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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.
Decades ago, at Texas Instruments in Dallas, one of my colleagues was almost fired for wearing shorts in the middle of summer on a Saturday. After that incident, the dress code was changed to allow more casual dress outside normal working hours.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Basically, a way to get people to leave, without going through the trouble of laying them off or providing severance. The often overlooked part of this is of course that good people leave first, and mouth breathers and managers of all sorts hang on for dear life since they are unemployable elsewhere.
Who cares?
I care. A dress code sends a message about a company's culture. The stricter the code, the more that company cares about having a professional appearance, and less about professional performance.
Perhaps they're also looking for ways to annoy enough people into quitting so that they don't have the pay out any severance when the next round of layoffs starts. This seems like something that would push a few people over the edge, though I suspect it might be some of their better workers. Then again, the current suit only cares long enough to hit some bonuses based on poorly chosen metrics in order to cash out with a golden parachute while the company collapses.
Normally you reserve good attire when there is client contact. Having formal attire for technician and engineer when there is no client contact is contra productive, you force people into a certain fashion which they might be uncomfortable with, for no good reason. That is a sure sign a hierarchy has lost sight of what is essential , and instead concentrate on rules which makes no sense , as to show they are doing "something". I expect no good future strategy from them from now onward.
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as long as shorts are banned
At my company, we require shorts and tank tops during the summer months. If you violate the dress code by wearing long pants or sleeves, then you are not allowed to complain about the AC temperature setting. It is currently set to 78F (26C).
Well, this shirt:
I don't care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet your shirt is sexist and ostracizing
generated a shitstorm on the internet. So possibly HP management is feeling a bit gunshy. Nothing like nasty, screaming little facists trying to ruin your career over the irrelevant to ruin your day. Or week. Or month. Or even your career.
This.
First pulling people back into the office after some have been telecommuting for years, often as HP's facilities have shrunk in most places - they are now expected to make the drive or relocate, regardless of the distance.
Our team has exactly 4 people in this state, and two of them will absolutely HAVE to quit if not given exemptions (which seems unlikely), and another will probably be gone by the end of the year.
They are effectively putting additional costs onto their employees, and want them to quit. Sadly, this (downright evil) tactic usually results in your best people leaving... and finding out that HP doesn't even pay engineers 75% of what their competitors do in the same geographical areas.
All that remains are the employees who either lack the confidence in their skills to feel that they are employable elsewhere... or those employees who lack the skills.
I don't think Meg has thought her cunning little plan all the way through.
I think it much more likely that they are wanting to trim some fat off of their employment expenses, and doing this is a quick and easy way to get some people to voluntarily quit without looking too conspicuously like constructive dismissal.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Fascists go around killing people they disagree with - they didn't just exercise rambling freedom of speech on the Internet.
And this guy's day might have been spoiled, but his week/month/career are fine. He's still one of the most employable people on the planet with a brilliant career behind and ahead of him, should he choose it.
I didn't even see much of a problem with the shirt, but I found the kneejerk reaction from BOTH sides a disappointing indictment on human reasoning ability, or rather a sound demonstration of the desire for anyone in the sidelines to jump on a bandwagon to further their politics. In fact, his reaction was way more humble than that of any commentators: he said he didn't want to hurt anyone, because he seems like a nice chap, and then he carried on with his job.
On my first two commercial jobs (an aerospace giant, then IT in a California retail chain) it was still suits, ties and white shirts for all.
What did the women wear, you ask? What women?
I started buying 5.11 tactical pants made out of lightweight, stretchy nylon with a Teflon finish. They look like business casual pants but move like pajamas, and anything you spill on them rolls or wipes off. I don't think I've worn any other kinds of pants to work since I bought my first pair.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I work for HP in RnD; I haven't gotten this memo. Reading the fine article and giving some of my (anonymous) experience however....
1) This seems to apply to only the services organization. That is, the digested remains of EDS. That arm of the company was bought originally because it had serious problems and hence could be acquired cheap and then fixed up. This is just yet another step in fixing it up (although, dress code doesn't seem that important; perhaps there are some serious professionalism issues in some parts?). There's also (I see reported in the news) yet more layoffs coming in that division; the rest of the company yawns when that is announced.
Per dress codes....
2) We had an "important visitor" this week.... so I dressed up a bit. I made sure that I had a clean pair of jeans, and wore a button-down dress shirt. With the buttons undone, my sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and I'm not 100% sure my tennis shoes didn't have holes, but I didn't wear the falling-apart pair. It was hot this week so I slacked on the dress shirt for some of the days, but I made sure it was a solid-color t-shirt without any logo or graphics. Not one fuck was given about how I dressed; I calibrated my dress to the level of importance, and it was fine.
3) There was only 1 case I know of regarding someone getting flack for under-dressing. One co-worker was told in the peer-review (and I was one of the people who told him this) that you should make sure that your t-shirt doesn't have massive holes when you know you're going to present in front of C-suite executives. We didn't say that t-shirts were verboten... just to please make sure that they're not in tatters. He bought a few polo shirts and a chucked the most "holiest" of his previous ones, and everything continued on just fine.
3) Previously my manager would regularly come in to work dressed much more shabbily than me. Seeing him wander around barefoot (not just sandals, but flat-out barefoot) in raggy shorts with a tie-died t-shirt wasn't uncommon. You could always tell if there was a customer visit, though; he'd be sporting khakis and a polo then. If he looked like a beach-bum, you knew that there weren't any customers around.
4) One day my manager got promoted to director level, and his biggest complaint was that he had to buy a suit. That is, although for day-to-day anything went, if we were meeting a customer, everyone knew we had to dress the part. A director had to wear a suit to certain meetings; so he sucked it up and got one. One of the other directors didn't like dressing up so much, but kept a suit in his cube just in case--he could have a t-shirt and jeans on most of the time, and if needed it took him 10 minutes to slip into the more formal clothes.
EDS (aka HP Services) has issues; the rest of the company is sensible. Show up in inappropriate clothes for the task at hand, and you'll get a polite suggestion that maybe you should up your wardrobe. Show up dressed like a homeless person when there aren't any big-wigs around, and nobody really cares.
The second happens when people join, typically fresh out of school, and never build their skills, always kind of hanging on in the fringe. It's quite easy in a large company like HP, too... it's harder to fire the same guy you wouldn't hire,so to speak.
A recent "Town Hall" had an executive telling us all that a manager would re-evaluate the positions that were left by personnel quitting (imagine that), including who they'd hire in that spot.
He also expected us to report to offices, even if there was no space, because engineers love to work off of 15" laptop screens, on laptop keyboards, while sitting on a bench at a cafeteria table (yes, he said we should make the "up to 95 mile" drive even if it means working in the cafeteria) as others wander around, eating and talking. The ultimate open office space.
So when a manager has to fire a direct report, it's a tough proposition... fire a warm body and possibly lose the spot outright, or let them hang in and keep your manpower up enough to keep your own job? They know these guys are borderline, but a big company is a machine unto itself.
If they do fire anybody... it usually ends up being based solely on salary and location, based on what I saw this past week - they WFRed a bunch of guys who were responsible for millions of lines of good, solid code. Tested, true libraries that have run for ages in hundreds of thousands of PCs.... people tossed aside on a whim from on higher up than the managers they report to. Why? Because again, a big company is a machine unto itself... often the actions of execs and the upper management is pure quackery, because they can be just as clueless as anybody else in an organization; it's also a bit worse, because it's a club of privileged people who protect each other from personal failure, even at the expense of the companies they run.
Well, technically we do have a dress code. You are required to wear pants. Or skirts if you prefer. And it is mandatory to wear it in such a way that it covers your genitals and buttocks. You are encouraged to wear something covering your torso. It would be nice if this had at least something that could resemble sleeves, however short they may be. And shoes would be encouraged but more out of comfort than necessity.
It is a bit more strict if you're in direct contact with the customer, granted. And no, we're not some hip little start up. We're a medium sized bank with a few centuries of tradition behind it and a rather conservative customer stock. But we're IT security. We don't get into contact with the customer. Why the fuck should we give a shit how someone dresses as long as it's clean and doesn't show me some part of his/her anatomy that should better stay concealed?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This makes me laugh.
Years ago, I worked for a company in Mesa, Arizona. It's damned hot in that area, especially in the summer.
When the company tackled the thorny issue of dress codes, they wanted a unisex dress code--no double standards. The dress code ended up being, "You must be covered from shoulders to a little above the knee in clothing of good repair." Open toed shoes were okay, but no flip-flops.
That was it. No ripped jeans. No tube tops or spaghetti straps.
That said, there were some people who could just not handle hairy men's legs and, I'm told, argued vehemently against men wearing shorts. The head of HR basically said that whatever standards are there for women should also be there for men. If you want to wear skirts, you need to let men show their legs, too.
There were two other interesting things they did. One, they hung a sign in the lobby that said "This company supports a casual dress code." So you wouldn't wonder why people were wandering around in shorts. The other rule was that there were times--maybe once or twice a year--when it might be necessary to, shall we say, "dress to impress." When this happened, you would be notified by your manager--and it was up to your manager to do this and verify that you got the message--more than 24 hours before this would happen. If you were not notified and showed up dressed unimpressively, your manager was the one who caught the heat.
With regard to IBM, having met one of their highly-paid technical consulting teams, I know what their problem is: Incompetence coupled with arrogance and no social graces. They also failed to solve their task for 3 years, when something similar took me a year to get to run reliably. Them being IBM, they actually got paid more for failing repeatedly, so at the moment the incompetence still works out for them, but eventually the customers will not be willing to pay a fortune for trash.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.