Silicon Valley has a dress code

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/silicon-valley-has-dress-code-you-better-believe-it

by Varcht • 12 years ago

64 77 12 years ago

slvv2• 12 years ago

I'd love to hear whether there are equivalent trends among women in the field, or what the challenges of dressing to be taken seriously as a woman in the valley are.

Varcht• 12 years ago

I'd find that interesting too. I was kind of shocked to see the majority of comments on tfa to be attacking the author for not doing that. To me it seems like it would be much more civil and productive to nicely request a follow up on women's fashion or (horrors) write it themselves.

seanhandley• 12 years ago

Agreed - the response was rather rabid.

Frankly, men are easy to taxonomise into dressing habits. Female fashion is much more diverse!

jamesdutc3• 12 years ago

Not at all surprised.

I work in NYC, and the last time few times I was out in SV to speak at conferences and such, I was attired in my standard suit & tie. (I'm the guy with the dopey photo and name-in-bold on http://nycpython.org/ which I run.)

This ends up working to my advantage. No one expects the guy in the suit to go up on stage and show off a Tweetable FFT in Python or give an in-depth talk on CPython internals.

hnriot2• 12 years ago

Tweetable FFT in Python

haha! obviously if all you're doing is calling the np.fft package it would fit in 140 chars, but this is the same false argument that people make all the time, "5 line web server" etc.

vhffm• 12 years ago

Only tangentially relevant, but he may be referencing this tweet:

https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/399982619242156032

noinsight• 12 years ago

On that site it says you've attended PyCon Finland. What was it like, any good? (Obviously, I'm from Finland and I'm curious about what you think of the Python scene in Finland, I don't hear about Python much generally.)

jamesdutc3• 12 years ago

PyCon Finland was great! http://fi.pycon.org/2013/

I believe it was the first time they held the event; everything was well-organised and went smoothly. I gave my Generators talk, which went over pretty well.

I met a lot of really cool Python programmers, and I'm looking forward to attending and speaking if they hold it again this year!

(By the way, swing by #python.fi on IRCNet!)

miohtama• 12 years ago

Checkout:

http://www.meetup.com/HelPy-meetups/

http://python.fi/

https://twitter.com/pythonfinland

https://www.facebook.com/python.fi

And because this is Finland come to #python.fi at IRCNet.

We have had 100-150 PyCon attendees during the last two years. Meetups in Helsinki have 20-30 attendees.

Disclaimer: I am one of the organizers.

pbreit• 12 years ago

Article doesn't support the headline very strongly.

steffan4• 12 years ago

Besides the obvious omissions of women, it's always hard for me to take an article seriously when there are obvious spelling errors.

overgard5• 12 years ago

Oh jesus, not this. If you included the subtleties of women's fashion you'd make the article about 4x longer. There's just way more going on there.

steffan4• 12 years ago

I'm not trying to white-knight here. I know plenty of women engineers that fall into those categories as well - engineer/hoodie, sales/suit, etc. Would it be that hard in the Bay Area to find a woman engineer in jeans and a hoodie?

It doesn't require an in-depth analysis of the entire breadth of womens' fashion to imply that yes, there are women engineers, and yes, a lot of them dress exactly like the men.

wyclif• 12 years ago

Agreed. I thought, "Great, more political correctness juking on HN, exactly what it needs." What percentage of VCs, engineers, and coders are men again? To write an article like this isn't sexist. It's describing fashion for 90+% of the field as it exists now.

overgard5• 12 years ago

More proof that refusing to make a fashion statement is just as much of a statement as wearing something bold.

(I'm not some crazy fashion person, I just think it's funny the way nerd culture shuns those that actually try)

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

I don't see anybody in that story refusing to make a fashion statement, quite the opposite.

This is especially true for "nerd culture". Very few subcultures are less tolerant of people dressing differently.

klipt3• 12 years ago

Very few subcultures are less tolerant of people dressing differently.

Are you saying nerds are intolerant, or did you mean few cultures are more tolerant?

benched• 12 years ago

It's less of a statement. I put no thought into what I wear. If that's making a statement, I think it's a weak one.

jleader• 12 years ago

The statement is "my skills are more important than how I look".

tikhonj• 12 years ago

No, there is still no dress code. Sure, there are trends and there is fashion, but it's all optional! Most programmers dress like other programmers, most designers dress like other designers and so on because most people dress like other people. It's just easier, and that's how fashion works.

But you don't have to!

There is no actual dress code. There are no actual rules¹. And most people in the industry won't look down at you for dressing differently (except maybe subconsciously). And people take advantage of this: I know plenty of engineers who wear button-down shirts, nice sweaters and blazers because the can--not everybody goes for jeans and a t-shirt.

What people actually wear is not important. The dress code--or the lack thereof--is only important because it illustrates a deep principle that I think is very important to the SV culture: departing from petty rules and embracing as much individual freedom as possible.

After all, individual freedom includes the freedom to conform! It's the freedom that's actually important, not what people do with it.

¹ Well, there are some ground rules--you can't just walk around naked all of the time--but they're very limited.

overgard5• 12 years ago

Just for fun, try wearing a suit to a programming job. Nothing ostentatious, just a well fitted medium priced conservative suit. You'll quickly learn there isn't an explicit code, but there is certainly an implicit one. You'll get about the same reaction as if you wore parachute pants with a neon shirt.

mikeash2• 12 years ago

There seem to be a lot of people who think that "you must wear a suit" is a dress code, but "you can't wear a suit" is not. I assume it comes down to never considering that someone might ever wear a suit voluntarily, so thinking that forbidding it has no actual effect.

Helianthus• 12 years ago

There's trying to cross trends for other people (your example) and trying to cross trends in order to find your own niche within expectations. Witness all of the not-quite-fits in the examples the author found.

I think you'd find that an amicable suit-wearing programmer could easily do well at an interview.

tomhallett• 12 years ago

I'm a ruby engineer and I was applying for a job at a 30+ employee startup in Brooklyn. I wore a nice grey pinstripe suit for the interview - nothing crazy, just a classic looking suit. When I got declined, I asked for feedback and he said "Well, some people thought you were here todo our taxes" and "You just aren't the right fit". Haha.

choult2• 12 years ago

If I wore a suit today, out of the blue, I would get a dozen people ask me if I was going to a job interview...

blueskin_4• 12 years ago

I think many people would get less reaction with the latter.

lmm2• 12 years ago

I've seen people do it. You'll get a few "witty" comments, but you're not going to get a talking-to from your manager like when you violate an actual dress code.

throwaway092834• 12 years ago

We have a few people who wear suits, or nice dress shirts and slacks. It's just not a big deal. No one cares.

platinum1• 12 years ago

Where I work, my group has instituted "Fancy Fridays" where people wear bow ties, suits, button down shirts, etc. It's not mandatory (participation is maybe 20%), and no one from other teams really notices or cares. One of our RF engineers and one of our PMs likes designer clothes, but most don't. One software engineer dresses like a pirate (seriously). Tie-dye is somewhat popular. And of course, T-shirts and hoodies are common.

I've also interviewed many people wearing a wide variety of clothing, and no one cares about that either. If we judged interviews based on what people wore, drove, ate, etc. we'd never get any competent engineers. A good culture fit means they interested in technology and our product, not that they fit some (in my experience false) stereotype.

As for your test, if there is a big change in how you dress (in any way) after people know you, it will garner notice.

YokoZar• 12 years ago

Most industries that have "dress codes" don't actually formalize it either. There's nothing that forces lawyers to wear suits and ties other than a belief that you would look weird to other lawyers and the public if you didn't have one. That's exactly the same sort of force at play here.

limelight• 12 years ago

Right, so both industries have dress codes and programmers don't really have much more choice in what to wear than lawyers.

justincormack• 12 years ago

I think many do, or people who deviate are told by managers. Certainly the case in the UK.

mrxd• 12 years ago

Well, there are some ground rules…

A while back I noticed some people use this phrase "ground rules" to talk about rules without making them seem so rule-like. Another one is "rules of the road". Thank you for demonstrating this phenomenon.

tzs• 12 years ago

Well, there are some ground rules--you can't just walk around naked all of the time [...]

That "all of the time" part is interesting. Are there many places where it is OK to walk around naked some of the time?

jmduke• 12 years ago

As a general rule of thumb: judgmental people exist regardless of hobby, profession, or city of residence. Software people aren't some mystical species immune to bad personality traits, but I'm confident that the majority (if not the vast majority) of them won't particularly care what you're wearing as long as you're not an asshole.

I'm not in Silicon Valley, but in Seattle, and I don't dress the part of an engineer -- lots of Ralph Lauren button downs and 511s -- and yet nobody has revoked my license to write code yet. Wear what you want to wear.

cromwellian• 12 years ago

I wear collared pull-over shirts and shorts with sandals practically everyday except when very cold. I don't own a single pair of jeans, when I need pants, I wear business casual.

Among Googlers I don't think the t-shirt + jeans model fits engineers. I think it correlates more with what state your office is in and what your age is.

jinushaun• 12 years ago

So true. I got so tired of dressing down all the time that I actually dress up instead. No one suspects I'm a programmer when I do.

tomkinson• 12 years ago

Silly.

crapshoot101• 12 years ago

To this day, one of my greatest fish out of water experience is walking through the Mission in a suit and tie on my way to a formal dinner - I think I would have been less conspicuous if naked.

spaceborn• 12 years ago

Good god, the comments on this article. You'd think the author went deliberately out of her way to not photograph women, and that she did so as a personal affront to the commenters.

stefan_kendall3• 12 years ago

A convenience sample is going to exclude women when you're targeting entrepreneurs, VCs, and engineers in the wild.

It could also be that the author was just less intimidated by approaching men than women.

I would feel awkward walking up to strange women and asking them if I could photograph them for an article I was writing.

Maybe the article should be titled "Men's fashion in Silicon Valley", which would be more accurate.

te_chris• 12 years ago

The author reads (or maybe doesn't know enough about clothes/fit) too much into the engineers choices: you can normally tell by awful fit of the clothes on people who just aren't that into fashion and don't need to be outwardly presentable. It's not that difficult and hardly a general rule, but anecdotally if the clothes don't fit that well then likely an engineer.

To the author: read a few fashion blogs (hell even complex) and compare to your photos, those who had to be presentable were in clothes that fitted nicely.

slvv2• 12 years ago

It looks like the author has added a short piece explaining why she didn't cover women. I'm not really sure why she wouldn't have just included the one or two relevant sentences here in her original article.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/why-no-women-story-si...

Silicon Valley has a dress code

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