It not totally superficial - a good haircut, shaved face, groomed nose hair, groomed ear hair, nice, clean ironed clothes and good shoes is signalling - it’s saying “All the little things have been dealt with and I have attention to detail - and I am also wise enough to acknowledge that this is signalling and I’m willing to play the game”

True, and it is easier to workout for a half hour everyday and buy a nice pair of clothes, than spend hours coding and pouring through tech docs, which also works into the signaling of 'I work smarter, not harder'.

OTOH, the actual engineers see through all the external signaling, which I've also discovered :) :P Or rather, the external signaling can work in the opposite direction with engineers.

At any rate, the big take away is it's ultimately about signaling one way or another, and knowledge about social signaling is probably most valuable for career advancement. Which can make a person cynical about the whole thing if one don't take such insight with moderation.

> OTOH, the actual engineers see through all the external signaling, which I've also discovered :) :P Or rather, the external signaling can work in the opposite direction with engineers.

I think it's important to disambiguate the two. People often believe themselves to be the former, when they have frequently fallen into the trap of the latter. Adopting counter-cultural signaling is not the same as being above signaling, but it's an easy thing to confuse.

Especially when confusing the two is a sop to the ego.

Yes, each social group has their own brand of social signaling, some defined by the social signaling of another group, even mutually so. Career minded ladder climbers try to disambiguate themselves from the worker bees, and visa versa.

The pragmatism of investing in the superficial to satisfy other people's expectations does not make it less superficial.

We waste an absurd amount of time fretting over image collectively for one reason: to satisfy each others need to judge things by their covers --IOW, to satisfy each others need to make flawed judgements.

It's wise for one person to care about their image, but not for a whole group of people to gatekeep the way we do based on aesthetics. The relevance of a suit and tie is self perpetuating, something like "I got hazed when I joined this fraternity, so the new recruits should get hazed, too."

It's an easy thing for a third party to check, easier than evaluating technical skill, and easy for a motivated person to fulfill. As such, it also serves as an easy filter that has a lot of false negatives, but probably fewer false positives than a non-subject matter expert trying to evaluate expertise.

It also signals consideration for other human beings, not expecting them to jump through a bunch of expertise evaluating hoops, but instead allowing them to rely a commonly agreed upon and decently useful signal. Consideration for others is yet one more important thing to signal.

It's circular to call that considerate. You're saying it's useful because people care, I'm saying people care about something useless.

You can apply the same logic to an obese person as chronically under-dressed/fashion-averse one: They ought to be considerate enough to show their attention to detail through managing their health better and careful calorie intake.

I stand by my point that it's a shortcoming of our culture that we give those signals (i.e. "t-shirts aren't very professional!") any weight at all.

I won't claim an inverse trend but I've worked with enough relatively-useless and very well dressed people that it's basically noise.

Judging appearances is useful as a very low level check, so I wouldn't say it is completely useless, though I agree it is over emphasized.