Monocles and pocket watches are cool (just like bow ties).

Seriously. Engineers don't (shouldn’t) need to dress like anything to have their skills recognized. Like dressing like a hipster? Great. Enjoy wearing bespoke suits? Great. Look like a Abercrombie model? Great. Hoodies? Great.

If you’re competent and honest and work hard, I respect your chops. I don’t care how you dress.

And therein is the paradox. James Gosling tells a great story about having a visiting professor come in to give a talk, the grad students hosted him for dinner the night before. The professor casually remarked that he was sad he had left his plaid shirt at home. Every grad student was wearing a plaid shirt. It was a completely unconscious thing, but when pointed out very obvious. James tends to wear t-shirts these days with inside jokes on them :-)

When I was working at Google the cafes provided a great place to watch people. Here was a large sample of silicon valley engineers. And looking at the way they chose to wear was fascinating. From really carefully put together outfits, to random sets of things, to carefully selected to appear random but not actually be random. An amazing spectrum.

What I concluded is that if you make no conscious choice at all, your random selection will be biased toward what your eye has seen on others. That leads to a homogeneity in appearance which is both unintentional and obvious when you look for it.

The interesting people for me were the ones who looked like they were part of the random crowd except they didn't have the sort of random mistakes that came with true randomness. Either by design or a natural fashion talent I don't know. But interesting anyway.

> "WTF is that supposed to be?"

A de facto norm that arises out of any subculture. When you have enough people all hanging around each other all the time, all kinds of things develop, including fashion.

> "We're all about judging worth based on who someone is and what they've done..."

> "is when I have to deal with certain business types who are perfectly comfortable with a monocle & a pocket watch"

So... you balk at being judged on your fashion choices, but you're more than willing to judge others for their fashion choices? These two sentences refute each other.

It's a more efficient social protocol - rather than having to ask everyone what their interests are at the start, and abandon 80% of conversations, you dress in a way that indicates what you're interested in, and then can quickly identify the like-minded people you want to talk to. I thought engineers were all about efficiency.