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The Utter Strangeness Of Dress Codes
The sartorial formalisation of software engineers was never going to work.
Today, a short missive on expressing yourself and why you’re not so different from the pioneers that started the industry, the grand game that we all play, all those years ago.
Memory Lane
In olden times, when all software engineers were genuine computer scientists, we were an eclectic bunch of mainly mathematicians and electrical engineers who dressed in the general manner of somewhat eccentric academics who’d be under a desk soldering high voltage electrical cables one minute, juggling hot vacuum tubes the next, and then taking a picnic on the college lawn at lunchtime with homemade jam and lemonade.
It was an age of dressing somewhat smartly, taking pride in one’s appearance, but also conforming to the generally more formal sartorial requirements of society along with the obligatory chalk dustings, pens and pencil stuffed in the top jacket pocket, and engraved slide rule behind one’s ear.
Happier times all round.
Unfortunately as computers began to shrink in size, their power requirements dipping below that of a moderately sized English hamlet, a class of less technical acolytes started to come on board — first as operators, then as programmers, and finally as users.
Although the somewhat eccentric ‘backroom boys’ remained in their white coats, checked shirts, and occasional elbow patched tweed jackets the more general class of programmer users came to dress in a manner which corresponded with the general cost of a computing machine.
That is, quite costly.
One Step Beyond
Both programmers, and users, started to wear proper shirts, ties, actual trousers and those squeaky shoes that were ubiquitous in the colourful pictures of ‘computer rooms’ that began to appear in the 1960s and 70s.
It was often the case that programmers would be pictured at their machines, dressed elegantly with scant regard for the dangers of static electricity or man made fibre fire hazards, against a backdrop of huge whirling magnetic tape storage devices.
