
Ask HN: Has anyone been fired for not wearing a suit and tie? - jmilinion
For the old timers here, what was is it like in the suit and tie culture of the past?  Do you know or have you been fired for choosing not to wear one?<p>Any stories of employees firing their best employees or passing over a really great candidate because they refused to follow dress code?
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lutusp
> For the old timers here, what was is it like in the suit and tie culture of
> the past?

There's a bit more to it than that. There's the East/West coast factor to
consider. East coast companies are much more likely to require/expect a suit
and tie than a Silicon Valley company. At some East coast companies, even the
janitors wear a suit and tie. I'm not making this up -- I've worked at several
such companies where it was true.

> Do you know or have you been fired for choosing not to wear one?

It might be better to look at one's advancement prospects instead of fired/not
fired. If you don't dress like you belong in an executive suite, chances are
you won't be asked to occupy one.

> Any stories of employees firing their best employees or passing over a
> really great candidate because they refused to follow dress code?

This way of looking at it unfortunately suffers from self-reference. Someone
who won't meet the dress code won't be looked on as a "really great
candidate", so the exercise is undermined at the outset.

Suffice it to say that following the dress code is so basic and essential that
no meaningful study that correlated dress and advancement could be done.

~~~
jmilinion
>This way of looking at it unfortunately suffers from self-reference. Someone
who won't meet the dress code won't be looked on as a "really great
candidate", so the exercise is undermined at the outset.

Even if that person is well known for being the best of the best? Even if
their everyone knows that other companies out there would love to grab them
because they are that good?

~~~
lutusp
> Even if that person is well known for being the best of the best?

There are too many subjective factors that enter into such an evaluation,
including how that person is dressed.

> Even if their everyone knows that other companies out there would love to
> grab them because they are that good?

In human affairs, "good" can never be made completely objective, and human
studies are rarely scientific in the classic sense. In this case, "good" might
arise from the most superficial evaluation -- for example, just a picture of
the candidate _in his suit_. :)

------
yungty
Why do you people hate suits so much? What's wrong with wearing fine clothes
and looking sharp?

People say they're uncomfortable, but if your suit is uncomfortable you've
just chosen the wrong suit. Same with your shirts. And if your tie is
uncomfortable, learn to tie a knot better.

People who say we should do away with the suit are arguing to do away with
centuries of evolution in professional men's attire. It's like arguing that we
should trash art or literature, or that we should stop using cutlery and just
use our hands.

~~~
6d0debc071
> Why do you people hate suits so much? What's wrong with wearing fine clothes
> and looking sharp?

I don't think they make you look sharp. They're a uniform, stick a suit on and
you're just another person dressed in grey or black. It doesn't exactly do
anything interesting with the eye.

Now, granted, there are various cuts of suit, and different pockets, ways of
making them roll the shoulders to make you look broader or... but I don't
really find that a well made suit is dramatically more interesting than a
poorly made suit.

Perhaps to other people it is, and then I could understand better why people
would choose to wear them if given a choice. But to myself a well made suit's
not really more interesting than a grey T-shirt and has additional social
connotations of being subservient to whoever's enforcing the dress code at the
time.

> People who say we should do away with the suit are arguing to do away with
> centuries of evolution in professional men's attire.

What's the selection pressure supposed to be? Cutlery serves an obvious
function. It's not clear what desirable function suits serve.

~~~
lutusp
> It's not clear what desirable function suits serve.

It marks you as a team player, sort of like a sports uniform. I say it that
way intentionally to show how a suit can be interpreted in both positive and
negative ways.

Wearing a suit means you belong to the group that wears suits. Belonging can
be overrated, but it seems many want to belong to the suit-wearing, six-
figure-income clique.

~~~
pasbesoin
AKA "signalling". And it can and does go beyond "a suit" to include "the right
suit / tailoring / etc".

Wearing "the wrong suit" can be about as bad as wearing no suit, from this
perspective.

------
cafard
I think that anyone not in a law firm or financial services would find it hard
to remember those days.

An acquaintance, probably 70 by now, worked in IBM sales when he was first out
of the Navy. He said that a fellow salesman shocked the office by coming to
work in a blue rather than white shirt. (He didn't mention any deaths from the
shock, so I assume the guy still had suit and tie.) And Gerald Weinberg has
written of a slightly earlier period that at IBM you demonstrated that you
were a genius by growing a beard and not getting fired.

I did once work for a place where men where expected to wear ties when going
to customer sites. (You might also have squeeze in behind a refrigerator-sized
minicomputers.) My boss grumbled a bit when one of our better techs skipped
the tie on the grounds of limited range of motion, having recently had
shoulder surgery. But there were no consequences.

Oh, and from the truly distant past: I worked with a man whose father-in-law
had worked at FBI headquarters. The older man told of J. Edgar Hoover one day
stopping in the hall, looking over at an agent in an unusually-colored suit (I
think green) and say "That's an odd-colored suit for an agent to wear.) The
guy was gone from headquarters the next day, I suppose shipped to Butte,
Montana.

------
pasbesoin
This doesn't directly answer your question, but I will say that if you are in
an organization where "formal attire" is (re)introduced as a means to "improve
the professionalism of the organization", it is time to start looking for
another job.

1) It doesn't solve anything. (Despite some anecdotal or loose correlation
between being "dressed up" and feeling "more professional".)

2) The type of people who promulgate such policies tend to think "they know
what's right" and to be very much about control (in a top-down sense). One way
or another, it's about manipulation (in some cases, even expecting to reduce
headcount through resulting attrition). It is also, as often as not, "putting
lipstick on the pig" before selling the organization in one fashion or
another.

Just one jaded employee's perspective. But, you have been warned.

P.S. I'll add that I understand, even if I personally dislike, the role and
effect of attire in some specific roles. What I'm talking about is a blanket
policy that does not take employee roles into account at all.

From the male perspective:

If you're a back office person with no customer interface, or perhaps worse, a
techie who has to go crawling around the floor after cables and such, being
uncomfortable in and having to prematurely wear out an expensive suit is not
very considerate treatment.

I'm suddenly reminded, too, of working around moving parts and having to wear
a ready-made noose around my neck (neck tie). Throwing the tie over your
shoulder is not very safe, and tucking it into your shirt is awkward and
uncomfortable and can quickly soil the tie. A tie clip can help somewhat, but
it still leaves bits out front that might get snagged if you lean in too
close.

P.P.S. Ok, you hit one of my "buttons" and I perhaps too quickly responded.
Looking again at this, I now want to ask you, why are you asking this? Do you
face a particular situation? Or is this one of those "fishing" questions that
seem to be becoming more prevalent on HN (to my personal dissatisfaction, for
one).

~~~
jmilinion
Companies make demands on all employees which have nothing to do with their
business all the time but they care about it a lot.

One obvious one is a suit and tie policy. I'm curious what happens to people
who "disobey" norms like this.

~~~
pasbesoin
Well, the time I recall most clearly when I ran into such a policy... Brief
story. Old-line company's doing poorly, stock tanking. Board finally brings in
some new senior management -- the "not nice", clean things up and
(unexpressed, but fairly apparent) sell it off kind.

We were formal, but had gone business casual a few years earlier.

One of the first mandates of the new management: Business attire. Fortunately,
in my role, I could skip the full suit, but dress shirt and tie, and "Dockers"
and similar more casual slacks were expressly verboten.

If you didn't like it, good-bye. Since they were looking at wholesale
reductions in head count, they couldn't care less.

My office was very "back end". I doubt I saw more than one or two external
customers a year. Wages were simultaneously frozen, so you knew where the
additional wardrobe expense was coming from.

Sure, this is pure anecdote. Just my experience. I've been at and watched
other companies struggle with the "clothing" question. It inevitably seems
that, in doing so, they are worrying about the wrong question. (And
inevitably, the ramp up of formal dress seems to come along with hard times...
That have nothing, in my opinion, to do with what people are wearing.)

Then again... maybe for the majority in mainstream corporate America, being
made to put on a suit is a signal to "stop fucking around". Because, that
_was_ part of the problem.

P.S. Since I walk around a lot, despite my relatively short remaining tenure,
I still managed to wear out a few pairs of rather nice dress slacks and put
some significant mileage on dress shoes, before I got out of there.

~~~
jmilinion
Just out of curiosity, did it work? Where they sold?

~~~
pasbesoin
It was sold to a large(r) interest already in the broader field of industry.
This was long enough after I'd left that my friends were out, as well, or out
of touch, and I had no other lingering ties, so I don't really know how that
went. (I can speculate; some essential production staff retained. Most others
retired or terminated. A continuation of what had occurred, taking advantage
of the resulting redundancies to further trim cost.)

------
thejteam
One time an interviewer pointed out my lack of a tie. Funny thing was I was
dressed up. Suit, nice pants, nice shoes. Everything but a tie. This
particular place was really into ties.

Don't know if that was the reason I didn't get the job. I think I was the most
junior person they interviewed, although one of the interviewers said that I
did better on the technical part than a lot of people more senior than me.

This was an "inside the beltway"(DC) company, and in that area I have
subsequently learned that once you go inside the beltway, you wear ties. At
least if the job is government contracting related.

------
terrykohla
Failing to follow company policies as absurd as they may appear is a sign of
rebellion. Managers often have to follow more rules than lower level
employees. Giving them a hard time with company policy compliance is rude,
childish and immature.

In the corporate world sometimes it's more important to be liked than to be
competent.

My rules are "when in Rome, do as the Romans" and "the nail that sticks out
gets hammered".

If you don't wanna follow company policies, I suggest you start your own
company or work from home in your pajamas.

------
Mankhool
Dressing down, ubiquitously known as “being comfortable”, says that you don’t
care about how you look, as if your appearance were an entirely private matter
that has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s the exact opposite: what you
wear is part of the visible environment, as relevant as the architecture, the
decor, [and everything else in that environment]. - L. Grant

