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HP R&D Starts Enforcing a Business Casual Dress Code
An anonymous reader writes: HP was once known as a research and technology giant, a company founded in a garage by a pair of engineers and dominated by researchers. Whilst a part of that lives on in Agilent any hope for the rest of the company has now died with the announcement that HP R&D will have to dress in business "smart casual" with T-shirts, baseball caps, short skirts, low cut dresses and sportswear all being banned.
Seriously, who gives a shit.
Who cares? Are that many geeks worn down by the brutal requirement to wear something slightly more formal than gym clothes?
I've yet to see a dress code policy that had any real impact on performance. Better to let people be comfortable than to push fashion on them.
Finding science on the matter is a crap shoot. There's support for both business casual and casual.
HP tried to step back in history today to more profitable and professional times, unfortunately reality refused to cooperate and they were still bleeding money like a sieve. Worse, their engineers were now leaving because they were pissed off by the dress code.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
... in severance packages. A hostile work environment will definitely reduce personnel.
Of course the smart people who have no problem finding another job will leave first.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
HP management is looking for scapegoat for their incompetence and has finally ran out of (other) scapegoats.
A sure sign of a company in trouble is when assholes at the top begins to blame people at the bottom for all the failings. I expect to see a lot of people shorting HP soon..
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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The divisions that were left behind when Agilent was spun off were Just Another Company, with nothing special to speak of.
I would wager that what happened was some executive who thinks he or she is too high and mighty to do something like... notify anybody AT ALL that they're bringing important people through... decided to talk up how professional and awesome their employees are and then bring them through, only to catch the overweight bearded guy wearing sandals in the middle of eating a messy burger. Of course the problem is that the guy was wearing sandals!
I've witnessed this multiple times. One executive told me about how he never knows in advance when investors are coming through. I asked if they just walk up and down our street and randomly poke their head into our place. The answer to that question was a suggestion that I should update my resume.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Do you only wear tshirts? Sounds like you are the redneck then. They'd wear normal shirts, you know like polo shirts and button down shirts. If an outfit is so casual you wouldn't wear it to a bar, why should you wear it to work? Even going to a dive bar, I wear pants not shorts, and a button down not a tshirt. Something like a plaid button down is very casual yet appropriate.
I learned two important lessons from one of my former bosses concerning dressing:
First: If you meet with a group of people, the least well dressed person is the one you're looking out for. It's either the tech or the decision maker. And both of them are important to you. The decision maker for obvious reasons, and the tech because he'll be the one asking the important questions and his reaction to your answers is also the important one, because he will later translate your answer to the managers. They can nod, ahh and ohh all they want to your answer, they don't understand it. It's the tech that will understand it and what he later conveys to his managers is what makes or breaks your contract. So that is the one person you need to convince.
And second, never trust a tech in a suit. Never. If you're in a customer meeting with someone who is allegedly a tech and he comes in dressed up like a manager, there's two possible reasons: First, he's not a tech but a sales goon who has been briefed by their tech, and he has been sent 'cause they fear their tech would tell us more truth about the product than they want him to. Or he is a tech and was forced to dress up to distract from the product being not able to stand on its own. If something needs a dolled up clown to sell it, it's not worth buying it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's something I never really understood. And it seems to be something that is actually pretty much an US thing. I don't see the same clinging to dress codes over here in Europe.
How the heck can it be important how someone dresses who is in no contact with customers? I can see the necessity of "professional" dressing when one has to do with customers. That's a given. You need to follow the rites of the human tribe. Dressing up in a similar way as the one you get into contact with makes him identify you as "one of his kind" and causes him to like you. He looks like me, so he's one of my tribe. That's deep in our ancestor's brain. That's why three piece suits are pretty much a necessity in management meetings because managers look at you and identify you as one of them if you're in the same three piece junk.
It's also, btw, the reason why techs don't like managers and why any tech dressing up as a manager immediately loses support with his peers. He's no longer "one of us". He's "one of them" now.
And no, I don't digress, actually, that's exactly the problem these things create. Because "business dress code" identifies a tech as "not one of us anymore". We not only don't want to wear that junk, we also don't like people wearing it. If anything, it alienates people.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
First of all, this fourth "wonder of the world" CEO needs to disassociate the name "HP" and "Hewlett-Packard" from the company. It's an insult to its founders.
R&D is typically closed doors to the public and should be for I.P. purposes.
If all the remains of HP has to tout in their R&D lab is how the engineers dress, that means there isn't much of substance to demonstrate the "wow effect" to outsiders. That says a lot about HP.
HP has undergone 16 years of cost cutting (and counting) and their product quality shows the effects of that short term goal (so managers can get their bonuses).
I will not buy another HP product. Frankly, their quality has become abysmal.