Tailored suit? Seriously? Does that not smell like luxury? Why is that part of the discussion for workplace uniform?

A college student wearing a hoodie given for free by TripleByte doesn't look bad at the world's largest software firm. If you wear a t-shirt I cannot tell if you graduated from Stanford. But if you're a young man aiming for the Big 5 accounting world, your friends would advise you to own a battle wardrobe.

Wearing a bad suit is embarrassing, and people at the upper echelons of the company almost always have better suits. It is a smell of class.

You can get a suit off the rack for $200 and have it tailored at the time of purchase for maybe $20. Your mileage may vary, but that doesn’t smell like luxury at all to me. It sounds like a reasonable thing to own for people in office jobs. It is de rigueur in many parts of the world, including certain software engineering jobs in the US.

The suit will last longer than your $500 phone, too.

> Wearing a bad suit is embarrassing, and people at the upper echelons of the company almost always have better suits. It is a smell of class.

It doesn’t take much effort or cash to escape from “bad suit” category. I don’t begrudge people wearing better suits, it’s just one of a million ways people use to suss out money or class. Wearing a suit doesn’t make you more of a participant in class warfare than you already are.

Some people also use the suit to escape racial profiling. A white dude can get away with wearing a hoodie and jeans to work, but even though it’s acceptable at work, darker-skinned folk can run into problems with the hoodie-and-jeans outfit on their way to and from the office. Now, you can lay blame for those problems how you like, but think of the suit and tie as:

    // FIXME: Temporary, remove suit when problems
    // with racial profiling are addressed.

Thus any symbol of class will always be a suit of armor for race in the way you describe, including Apple hardware. But the reason why Apple hardware is as much the same armor is because of thoughts around race and its connections to poverty, desperation, and crime.

You can wear Apple watch in and out of the office. But why shouldn't t-shirt be the status quo culture of the office? Because those who are judged by race need extra symbols of wealth to wear so they don't end up wronged? So let us band together and create sufficient distinctions of class so that those who make it out can show how they've made it out? How else do we know the Trayvon Martin from the thug?

Any response to this question shorter than a hundred pages is going to do a disservice.

Because you asked: Because people are judged unequally for wearing a T-shirt. Because this fails to delineate between work attire (and spaces, modes) and personal attire (spaces, modes). The delineation is important. Because attire communicates, among other things, what you think about the people around you, and I dislike the message sent by wearing a T-shirt. Because the T-shirt is a symbol of Silicon Valley technology culture, privilege, and entitlement which I reject.

This kind of communication is not denotative, but it is full of information and intent, and interpreted differently by different people. Yes, it also encodes class, but so does every other form of communication, and attire communicates so many other things.

Why is this that solid of a fact to you? If you had to imagine the best way to scale a workforce, and you were worried about artificial barriers, why is not the suit which reeks of gate-keeping? How is it the t-shirt, which just about every young American owns, the culprit of privilege and entitlement?

I agree that the signals of money or power is an armor against racial judgments about criminal risk. I just don't agree to sustaining the gate-keeping as the necessary moral price to pay. In fact, if this armor is to be depended on, then its quality depends on the degree of gatekeeping. We are after all saying it is problematic if there isn't a visible symbol to show you're not one of the bad ones.

Have you been to an office where the dress culture is divided into two? I find it happens even to startups the size of 30. When the executive business class meets together for lunch or causal conversations between the hours, the concentrated signal of high quality suit is really loud to me.

In such mixed dynamics I have found the suit to be the signal of executive power, and the same to be true when the company is large enough for in-house legal. That is why I question why you are so confident that it's the t-shirt that's so elite.

In such mixed dynamics, you're never going to find it's the programmers who wear suits and the executive class look like young teenagers in hoodies. Who has the power here?

It’s not.

> That is why I question why you are so confident that it's the t-shirt that's so elite.

I don’t say that, at least not in that sense.

> In such mixed dynamics, you're never going to find it's the programmers who wear suits and the executive class look like young teenagers in hoodies. Who has the power here?

This conversation loses too much insight when we flatten things down into a single more power / less power dimension.

I will say that the programmers I see wearing T-shirts are earning $100k+, and they can work remotely, have a flexible schedule, and often ditch meetings which they don’t feel like attending. They go to a café and order coffee from a barista who wears a uniform and may not dye their hair an “unnatural” color, who earns $25k and doesn’t learn their work schedule until the last minute.

The suit, at least, if you wear it every day, can communicate “this is kind of uncomfortable and ridiculous, and as soon as permissible, I will take it off.” I can understand why some people would see it as a conceit, at the same time, to the people who must wear suits, it is generally annoying or inconvenient more than anything else.

> In such mixed dynamics, you're never going to find it's the programmers who wear suits and the executive class look like young teenagers in hoodies. Who has the power here?

“Never” is certainly too strong an assertion here, I’m going to interpret it as hyperbole because there are plenty of exceptions.

Some alternative comparisons that are very informative are to compare different departments within an institution. In tech companies, take a tour of where the developers sit, the QA department (if it’s not contracted out!), customer support, sales, marketing, communications, and HR.

There are also strong regional differences at play here. West coast casual attire is fairly unusual even compared to other parts of the US.

So I’ve come to have a pretty dark opinion of the T-shirt dress code. To me, it symbolizes the entitlement of the west-coast tech elite.

2. Right. Luxury bad. Class bad. But what you are wearing has no bearing on your skills. Even if you are wearing a suit.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/05/suits-and-ties-now-optional-...

Also, you have too much faith in programmers being able to eyeball the quality of a suit.