Why Geeks Wear Jeans and T-Shirts
This was from a Slashdot link to an article called “What the Bubble Got Right” by Paul Graham, but maybe you didn’t get all the way to the bottom. It’s the best description I’ve heard for why programmers at tech companies don’t dress up. I’ve never worked for a company that made me dress up, and I can’t imagine that I would like it. Maybe this is why:
If you’re a nerd, you can understand how important clothes are by asking yourself how you’d feel about a company that made you wear a suit and tie to work. The idea sounds horrible, doesn’t it? In fact, horrible far out of proportion to the mere discomfort of wearing such clothes. A company that made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong with it.
And what would be wrong would be that how one presented oneself counted more than the quality of one’s ideas. That’s the problem with formality. Dressing up is not so much bad in itself. The problem is the receptor it binds to: dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as “suits.”
Nerds don’t just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.
So, next time someone asks me if the jeans and t-shirt I’m wearing was what I wore to work, and I say yes, I’ll be reminded that it’s because the ideas we come up with are way more important than what we’re wearing when we come up with them.
