When I moved from academia to the computer industry back in the early seventies, the most difficult adjustment I had to make was adherance to the "business" dress code. As a college teacher, my favorite look had been jeans (which were dungarees then), a work shirt, one of those woven ties with the square bottom, and a corderoy sports jacket. Somehow this costume did not go over well with the old-timers at the insurance company where I started as a programmer. These guys all wore suits, white shirts and ties, like bankers and, well...like insurance salesmen. I was asked to dress according to the code. There we were, a bunch of COBOL programmers, tucked away in the back of some huge room, huddled over our coding sheets from 8:30 AM until 4:30 PM, dressed in suits! It was as ludicrous as it sounds. Because most of the data processing work those days was being done in large corporate environments, the corporate mentality prevailed over this budding industry, and we all donned the costume accordingly. To make things worse, my experiences proved that when it came to getting raises and better work, it really mattered how you looked. The mediocre programmer who dressed well, was clean-shaven and neat almost always did better than the whiz kid who could churn out the most efficient programs but looked like he slept in his suit and hadn't shaved in a week.

I suppose none of this is earth-shattering news. What is interesting to me is how the reversal of the dress code in the computer industry has progressed. Many corporate environments over the past few years have at least instituted "dress-down days" if nothing else. The EDP white shirts and ties are diminishing at various sites. However, in certain circles, there's a much more intense revolution. There seems to be a relationship between the type of work and the dress code for those who have the skills to do that work, regardless of the company. Cutting edge technology (especially Internet-related) accommodates an extremely relaxed dress code, less advanced work allows a moderately relaxed code, and old-fashioned business applications maintain their more severe dress codes. I've been finding that those programmers and system designers who know Java, HTML 3.0, C++, etc. are much more likely to be accepted (and even expected to be) wearing whatever they please, including jeans and tee shirts, long hair, beards, earrings, whatever. I'm not talking about only the younger crowd, either. Some of my contemporaries (40+) are enjoying this freedom of dress as well. Yet when I visit a site where the work is mostly mainframe COBOL financial applications, I find that most of the staff are still in suits, with the occassional renegade in jeans allowed to dress that way only because he has indispensible knowledge or skills. In contrast are the sites of companies in the online service arena where suits or ties are regarded as a sign that you're going on an interview that day. They think that if you can't do your work in jeans, then something's wrong.

Does any of this mean anything beyond the obvious? I'm not sure. I would like to think that quality work and the ability to accomplish it in a positive and harmonious fashion in the workplace should be the only concern of management (and everyone, for that matter). If you want to wear a suit or a tee shirt really shouldn't matter. I know it does in certain environments; our society dictates dress as a barometer of culture, refinement, intelligence, wealth, and other characteristics. We're all guilty at times of first impression based entirely on a person's clothing. But if we can't shed that notion easily (and I doubt that we will ever do so), perhaps we can take advantage of the expanding relaxation of dress code in this industry and pay more attention to the work at hand than to the tie around the neck of the person doing it.

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