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.

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.

Don't know if that is just a joke, but one of the best places I ever worked people all wore suits, the systems were internal for a few high wealth people revolving around aviation.

Not pretentious, just looking as smart as you can. Same sort of logic as dressing up to go to the opera, I love to see gf in an evening dress, she likes me in black tie. I definitely look more dashing!

I should be wearing a suit now, but instead have my arm in a sling, so am in an injury friendly easy to dress casual t-shirt. No one objects (well aside my productivity drop due to one arm out of action).

Would you though? Because tailored suits are a casual hipster staple nowadays too. You can meet a guy with huge victorian mustache and beard and a fine suit and they're a graphic designer or something....

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.

Business suits are business wear, not formal wear, which is a whole different category of clothing. Formal wear being required in the office would be a very odd thing, indeed.

I don't think they make you look sharp. They're a uniform, stick a suit on and you're just another person dressed in grey or black. It doesn't exactly do anything interesting with the eye.

Now, granted, there are various cuts of suit, and different pockets, ways of making them roll the shoulders to make you look broader or... but I don't really find that a well made suit is dramatically more interesting than a poorly made suit.

Perhaps to other people it is, and then I could understand better why people would choose to wear them if given a choice. But to myself a well made suit's not really more interesting than a grey T-shirt and has additional social connotations of being subservient to whoever's enforcing the dress code at the time.

> People who say we should do away with the suit are arguing to do away with centuries of evolution in professional men's attire.

What's the selection pressure supposed to be? Cutlery serves an obvious function. It's not clear what desirable function suits serve.

It's because you haven't purchased fancy clothes that fit. There are probably some other constraints that produced this outcome (e.g., cost, availability), but I'm skeptical that optimizing for fanciness did it.

Was it a tailored suit by a designer brand? Alternatively, was it a fancy bespoke suit?

Suits usually don't set off my bullshit detector. Many legitimate hackers have had to wear them since the dawn of computing.

It's the details that catch my eye.

The money, priorities, and (most import of all!) time are in the details.

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.

If you're the only one wearing a suit, you look overdressed. It's as simple as that.

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.)

I've had very, very bad experiences with people who dress in suits. Indeed, the people who have had the most severe negative effects on my life have invariably worn suits. And I can't name many people I've had positive experiences with who ever wear suits.

Yet, somehow, I don't think that's what you had in mind when defending this nonsense.

You work in a building full of men who look ridiculous. They and their peers may not care, but many do. And what's the point of needlessly alienating others?

I think fashion and the disdain programmers have for it play a role in creating the popular misconception among non-programmers that skilled software people should be very cheap. Skilled professionals dress like skilled professionals. Look at doctors and lawyers. Deal with it or deal with the consequences.

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".

I don't understand why it matters what people wear as long as it's not offensive...

There’s a running joke in my circle about the “dad professional class”. People who are older (40-60s) and go to the office in a remote-work-accepting world mostly because they seem to want to leave their family at home. They all dress like shit in ill-fitting clothes, but because they’re older than the “office casual” dress code, they tend to dress in overly professional button downs and slacks. The business attire that look out of place in tech next to a 25yo in a tee shirt. They don’t seem to know people don’t always take them seriously, and think “they’re not here to [change the world/be the best/rise in the ranks/etc], they’re here to avoid their wife and collect a salary”.

TLDR: stop telling people you try to avoid your family, and start tailoring your clothes, it’s honestly not expensive.

To me, they have that connotation. Fashion doesn't tend to be that regular outside of close-knit groups, and even within those groups there are differences that those within can pick up on. You might think that Amish all dress alike, but they really don't. Similarly all suits look more or less alike to me, despite the fact that I'm sure if I spent a lot of time looking at suits I'd start to notice more refined differences.

To have such a narrow variation as suits tend to constitute, among a group of fairly diverse individuals... that implies to me that there's a power effectively forcing that distribution on the group.

> a t-shirt saying Hollister or Linux or some other corporate entity does.

I don't see the relevance, no-one has to wear those things so the connotation of subservience isn't there. I suppose coming off the point of the fella above this fork you could view it as submission to a group norm, but I think the connotation's different there - less about overtly oppressive dominance.

In any case, I don't wear that sort of thing - don't like writing on my clothes, if someone's advertising with my body I want to be paid for it. Prefer patterns and pictures and nice rich colours.

You haven't been anywhere near any sort of technology company in Seattle in the past 10 years, have you?