Why don’t they wear suits? And how do other businesspeople take them seriously when they don’t wear suits? It seems super unprofessional.
Not having to is a status symbol.
This is true. If you’re good at a tech job you don’t need to wear a suit because you’re valuable to the company. Most programmers don’t like to wear suits and don’t wear them if they can get away with not wearing them. Also as a way of setting them apart from sales/legal/management people. Tech bros mostly started out as programmers and kept that habit.“In Silicon Valley, wearing a full business suit marked you as unsophisticated and not ‘with it’ in terms of tech and innovation. This caused the dress code requiring a suit to be inverted and it eventually reached the point where you can’t wear a suit and be taken seriously in Silicon Valley.”
Suits are a lot less common in the professional world than they used to be.
The real boss wears a Hawaiian shirt and rolls into the office once a quarter.
Why are you calling them your bro?
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The word professional is so ambiguous as to be effectively meaningless, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to its original definition.
No one but the most shallow and superficial among us cares what you’re wearing. Thinking a suit does anything but make you look self-important and pretentious is an anachronism.
Wearing a suit isn’t the only way to show power.
Tech used to dress up to the same standards as other professions in the 60’s, with their rules for conformity. Some engineers realized that they were too good to need to conform, so they dressed down, daring their bosses to fire them. Given how valuable the good engineers were, they got to keep their jobs even though they didn’t fully conform to the dress code.
It became a statement of power. Meetings would often be decided on the person worst dressed because they were the valuable tech decision maker.
Fast forward to when Facebook is trying to get its IPO and Mark Zuckerberg is going into meetings with financiers dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The financiers were all wearing suits, but Zuckerberg didn’t need to because they needed him more than he needed them. Zuckerberg didn’t need to dress up for bankers, bankers needed to dress up for him.
The only time Mark Zuckerberg wore a suit as part of his work was when he was testifying in front of Congress. Why? Because Congress had power over him and that power made Mark dress up.
Blame Steve Jobs.
