable makes my mind really free to go. Probably releases some neurons to more pleasant/significant/important tasks.

really? In business, politics and law, we tolerate a lot of manipulative, egotistical assholes. why shouldn't the nerds get a break on some things, too? If I can save 20 minutes in the morning by throwing on jeans and a T shirt and not messing with my hair, really, what's the problem with that? why should I waste time/money on dressing nicely?

Really, I think the fact that nerds aren't held to the same level of 'professional appearance' as others of the same pay grade is that manipulating others, generally speaking, isn't our job.

The fact of the matter is, how someone dresses is simply not a good indicator of honesty, skill, or anything else you might actually care about.

I know my first impression, when I see someone in a suit, is "who is he trying to impress? and why can't he do it with his skills, rather than his appearance?"

> Or, put simply, spend a couple of hours and $200 on cloths to look the part.

Assembling a $200 wardrobe tailored to appeal to the innate biases of someone hiring based on the clothes you wear is not low cost, low friction, or even representative of many audiences for the kinds of software people write. Also, that you tie looking appropriate to spending a bunch of money on clothes is laughable and goes against startup culture in the first place (when you have little or no money, you mend and thrift your clothes).

> What, exactly, do you think would happen to a 24 year old hotshot banker who goes to an interview at, say, Goldman Sachs wearing Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt?

If your company is aspiring to the Goldman Sachs culture, I will never apply to or do business with it or you.

You can get a suit off the rack for $200 and have it tailored at the time of purchase for maybe $20. Your mileage may vary, but that doesn’t smell like luxury at all to me. It sounds like a reasonable thing to own for people in office jobs. It is de rigueur in many parts of the world, including certain software engineering jobs in the US.

The suit will last longer than your $500 phone, too.

> Wearing a bad suit is embarrassing, and people at the upper echelons of the company almost always have better suits. It is a smell of class.

It doesn’t take much effort or cash to escape from “bad suit” category. I don’t begrudge people wearing better suits, it’s just one of a million ways people use to suss out money or class. Wearing a suit doesn’t make you more of a participant in class warfare than you already are.

Some people also use the suit to escape racial profiling. A white dude can get away with wearing a hoodie and jeans to work, but even though it’s acceptable at work, darker-skinned folk can run into problems with the hoodie-and-jeans outfit on their way to and from the office. Now, you can lay blame for those problems how you like, but think of the suit and tie as:

    // FIXME: Temporary, remove suit when problems
    // with racial profiling are addressed.

Dressing cheaply also saves money. But it's a mistake for one's career. Wearing clothes that are a cut more expensive than your peers and competitors is a good investment in your future.

People adamantly deny that they're so shallow as to be affected by this, but I've seen it happen too often to discount it.

Back in my Zortech days, we decided on a policy that our employees would wear a suit whenever meeting customers. We even paid for the suits. Initially, there was a lot of grumbling about it. But it paid off. Our customers loved it, because they were sick of seeing software people dressed like slobs. For many of our employees, it was their first suit, and they loved the effect it had on their interactions.

This annoys me. The 'dev-uniform' of t-shirt, jeans and sneakers is just as constraining as the 'business-uniform' of suits and button downs.

You rarely wear one, they are not necessarily expensive, and they are not inconvenient.

Basically, there is nothing inherently better about jeans and a t-shirt, and nothing inherently bad about suits or anything else that isn't in either category. The key is to not expect others to comply to your weird ideas about dress code and let everyone express themselves without stereotyping them.

In fact it's become an anti-signal in software; people look at you funny. I actually failed an interview once because I wore a suit.

Things aren't quite as loose as you seem to think. If you want to see where the boundaries are, start gradually dressing more and more informally, and note when you start drawing criticism from your manager and senior coworkers. I expect you'll get more attention than you want if you were to come to work shirtless, say.

Tailored suit? Seriously? Does that not smell like luxury? Why is that part of the discussion for workplace uniform?

A college student wearing a hoodie given for free by TripleByte doesn't look bad at the world's largest software firm. If you wear a t-shirt I cannot tell if you graduated from Stanford. But if you're a young man aiming for the Big 5 accounting world, your friends would advise you to own a battle wardrobe.

Wearing a bad suit is embarrassing, and people at the upper echelons of the company almost always have better suits. It is a smell of class.

Holy cow, I follow exactly that principle but never realized it until you put it into words. My office is super casual, but I'm always wearing at least neat jeans and usually a button-down shirt. It feels right even though it's not necessary -- and you finally put my finger on why, that dressing up for work creates separation and room to dress down when not at work.

I grew up with the same thoughts and just didn't care about dress. Only when studying psychology did I realize why we judge a book by its cover, and have begun trying to incorporate this into my daily life enough to be a better fit in normal society. The problem is that now, since I had to view this from such a technical point of view, as this is something that I don't just 'get' like most people, I am viewed as manipulative by others. Of course, pointing out that they dress to manipulate the opinions of others, just without needing to put as much thought into it because it is something they 'get' doesn't help.

I dunno about that. When I see someone who's wearing decent clothes, I still think, 'wow, that's someone who wants to look good.'

But I think that I'm a bit weird — I actually enjoy dressing differently for different occasions: it helps me get into the right headspace. Programming while wearing hiking clothes would make as much sense to me as hiking in a tuxedo.

I won't deny that dressing up is a social advantage, but sometimes people care about some things more than strictly getting ahead. It's entirely possible that an individual could place more value on being comforatble than on getting that raise or promotion.

How about basic hygiene? Is that a no-no, too? "She is clean and doesn't smell. Must be covering for her incompetence." /s

I feel perfectly comfortable working in a T, jeans and sandals, and I pretty much wore a shalvar-jaaf (Kurdish pants) my entire graduate years, but if I am to meet anyone initially in a professional context I will wear a suite (fully aware of the reactionary views of the sub-set that apparently is so focused on surface matters that they would ignore technical competence and make decisions based on the fact that one wore a suite to, say, an interview.)