Ask HN: Has anyone been fired for not wearing a suit and tie?

[jmilinion]

For the old timers here, what was is it like in the suit and tie culture of the past? Do you know or have you been fired for choosing not to wear one?

Any stories of employees firing their best employees or passing over a really great candidate because they refused to follow dress code?

[lutusp]

> For the old timers here, what was is it like in the suit and tie culture of the past?

There's a bit more to it than that. There's the East/West coast factor to consider. East coast companies are much more likely to require/expect a suit and tie than a Silicon Valley company. At some East coast companies, even the janitors wear a suit and tie. I'm not making this up -- I've worked at several such companies where it was true.

> Do you know or have you been fired for choosing not to wear one?

It might be better to look at one's advancement prospects instead of fired/not fired. If you don't dress like you belong in an executive suite, chances are you won't be asked to occupy one.

> Any stories of employees firing their best employees or passing over a really great candidate because they refused to follow dress code?

This way of looking at it unfortunately suffers from self-reference. Someone who won't meet the dress code won't be looked on as a "really great candidate", so the exercise is undermined at the outset.

Suffice it to say that following the dress code is so basic and essential that no meaningful study that correlated dress and advancement could be done.

[jmilinion]

>This way of looking at it unfortunately suffers from self-reference. Someone who won't meet the dress code won't be looked on as a "really great candidate", so the exercise is undermined at the outset.

Even if that person is well known for being the best of the best? Even if their everyone knows that other companies out there would love to grab them because they are that good?

[lutusp]

> Even if that person is well known for being the best of the best?

There are too many subjective factors that enter into such an evaluation, including how that person is dressed.

> Even if their everyone knows that other companies out there would love to grab them because they are that good?

In human affairs, "good" can never be made completely objective, and human studies are rarely scientific in the classic sense. In this case, "good" might arise from the most superficial evaluation -- for example, just a picture of the candidate in his suit. :)

[Cardeck1]

The best of the best will always be the exception to any rule in any industry.But the best of the best doesn't care if he gets fired because he will always come on top.So you are asking the wrong question.

[pasbesoin]

Yes. There are companies, and management structures, that are much more about conformity than excellence.

[yungty]

Why do you people hate suits so much? What's wrong with wearing fine clothes and looking sharp?

People say they're uncomfortable, but if your suit is uncomfortable you've just chosen the wrong suit. Same with your shirts. And if your tie is uncomfortable, learn to tie a knot better.

People who say we should do away with the suit are arguing to do away with centuries of evolution in professional men's attire. It's like arguing that we should trash art or literature, or that we should stop using cutlery and just use our hands.

[TheCoelacanth]

I agree that a properly chosen suit can be comfortable and I don't mind wearing one on occasion, but I wouldn't want to wear one every day. Suits are far more expensive to buy and maintain than other clothes and they take a lot more work to maintain as well.

[6d0debc071]

> Why do you people hate suits so much? What's wrong with wearing fine clothes and looking sharp?

I don't think they make you look sharp. They're a uniform, stick a suit on and you're just another person dressed in grey or black. It doesn't exactly do anything interesting with the eye.

Now, granted, there are various cuts of suit, and different pockets, ways of making them roll the shoulders to make you look broader or... but I don't really find that a well made suit is dramatically more interesting than a poorly made suit.

Perhaps to other people it is, and then I could understand better why people would choose to wear them if given a choice. But to myself a well made suit's not really more interesting than a grey T-shirt and has additional social connotations of being subservient to whoever's enforcing the dress code at the time.

> People who say we should do away with the suit are arguing to do away with centuries of evolution in professional men's attire.

What's the selection pressure supposed to be? Cutlery serves an obvious function. It's not clear what desirable function suits serve.

[lutusp]

> It's not clear what desirable function suits serve.

It marks you as a team player, sort of like a sports uniform. I say it that way intentionally to show how a suit can be interpreted in both positive and negative ways.

Wearing a suit means you belong to the group that wears suits. Belonging can be overrated, but it seems many want to belong to the suit-wearing, six-figure-income clique.

[pasbesoin]

AKA "signalling". And it can and does go beyond "a suit" to include "the right suit / tailoring / etc".

Wearing "the wrong suit" can be about as bad as wearing no suit, from this perspective.

[6d0debc071]

Ah, good point. I didn't think of that :)

[yungty]

A suit doesn't make you look subservient - a t-shirt saying Hollister or Linux or some other corporate entity does.

[6d0debc071]

> A suit doesn't make you look subservient

To me, they have that connotation. Fashion doesn't tend to be that regular outside of close-knit groups, and even within those groups there are differences that those within can pick up on. You might think that Amish all dress alike, but they really don't. Similarly all suits look more or less alike to me, despite the fact that I'm sure if I spent a lot of time looking at suits I'd start to notice more refined differences.

To have such a narrow variation as suits tend to constitute, among a group of fairly diverse individuals... that implies to me that there's a power effectively forcing that distribution on the group.

> a t-shirt saying Hollister or Linux or some other corporate entity does.

I don't see the relevance, no-one has to wear those things so the connotation of subservience isn't there. I suppose coming off the point of the fella above this fork you could view it as submission to a group norm, but I think the connotation's different there - less about overtly oppressive dominance.

In any case, I don't wear that sort of thing - don't like writing on my clothes, if someone's advertising with my body I want to be paid for it. Prefer patterns and pictures and nice rich colours.

[Jacquass12321]

It does make you look like you wasted hundreds of dollars on one outfit.

[prodigal_erik]

If suits weren't inherently less comfortable, we'd see them worn in the grocery store and up the hiking trail. They're not durable, they're hard to clean and mend, and they're expensive and hard to replace (since "the wrong suit" is all I can find up the street). If they didn't manipulate people into overlooking merit when making decisions, they would have long since been forgotten.

[dllthomas]

I find my suits to be comfortable, and wear something comparable (odd jacket and slacks) most days. I don't wear a suit because I already stand out enough in my office wearing what I do.

[anywherenotes]

basically today's suits are like 18'th century powdered wigs.

[Mankhool]

You've never worn a made to measure suit :)

[jmilinion]

There is a difference between wanting to wear a suit and forcing everyone to wear one.

[cafard]

I think that anyone not in a law firm or financial services would find it hard to remember those days.

An acquaintance, probably 70 by now, worked in IBM sales when he was first out of the Navy. He said that a fellow salesman shocked the office by coming to work in a blue rather than white shirt. (He didn't mention any deaths from the shock, so I assume the guy still had suit and tie.) And Gerald Weinberg has written of a slightly earlier period that at IBM you demonstrated that you were a genius by growing a beard and not getting fired.

I did once work for a place where men where expected to wear ties when going to customer sites. (You might also have squeeze in behind a refrigerator-sized minicomputers.) My boss grumbled a bit when one of our better techs skipped the tie on the grounds of limited range of motion, having recently had shoulder surgery. But there were no consequences.

Oh, and from the truly distant past: I worked with a man whose father-in-law had worked at FBI headquarters. The older man told of J. Edgar Hoover one day stopping in the hall, looking over at an agent in an unusually-colored suit (I think green) and say "That's an odd-colored suit for an agent to wear.) The guy was gone from headquarters the next day, I suppose shipped to Butte, Montana.

[pasbesoin]

This doesn't directly answer your question, but I will say that if you are in an organization where "formal attire" is (re)introduced as a means to "improve the professionalism of the organization", it is time to start looking for another job.

1) It doesn't solve anything. (Despite some anecdotal or loose correlation between being "dressed up" and feeling "more professional".)

2) The type of people who promulgate such policies tend to think "they know what's right" and to be very much about control (in a top-down sense). One way or another, it's about manipulation (in some cases, even expecting to reduce headcount through resulting attrition). It is also, as often as not, "putting lipstick on the pig" before selling the organization in one fashion or another.

Just one jaded employee's perspective. But, you have been warned.

P.S. I'll add that I understand, even if I personally dislike, the role and effect of attire in some specific roles. What I'm talking about is a blanket policy that does not take employee roles into account at all.

From the male perspective:

If you're a back office person with no customer interface, or perhaps worse, a techie who has to go crawling around the floor after cables and such, being uncomfortable in and having to prematurely wear out an expensive suit is not very considerate treatment.

I'm suddenly reminded, too, of working around moving parts and having to wear a ready-made noose around my neck (neck tie). Throwing the tie over your shoulder is not very safe, and tucking it into your shirt is awkward and uncomfortable and can quickly soil the tie. A tie clip can help somewhat, but it still leaves bits out front that might get snagged if you lean in too close.

P.P.S. Ok, you hit one of my "buttons" and I perhaps too quickly responded. Looking again at this, I now want to ask you, why are you asking this? Do you face a particular situation? Or is this one of those "fishing" questions that seem to be becoming more prevalent on HN (to my personal dissatisfaction, for one).

[jmilinion]

Companies make demands on all employees which have nothing to do with their business all the time but they care about it a lot.

One obvious one is a suit and tie policy. I'm curious what happens to people who "disobey" norms like this.

[pasbesoin]

Well, the time I recall most clearly when I ran into such a policy... Brief story. Old-line company's doing poorly, stock tanking. Board finally brings in some new senior management -- the "not nice", clean things up and (unexpressed, but fairly apparent) sell it off kind.

We were formal, but had gone business casual a few years earlier.

One of the first mandates of the new management: Business attire. Fortunately, in my role, I could skip the full suit, but dress shirt and tie, and "Dockers" and similar more casual slacks were expressly verboten.

If you didn't like it, good-bye. Since they were looking at wholesale reductions in head count, they couldn't care less.

My office was very "back end". I doubt I saw more than one or two external customers a year. Wages were simultaneously frozen, so you knew where the additional wardrobe expense was coming from.

Sure, this is pure anecdote. Just my experience. I've been at and watched other companies struggle with the "clothing" question. It inevitably seems that, in doing so, they are worrying about the wrong question. (And inevitably, the ramp up of formal dress seems to come along with hard times... That have nothing, in my opinion, to do with what people are wearing.)

Then again... maybe for the majority in mainstream corporate America, being made to put on a suit is a signal to "stop fucking around". Because, that was part of the problem.

P.S. Since I walk around a lot, despite my relatively short remaining tenure, I still managed to wear out a few pairs of rather nice dress slacks and put some significant mileage on dress shoes, before I got out of there.

[jmilinion]

Just out of curiosity, did it work? Where they sold?

[pasbesoin]

It was sold to a large(r) interest already in the broader field of industry. This was long enough after I'd left that my friends were out, as well, or out of touch, and I had no other lingering ties, so I don't really know how that went. (I can speculate; some essential production staff retained. Most others retired or terminated. A continuation of what had occurred, taking advantage of the resulting redundancies to further trim cost.)

[thejteam]

One time an interviewer pointed out my lack of a tie. Funny thing was I was dressed up. Suit, nice pants, nice shoes. Everything but a tie. This particular place was really into ties.

Don't know if that was the reason I didn't get the job. I think I was the most junior person they interviewed, although one of the interviewers said that I did better on the technical part than a lot of people more senior than me.

This was an "inside the beltway"(DC) company, and in that area I have subsequently learned that once you go inside the beltway, you wear ties. At least if the job is government contracting related.

[terrykohla]

Failing to follow company policies as absurd as they may appear is a sign of rebellion. Managers often have to follow more rules than lower level employees. Giving them a hard time with company policy compliance is rude, childish and immature.

In the corporate world sometimes it's more important to be liked than to be competent.

My rules are "when in Rome, do as the Romans" and "the nail that sticks out gets hammered".

If you don't wanna follow company policies, I suggest you start your own company or work from home in your pajamas.

[Mankhool]

Dressing down, ubiquitously known as “being comfortable”, says that you don’t care about how you look, as if your appearance were an entirely private matter that has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s the exact opposite: what you wear is part of the visible environment, as relevant as the architecture, the decor, [and everything else in that environment]. - L. Grant