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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.
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'
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.
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.