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Individual solution for being cold is easy - wear more clothes! Individual solution for being hot is hard - you can get only so much clothes off

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Exactly. Folks should be dressed for the season: it is fundamentally unreasonable to be wearing nothing but a T-shirt in the winter, or to be wearing a sweater in the summer. This means being dressed in such a manner as to be comfortable walking at a moderate pace outdoors (such as if one were walking to & from a transit stop), modulo removable outerwear. That implies that the office temperature should be low enough in the winter in northern latitudes to be pleasant for those wearing long underwear. It should not be hot indoors in the winter.

In the summer, it should be warm enough to still be comfortable for folks wearing short sleeves, maybe short pants (depending on how warm it gets outside). It should not be cold indoors in the summer.

Putting on more clothes would be great, but women's established dress codes in offices often have way more exposed skin than men's dress codes: Skirts lead to exposed legs and blouses lead to exposed arms. So it's very hard to put on clothes and still appear professional.

The game is equally rigged against men cooling down, as many offices also have formal or informal rules against men wearing short trousers and T-shirts.

I think most places with a dress code would allow opaque tights and a suit jacket. But I'd also thought that the office dress code had been greatly relaxed in the past few decades, and hopefully the WFH revolution will put a dent in what remains.

Are there offices that still require skirts for women?

I know that used to be a rule many years ago, but I was under the impression that slacks or pantsuits were acceptable business attire for women just about everywhere.

This is true, but it can be very expensive depending on the dress code and what's in style/available in stores. I'm female and fairly curvy (38-27-40) and my options when I worked in person were often a cheaper dress/skirt that fit (due to there being professional dresses/skirts that didn't require tailoring) or taking every set of pants I bought to a tailor and adding a bunch to the price.

Also as a female that wears both sexes's clothing, the fabric on women's clothing is far thinner and less insulating than the fabric on men's clothing: I'm substantially warmer when I wear men's clothing (but again, that's not professional). On the other hand, women's clothing is softer and stretchier.

I work from home and in my pajamas now, but there are other variables contributing to the male/female office temperature debate.

Personally I think offices should just have 2 or 3 zones and let people work where they're most comfortable. It would probably be the most productive too.

In a pinch you can get an adjustable vent in your office. If it is hot, and the vent is blowing hot (my situation) you close the vent. But yes, I show up to work with shorts, tshirt and sandles under my regular clothes, because my office would regularly go 90 degrees through some issues with its siting (sun despite all windows with blinds closed) and HVAC tie-in etc. Close the door for zoom calls - pretty miserable.

Work from home has been great though.

How do I wear more clothes on my hands, when my job is 100% typing?

I ended up wearing fingerless gloves at my last job.

That said, in general I'd really prefer if offices weren't so cold.

Electric heating pad.

Fingerless gloves.

Small heater on the desk.

Blood flow (stand up and stretch more often, or walk around the office more).

Increase core temperature (wear more on the core - it will warm extremities).

1) Heating pad on my hands while I'm typing? 2) Have you tried typing with fingerless gloves? 3) Not allowed to have space heaters in our office per "the guy who comes around and yells at you for things periodically" 4) This does not warm up my hands, I can assure you 5) This does not warm up my hands, I can assure you

One thing that works great for me at home is, compromising on a temperature with my partner such that we're both physically comfortable throughout the day.

> One thing that works great for me at home is, compromising on a temperature with my partner such that we're both physically comfortable throughout the day.

Finding an intersection of two preferences is much easier than finding one with 30+ preferences. Me and my wife are extreme opposites but manage to keep the house comfortable for both of us thanks to having our own offices. If we had to share one...

In a lot of circumstances, an office can shuffle people around and modify the HVAC settings to get most people comfortable, but getting everyone comfortable is rare. I think the fundamental point the parent was trying to make is: given that outliers will exist, which end of the spectrum is preferable? There are many more tools to deal with being too cold than there are with being too hot.

Sure, but in my office and a lot of the others I have worked in, either a) no one was ever too hot, but many people were too cold or b) the HVAC was old/terrible s.t. that everyone was either way too hot or way too cold. My dream is for everyone to just be a little bit miserable together.

1) Forgive the link to amazon...

https://www.amazon.com/Madala-Waterproof-Electric-Extended-P...

2) yes - I own a pair with an electric heating element. I'm not quite as fast as normal, but they work just fine.

3) This one is fair, but you just need to avoid the heaters that pull a ton of power. Shoot for something around 200 watts (or anything that will run on usb) with an auto-off. A lot of folks will plug in 1500 watt heaters (because they're small), and not realize they're pulling a LOT of power. A standard 20amp/120v circuit in the US can only support a single 1500 watt heater (maxes at ~2400 watts) and 2 will start blowing fuses.

4 & 5) They do work - I promise. Also consider a head covering (beanie/hat or something).

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It's not really a preference/compromise discussion - in most cases office buildings are running their AC/heat to shoot for minimum costs. Add in relatively poor airflow and building designs that have warm/cold pockets and it's literally impossible to make everyone happy.

> 4 & 5) They do work - I promise. Also consider a head covering (beanie/hat or something).

I'm not sure why it seems to be so common for people to be so persistent about increasing core temperature to make extremities comfortable. It's probably good advise for life and death scenarios to keep your extremities workable, but I can assure you that it's not an uncommon occurrence in the winter for my hands to be freezing while im sweltering elsewhere.

I usually have the opposite relation with core temp and extremities where covering my feet or hands makes up a much more significant temperature difference while inside. All else the same, socks vs no socks is a significant difference between being comfortable and not based on the temperature.

People are pretty consistent because it's a known physiological reaction.

Cold hands and feet are almost always a sign of poor blood flow in extremities, Making the heart beat faster (ex: doing 15 pushups/jumping jacks) helps the most. Decreasing blood vessel constriction helps as well (increasing core temp/ decreasing heat loss). Alcohol has a similar effect, and will increase blood flow to the extremities and increase heartrate - this is why it's so commonly thought to warm you up (note - it's not, it's just increasing blood flow and getting it to your hands/feet more quickly & easily)

Unfortunately - no one is identical, reynauds is a condition where folks have an extreme version of the constriction of the blood vessels in their hands/feet in response to cold. You may be farther along that scale.

At a previous job, I used a pair of usb-powered fingerless gloves. They worked quite well, if a bit bulky in the palm area.

Just warm the rest of your body and your hands will be warm too.

Okay, but if an office is so cold that people are putting scarves and jackets on, that’s a problem. It’s also a huge waste of energy.

> Okay, but if an office is so cold that people are putting scarves and jackets on, that’s a problem. It’s also a huge waste of energy.

Depends where and when you are! Where I live and in this season cold is saving energy and heating is a huge waste of energy.

Aye, I used to live somewhere like that as well. It’s still ridiculous when outside is 40C and inside is 16C, there’s no need for that.

I worked in an office that was cooled to a temperature of 62 F year round. There were no thermostats, the AC was simply on all the time. The solution was to wear jackets (even in August) and run space heaters in the rooms to keep them at a more manageable temperature.

Traditionally, "business culture" has required men to wear jackets (or similarly heavy garments). The thermostat can't go up until we're allowed to take them off. It's a problem, but there's a necessary order of operations at play.

I've never been to a tech company where this was the dress code but obviously I haven't been to all of the tech companies

Which businesses still adhere to that attire culture?

Lots of banks and law offices, a lot of bigger name accounting/auditing/consultancy firms, and a substantial amount of government/quasi-non governmental organizations. When I started at my current government position, the only department exempt from wearing suits were Admin and IT Services, and even we had to wear polished black leather shoes, dress socks, pressed pants (trousers for you brits), and button-down long-sleeved shirts. When we won the right to wear polo shirts it was a big deal.

Fortunately, a new CEO came in and revised down our 4 page dress code to a single common-sense paragraph: "Employees are prohibited from wearing sweatpants and offensive t-shirts in the office. Personnel who are meeting with clients or presenting at court should wear business-formal attire for those meetings/events. Use common sense for all other times."

banks/law offices

OP obviously meant people should wear a cardigan or jumper to keep themselves warm if they're not already. I swear at least 70% the comments on HN are just lazy straw man arguments and people like me wasting their time to point them out as such.

It'd help if they made cardigans/jumpers that were acceptable professional wear for women that were thicker than tissue paper + weren't over a hundred dollars. I just froze EVERYWHERE until I gave in and started buying men's tops, but that isn't an option for workplaces with dress codes.

What do you mean they are not acceptable? Not being snarky, I live in cold climate and want to understand

So in my experience sweaters that need to be worn in offices that care about that sort of thing need to a.) be women's sweaters (because male clothes look 'sloppy') and b.) need to have some level of design/fit thought having gone into it. The reason for this is that women in the workplace can't be over or under sexual, so there's a limited range for how the clothes can interact with your body. (This also varies from person to person: I can wear short skirts and still look professional because my legs are shorter than my sister's, but she can wear tops I can't because my breasts are much larger than hers).

Oh, and at the cheaper places, 60% of stuff is for teenagers or college students. Literally.

So, for example, let's take Target as one of the cheaper brands since I was there earlier. For female clothes here are some examples:

[0]https://www.target.com/p/women-s-cropped-turtleneck-pullover... = sweater that looks great until you pick it up and it's a crop top because that's what the kids are into. This is about 30% of what you find.

[1]https://www.target.com/p/women-s-crafted-chunky-knit-cardiga... = looks decent until you check the fabric content and, like any woman's sweater under 80 dollars, it's all plastic so it won't insulate you for shit.

[2] https://www.target.com/p/women-s-crewneck-pullover-sweater-k... = looks fine, but hover over and check o out the sleeve. Look how thin that is; making thin sweaters saves fabric. And again, this is 100% synthetic (and not fleece or other warm polyester; it's acrylic)

So it's basically all that until you spend at least 80 bucks on a single sweater.

There are cheaper things that keep you warm, but you can't wear them to an office:

[3]https://www.target.com/p/women-s-fleece-quarter-zip-sweatshi... [4]https://www.target.com/p/women-s-sherpa-longline-1-2-zip-tun...

Does this make sense?

I have a better solution: WFH.

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