Slashdot Mirror
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?
"HP was once known as a research ant technology giant..."
I hear ant technology is the wave of the future!
~Liberalism Is A Mental Disorder~
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.
This seems like a logical step to encourage an atmosphere of professionalism in which HP's remaining employees can train their H1B replacements.
At least partially silly but I do understand some of the banned items like baseball caps (or any other head wear like hoodies) as they are totally impolite to be worn indoors.
POV, even in US.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
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.
Indeed, the people who work in R&D should be forced to wear the white lab coat, i.e. "R&D Casual".
WTF is "business casual" anyway? A business suit with a funny tie?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
... 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
... strutting around in their low cut shirts and bare midriffs... And do we really need to see your tramp stamps?
In other news, Jerry that keeps showing up to work in his S&M gimp suit will switch to a more work appropriate polo shirt. Thanks for ruining it for everyone Jerry... you jackass.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I care about the quality of your hardware and software, not about what your engineers are wearing. Or, for the "anonymous reader" and the understandably anonymous Dice editors, "waring".
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!?
.
The divisions that were left behind when Agilent was spun off were Just Another Company, with nothing special to speak of.
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.
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.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Picture this at a management meeting:
"Our stock is at an all-time low, profits are down, moral is gone, all our good engineers have left. What are we gonna do?"
"I know! We'll ban casual dress, that'll solve the issues."
(Boss) "That's brilliant! Raises for everyone!"
__
Something like that perhaps? H and P must be spinning in their graves...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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).
WTF is "business casual" anyway?
Collared shirt. Long pants that are not jeans or cargo. Shoes that are not sandals or athletic (running, tennis, hiking, etc.) shoes. Socks.
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)
With fertilizer like that, I'm sure their lawns are looking great in spite of the drought. On a scale of 1 to 10 on the shittitude meter, that's probably like a 12 or 13.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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 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'
First off the article linked was poorly written. It is only their professional services arm that has these new restrictions. R&D does not. Secondly who cares? I prefer business casual over some of the other forms of outfits that you can wear. Yes I can wear sneakers (trainers) and they might be very comfortable, but I buy an $80 pair of shoes, wear them every day, and they last 5 years. That is not all that expensive. Khaki's are lighter than Denim Jeans .. so I prefer them. Hey, less ball sweat. $40 a pair (you need five). I have light button down shirts that I wear over my under shirt and have never had a problem of being hot, or feeling constrained. Again, spend $40 on each shirt and you will only have to replace them if you get fat (or skinny) or after like 5 years. So lets see. $500 for 5 years worth of NICE clothes you can wear anywhere (church, wedding, christmas dinner, etc.) and you are more comfortable than when you wear jeans and a polo.
Of course this is all subjective. My current job allows people to wear jeans instead of Khaki's. I told my boss that I will never wear jeans, but if he lets me wear shorts that will be a different story. I would prefer to wear shorts and a t-shirt, but it is work. Seriously. If you are customer facing, it is not hard to look nice and professional. If you are a back room guy - Who cares.
For those of you following along at home, they've corrected "sportsware" to "sportswear" in the summary. I guess someone does read the snarky comments.
That way you can't tell who's incompetent by just looking at who's dressed up anymore.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wearing a headpiece indoors is excusable only if your head looks really bad - from injury or disease.
Slippery slope here. What about yarmulkes? What about Sikhs wearing turbans? What about women wearing hijab, niqab,or burkas?
I'd probably wear a nice, not short skirt because that would be against the rules, but a nice mid length skirt.
Do you want kilts? Because that's how we get kilts.
You don't have to tell us, we can smell your company through our displays.
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.
Would it help if we shaved, and do you only hate male knees? What about unshaven female calves?
While we're at it can we enforce a strict BMI rule at the work place? I've never seen a fat person I prefer not to see.
Oh also brunets; Everyone should be blonde and blue eyed.
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.
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.
Don't hate on Kilts.
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.
While sweltering at an outdoor summer wedding wearing a jacket, pants and socks (!) I ended up in a conversation with a woman wearing some kind of sheer silk dress and sandals about how men don't understand the social pressure on women to appear a certain way. I told her I would love to wear what she was. She gave me this strange look and excused herself.
I don't think I ever showed up for a job wearing gym clothes. But jeans and comfortable short-sleeve polo type shirts, or even t-shirts in the summer months, and tennis-shoes? Definitely!
At one of my previous jobs, they hired a new woman in the H.R. department, and all of a sudden she decided she was going to enforce new dress codes. The word was, I.T. and software developers would no longer be allowed to wear jeans. Thankfully, our best Java developer was an ex-hippie who viewed this as an opportunity to get the whole team together and fight for a cause again. Within about a month, H.R. retracted the policy change, agreeing that jeans in "presentable condition" were part of an acceptable business casual dress code for the company.
Truthfully, I can't speak for the software devs. But as one of the support specialists - the ability to wear jeans and t-shirts was a huge benefit, as we were expected to crawl around on the floor to connect or disconnect cables and had to go out to an industrial shop floor regularly to swap out nasty, grimy old equipment or service it. It just didn't make sense to wear clothing you'd have to pay to get dry cleaned, or even khaki pants that would get torn too easily.
Even at my current job, I consider it a big perk of the job that they're pretty casual with the dress code. I don't own a lot of more formal clothing, so I'd have to lay out a lot of money to build my wardrobe of that stuff up again. And I'd pretty much never wear it except for the job requiring it -- so in that sense, I may as well be buying my own uniforms or something.
I will say, there are always people out there who don't seem to have any sense of what's appropriate to wear into a workplace. Especially in some of the help-desk environments I've seen, you've got people dressing like they're going out to a nightclub instead of to do technical support. And no, I don't think it's professional to wear beat up, raggedy clothes either. If you work I.T., I think t-shirts with advertising logos related to your industry are perfectly acceptable. (If you have that Microsoft, Intel Inside, Apple or HP promotional t-shirt - great.) But one advertising your favorite alcoholic beverage? Probably best to leave that at home.
There is a difference, and I do sincerely hope you know it, between dirty, stained rags and informal attire. Believe it or not, it's possible to wash jeans and t-shirts so they not only look but also smell nice.
As for your picture, you might notice that this is from a very different time. That's like complaining about the fashion of the 70s and questioning the sexual preference of the guys.
I have to agree.
One of the "You Have Arrived" indicators for success for a technical person in Silicon Valley is not having to wash your T-Shirts unless you want to keep them, because you are getting, on average, a new T-Shirt every day or so. It's a lot less that way these days, but you could, if you are sought after technically, go an entire month without doing laundry, and wear one to two T-shirts a day, with little effort to solicit shirts.
I had an intern in a button-down collar, at Google, engage me in the following conversation:
Intern: "Who's the old guy in the T-shirt"
Me: "Vint Cerf"
Intern: "Is he the token really old guy? Why do they keep him around?"
Me: "He invents things. He's a Distinguished Engineer."
Intern: (not hearing the Caps) "Like what?"
Me: "The Internet."
Intern: "Yeah, but what on the internet?"
Me: "That's it. He invented the Internet."
Intern: "You're shitting me!"
Me: "Someone had to. Do you really need me to explain who Vint Cerf is? Because if that's true, I'm willing to do the job, but you should probably 'us' it."
Intern: "What's 'us it' mean?"
Me "Google it."
Frankly I expected defibrillators would be involved at that point, but he recovered.
He moved to machine learning after that, but I think the lesson improved him.
If you like dress codes, you'll love Booz, Allen, Hamilton. Freshly pressed suits, at all times. If you're lucky, you might be allowed to take your jacket off after hours.
http://www.indeed.com/forum/cm...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere