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Comment by forgottenpass | Hacker News Reader

"Professionalism" gets used as a rhetorical tool to lump aesthetics into the same category as qualities that effect job performance. Once they're in the same category, the irrelevant things steal creditability from the important ones. (And because society doesn't exist in a vacuum, they might even become self-fulfilling prophecies)

Remeber Bobak Ferdowsi? The NASA guy with a mohawk?

    [...] you know, too unprofessional to be selling tickets at a railway 
    station but reliable enough for landing robots on Mars. [0]

[0] http://www.smh.com.au/small-business/blogs/work-in-progress/...

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Eh. Different professions have different needs. If you're in a profession where you need to interact with a broad variety of human beings in a positive way, then having a haircut which is designed to draw attention to yourself by boldly and deliberately flouting social conventions, it may be a problem. You're being paid to make the customers happy and their interactions straightforward, not to challenge their conventions and ways of thinking.

If you're in a position where you need to work closely with your fellow employees and a computer, that's different. Approaching things unconventionally and thinking outside the box could very well be a NASA scientist's chief virtue.

I suspect that a salesman would give others pause if he was near-obsessively washing his hands. Not so with a surgeon.

While a I agree with you up to the point, the word "professionalism" is often used to construct social convention around a rule that did not existed previously or is not strong. I am talking about a situation where the society do not care much, but the person using the word "professionalism" does and wants us to force it on others.

And yet we have hordes of white collar workers who never interact with customers face-to-face, but are still expected to come into the office in business or business casual clothing.

After a certain period, you start to understand that "proper business attire" has nothing to do with customer interactions and everything to do with providing yet another avenue for bosses to exert control over their workers.

How you present yourself has a very real effect on how you perform. When you stay in pajamas and a t shirt all day you are holding yourself back.

I barely put pants on most days and I'm making more now than I ever did when I was shaving and wearing a suit.

Assuming you are something along the lines of a freelance software developer, would you visit clients undressed like that?

Of course not. Why would I ever visit my clients?

Face to face contact can be useful to clarify things.

Only if they are bad communicators. And then you either lose any record of what was discussed or you have to write notes, which will have to be clear without human interaction anyway, so why not just write that email and draw those diagrams and save everyone the trouble from the start?

I firmly believe meetings are a waste of time.

OK, I agree with your points that having written notes is good, and I would say that 90% or more of meetings that I attend are a waste of time, but then occasionally something useful does come out that can't be conveyed clearly via email.

And a lot of people are bad communicators.

If how you present yourself has a "very real" effect on how you perform, maybe you can provide some citations.

Every now and then, articles pop up that talk about how people who work at home perform better when they actually wear work clothes. My suspicion is that this is simply the PR industry at work, hired by companies that sell work attire.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I'm not who you replied to, but here you go: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103112...

I think that the statement "My suspicion is that this is simply the PR industry at work, hired by companies that sell work attire." is complete unfounded bullshit.

There are many studies that show habits are an integral part of being human. I like the 'elephant and rider' metaphor. You have a finite amount of rider time each day to control your elephant. Every time you make a decision or exercise a bit of self control, you use up some rider. Habits drive the elephant too, but don't cost any rider time. If you are working with your habits, you get the elephant to do what you want for free. If you are working against your habits, it costs even more rider time just to do the basics.

So if you are someone that has a habit of wearing sweatpants and a tshirt all day, forcing yourself into business casual clothes costs rider and reduces your potential productivity for that day.

On the other hand, if your habit is to wear work clothes, then getting up in the morning and dressing as if you are going to an office isn't costing you anything. In fact it's probably putting you in the state of mind that you are 'now at work'.

For me personally, 'getting dressed for work' generally means jeans, comfortable shoes, and a button down shirt. Some days a tshirt. If I'm working from home - even on a Saturday for my own sideprojects (as I did today), I get 'dressed for work'. I wake up, take a shower, shave, have breakfast, make the same coffee as a work day, wear the same clothes as a work day, and then go get shit done. Arguably I would expend less physical energy rolling out of bed and sitting in front of my computer, but I would never ever be in the right state of mind.

So if someone told you that jeans were not proper working clothes and that you are being unprofessional, would you agree with them?

What you're describing is just sticking a "I'm working" label onto yourself, which could be done with a button-down shirt just as well as with wearing a black t-shirt as long as it is, in your mind, "dressed for work". The part where the PR industry comes in is where people in a customer-facing position - people used to call those "suits" in the 90s for the exact reason of being inappropriately dressed for someone doing production, as opposed to management or sales, work - expect others to conform to their standards instead of the other way around.

In other words, standards of dress tell a lot about whether your organization is engineering-driven or sales/marketing driven, and startup culture - traditionally driven at least in part by technical people - definitely has other standards than banking or consulting.

I do not agree with gnopgnip, but I think the way you are dressed might have a priming effect. There were quite a few studies conducted on this topic. But I don't think its effect is significant, and if you associate being dressed for the office with something stressful, then it might have negative effect on you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29

No. Small technicality here.

How comfortable you are has a real effect on how you perform.

How you present yourself is someone else's problem. If it is a problem for someone else then they are affecting how you perform.

I'd say rather "professionalism" is a way for people to deride behavior they choose not to like and attempt to escape justifying their derision.

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