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IT Workers Worst Dressed Employees
Poorly Dressed Anonymous Coward wrote to mention are article run in the Syndney Morning Herald saying that IT workers have been dubbed the worst dressed corporate employees. From the article: "Help-desk staff were named as the worst offenders, followed by those working in technology start-ups, many of whom had continued to wear T-shirts to work as a consequence of the casual web culture of the '90s. 'The internet is now such a massive industry but people haven't caught up in terms of their dress'."
I guess the real question is why do IT workers get that freedom when others don't? There's certainly lots of other positions in the world where appearance matters as little. Is it because we've successfully trained the world to diminish their clothing expectations of geeks?
I've lived in/near Seattle for the last 6 years, working in the tech industry, and I've regularly seen people come to work in sweats or wearing shorts in the dead of winter (and it gets cold up here - we're only a 3 hour drive from Canada). The most disconcerting thing, though, is the growing presence of fat guys in kilts.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Sure, why not? After all, we're the first to get "downsized", first to have our budgets cut- this despite the fact that IT workers have the highest attrition rate of virtually any other job category. We're often the only people in an entire company "required" to carry a pager. Our managers won't stick up for us, we work in a job which we're visible only when something is wrong (so no matter how good a job we do, the question is "why did this break in the first place). We spend all day listening to people whine and have little "chats" with the boss when we don't bed over far enough. We're the #1 excuse of why business doesn't get done ("oh, I didn't get that out for fedex by 6 because my laptop stopped working right before I was going to save it! Those IT people can't do anything right!").
Tell you what? Give me that salary review I was promised when I signed up. Give me a competitive wage even half that of the slick-haired assholes in sales, or the ditzy bleached bimbos in marketing. Take me out to lunch when the mail server crashes and I get everything back up and running in record time, yet again.
I'll be more than happy to dress nicer in return.
Please help metamoderate.
C'mon, it takes a lot of money to look good and to develop the style to know when you look good. People in tech support don't get paid enough money to look good.
Plus,...well,...their brains work differently.
It could be worse. Lip Shit Ralph Lauren forced the people working in his stores to buy the company clothes from his company at full retail cost. And then he paid them minimum wage plus a few points commission on what they sold. How's that for suck?
Plus how about filling some of the cubicles with beautiful young women? Tech support guys know that they are zeros and will most likely always be zeros. They realize that they will constantly have to be studying new technologies in order to remain employed at chump wages. They know that they will never have the social status that their counterparts in Bangalore and Chennai have with the general public. They know that they will be working for the rest of their lives in dead soulless drab cubicles. They know that the only difference between their lives and the lives of those who are serving (in USA the same verb is used for being in the military and being in prison) 20 years for killing record company lawyers is that they are less likely to be raped after 'work'. So they figure, why not where whatever I feel like wearing.
What difference does it make to anyone?
If you aren't the average size.
My relevent dimesions are 32, 36, and 36. Those are waist, inseam, and sleave length measured in inches. It is near impossible to find clothing that fits, even at big and tall shops. Actually, big and tall shops are much more consistant. They never carry anything that fits.
Long ago, I mostly gave up. I could find and buy short sleave shirts and jeans without major effort so that's what I wore. More recently, I am finding that I can't even find jeans without a multi day cross town search. After the last such search, I found two pairs at the largest of several GAP stores in my metro area. I bought them both. After I left the store, they once again had nothing in my size.
Some say the Internet is to blame. Brick and morter clothing shops think they can avoid the expense of carrying a full range of sizes but telling odd size people to buy online. Never mind that fit can not be verified through a web browser. Whatever the reason, it takes all the fun away. It is hard to get excited about fashion when even the basics are denied.
Quite honestly, I'm with everyone else here on this. [Of course, this is slash-dot.]
.. VERY nervous.
.. made sure to say 'Hi' to me, and [bluntly] I had a lot more 'package glances' from co-workers. Maybe I just look 'nicer' in an expensive suit (who doesn't ?!) but I think, in a professional environment where you interact with outside departments who *NEED* to dress nicely to deal with clients - it can help them feel more comfortable. Job advancement is mainly based on other people's perception of how you do your job. I've seen *AWESOME* coders get shafted again and again, but jr. guys who know how to play the game - get given better projects, raised, and recognition.
.. i mean .. 'look at them'.
:)
Dress doesn't matter in IT.
Several jobs ago, I was a sales-man. Selling toy soldiers. I wore suits, but when you were selling $10-$20k of product to a small independant retailer, you needed to make an impression.
I then worked for a cable giant, and was told to wear kakhi's and a polo to work. I did, there were a *LOT* of cute girls in that office, seemed easy to comply - especially with lunch dates in mind.
I left that job to go work for another fortune 500, where Jeans were expresly forbidden. I wore jeans every day. Once a director asked me [infront of a vp, and a department head] why i was allowed to wear jeans. This man, ironcally - the head of it/ecommerce, and 2 years later, my boss - was told by the VP of marketing : "Oh, thats cause he is one of those programmers, who wants to do all that math in a tie ?"
The two or three times I pulled an armani out of the closet (remember, i was in sales!) and wore them to work, I made people VERY
That being said, in a fortune 500 environment, I noticed that on the days I wore a $1500 suit, people stepped out of my way
Now I am the V.P. of IT at a smaller company, and all upper management actually tells me all the time to 'dress edgy' when I ask if I should wear a suit.
In the small co. / startup / under 50 million a year industry. Venture Caps *LIKE* to see the crazy IT guys, it provides them with an oddly inverted feeling of comfort - NO ONE who dresses like that could be hired by such a small company if they were not REALLY good at their job
Like it or not, we actually *HAVE* fostered the belief that good programmers really *don't* wear suits. And the tighter we hold on to that conviction, the more truth it gains
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Oh please. I try to dress neatly, even if I'm not dressed super nicely for work. But I have to say, as a female Systems Engineer who tries to be fashionable... it's inevitable that if I'm trying to break in my newest pair of heels, or wearing an expensive sweater or blouse, I'll have to head to the data center and deal with something. I've torn blouses on racks, bled on nice clothes, and also, rack grease doesn't come out of clothes... they don't pay me enough for that.
Also, have you ever had to crawl under a desk for cabling... in a skirt?? Yeah, it sucks, though I'm sure that employee had a nice view that day.
IT workers rarely deal with customers, though I try to look decent when I know I'll be meeting with vendors.
It's just not entirely reasonable to ask anyone in IT to dress up. We think on our feet, deal with hardware on the fly, and deal with various environments.