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Comment by jib | Hacker News Reader

Caring about dressing nicely is a Moneyball thing to me.

If you care about how someone dresses when you hire them, odds are you're using bad criteria for your decisions. That's not to say that you can't get great people, but you're probably paying over the odds for them, if "dresses nicely" is one of your factors for selection.

I think I will hire better if I dont care about dress code - I think odds are better that I will find a good hire if one of my criteria is not "do they own a suit or a dress".

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> If you care about how someone dresses when you hire them

Funnily enough, all the programmers I know who "don't care about dress" also will say that they have negative perceptions of people turning up in a suit for a programming job.

They care about dress, they just want people to conform to a very casual dress code. Which would be fine, if they admitted to it. Instead, they say they "don't care about dress".

They don't care about dress. They care a lot about being around people that care about dress, and turning up in a suit is a very reliable indicator that a person cares about dress.

That said, it's a very reliable indicator on almost all situations, the most important exception being during an employment interview; it's extremely noisy then.

> They care a lot about being around people that care about dress, and turning up in a suit is a very reliable indicator that a person cares about dress.

I disagree with this.

Showing up in "a suit", in most cases, isn't caring about dress, it's thinking that a required formality of dress is necessary. People that care about clothes, and are fashion enthusiasts, will show up in Thom Browne, CdG, Engineered Garments, etc. - or even just basic Club Monaco-type stuff if they're don't have a giant amount of disposable income.

While adherence to arbitrary fashion formality levels may be an indicator of unawareness, an interest in fashion seems incredibly unrelated to programming skill, unless the programmer is expected to be solely interested in programming - in which case, they should also rule out runners, rock climbers, guitarists, etc.

By "care about dress" I don't mean people that care about how they are dressed. Those don't bother anybody.

It's people that care about how others are dressed that are the problem. What you call "thinking that a formality of dress is necessary". We disagree on terminology.

> turning up in a suit is a very reliable indicator that a person cares about dress.

or that they expect to be around people who (act as if they) care about dress.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

True. The pressure to look the part is everywhere. Looking the part for programmers is very different than for business people, but it's still a thing. Someone in suit and tie does not look like a programmer in this Silicon Valley/hacker culture-inspired world. But there is of course no reason why someone who likes to wear suit and tie can't be an excellent programmer.

"Looking the part" can be a lot worse than just clothes, though. Because most programmers are young white men, HR people, even women, even when they care about hiring more women and minorities, still tend to hire people who look the part, meaning more young white men.

Maybe getting rid of all pressure and expectations to "look the part" would be necessary to finally get rid of these subtler, subconscious forms of sexism and discrimination.

Maybe part of the reason people treat software developers as oversized children is because when we are asked to wear the same kind of clothing as other professionals, we whine like a small child who has to wear a decent shirt to their grandma's funeral.

Also, we demand hipster beer to be delivered to our desks on Friday afternoon.

When I interview, one of the factors for selection I have is "put some effort into preparing for this interview". One of the indicators for that is how they dress. Clean is better than dirty, presentable is better than slobby, ironed is better than spent the last week crumpled into a ball, shirt with buttons is better than t-shirt, and so on. Basically, show me that you actually want this job enough to put some thought and preparation into how you look.

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