Edit: Honestly, reading the comments, I want to find out where all these people work and cross off all their employers as places I'll never even consider applying to. No open door policy == broken culture.
Personally, I think the fired interns were given a valuable life lesson, if they choose to learn something from it. If an employee wants to work for a company, it's incumbent upon them to adapt to the company's standards, not the other way around.
This, to me, is an example of the "special snowflake" mindset that colleges foster in students these days.
Any company with a healthy culture has an open-door policy. I've never worked for a company that doesn't have an open-door policy, and I never will.
And "special snowflake" is a slur used to attack LGBT people 90% of the time.
And haphazardly laying claim to a perjorative in order to impugn someone? Get over yourself.
Got a reference for that?
Sarcastically calling people, especially young naive people, "snowflake" as a rejection of their projection of uniqueness or specialness has been around for decades. It's applied without sexual or gender connotations.
Example of alternate declarative form from Fight Club, "Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else."
So it's mainly uttered by fascists? (Tyler Durden is a textbook fascist) Sounds about right.
Proof by assertion?
There is a big difference between an open-door policy and allowing a group of interns, most of which are a net-negative for the company while they are interns, to petition the company's leadership to change their culture. The intern writing the letter even stated that they had already had a conversation with their manager about it. Sounded like that convo went pretty well. "We appreciate your view, but no, the dress code is not changing". That is a good open door sounding culture.
"Special Snowflake" is pretty fitting here. You want to band together with fellow interns to make changes at the company with which you are interning? Make that company some money. That's why they are in business. That's what they will listen to. You are a "Special Snowflake" if the dress code is the sword you are going to fall on. It's nuts and these kids need to grow up.
Just because they were denied doesn't mean they weren't able to make their case.
Coming back with a piece of paper that essentially says "look how many we are, surely you're wrong and we're right" is aggravating, especially from interns who have no experience and would better spend their time trying to understand why things work a certain way rather than assume they're right.
Dismissing them is a bit harsh, but we don't really know how aggravating they were nor how much of management's time they wasted. If this whole thing turned into a 1 hour long meeting where they refused to be told no, then I might also have thought this particular bunch might be more trouble than they're worth.
You might have a much higher tolerance to your time being wasted than I do, and that probably does make you the better person. I can take a fair amount of rudeness, lateness and incompetence. Wasting what little time I have on matters that I have already made clear were not up for discussion though, that'll get to me.
So aggressive and aggravating!/s
>a reasonable decision
Who says the dress code is a reasonable decision?
I'll tell you who doesn't get to say whether it is or is not: interns (unless the dress code is illegal, but that doesn't appear to have been the case).