business casual

August 9, 2001

This Year's Bird List:
Plum Island Bird List

Today's Reading:
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan

This Year's Reading:
2001 Book List

Today's Starting Pitcher:
Tim Wakefield

Sometime in the last 6 years suits and ties went out of style in the workplace. It used to be you could tell the managers from the engineers and marketing from engineering and sales from normal humans by their clothing. Now everybody, men and women alike, wears khakis, chinos, Dockers -- all in that khaki color-- and golf shirts.

Why back when I was a young wisp of an engineer and we had to hand crank our computers to bootstrap them, not to mention toggle in the bootstrap in binary on the switch console (actually, we did have to do that on one machine I worked on, but that's a whole 'nother story), and we walked 10 miles to school in snow up to our waists clutching a quarter to buy a loaf of bread on the way... where was I? Oh yeah, olden times in computing.

So back in those olden times the powers that be used to find ways to hide the engineers from the customers so they wouldn't see us in our jeans and T-shirts and sneakers (red Converse All Stars were very popular). Like marketing had these gleaming fish bowl machine rooms unsullied by any unwashed engineers except there was this one time when I couldn't get standalone time on any of engineering's machines and negotiated with one of the product lines to use their machine in the fish bowl at night. After a long night's debugging I fell asleep on the couch in the fishbowl. Before I knew it, daylight and people in suits had appeared. Customer people in suits too. That particular product line never ever let me use their machine room again.

They kept engineering on separate floors. The floor you entered the building on had people in suits in nice offices. The machines were in the aforementioned fish bowls. The conference rooms had wooden tables. One had to climb the stairs to see the wild men (and a few women - fewer than now) in jeans and red sneakers madly typing code on terminals connected at absurdly low speeds to a central timesharing computer.

This being olden times, the men frequently had long hair, really long hair, and full beards. Software guys now just don't know how to do beards. The women had exceedingly long hair, which they wore hanging straight down. With the clothing styles I've just mentioned, it was kind of hard to tell the engineers from each other. You could use the fact that women didn't generally have beards in order to tell the engineer's gender but that was about it. So you couldn't tell the engineers apart but you could tell them from marketing and sales.

You could tell sales from marketing because their ties were more expensive. And the more important the executive, the nicer the tie. Nicer suits higher up the hierarchy too. The venture capitalists had the nicest suits of all and showed off by wearing them to IPO celebration parties in the sweltering heat so they could melt along with the ice cream.

Fashions changed as the times modernized but you could still always tell the engineers from the suits. That's what we called them, suits.

And so today, you have to look at somebody much more closely to see if the chinos and golf shirt are from K-Mart, Old Navy, the Gap, or Brooks Brothers before trying to guess where he or she fits in the organization. And nobody wears Converse All-Stars anymore.