Intersting. I am in the technical field, but always wear suits to interviews. Guess I’m one of the eccentrics. Oh well. I wear French cuff shirts with cufflinks on casual Fridays, too. 
Interesting - I’ve always read that the basic rule is up-dressing one step from the work environment - how that works for work environments where three-piece suits are the norm, I don’t know. Frock coats and top hats, I guess.
The entire ritualistic nature of the interview always struck me as rather silly. What really should be an exchange of information leading into a negotiation is instead turned into an intricate game of verbal jousting on subjects mostly irrelevant - asking “What is your biggest weakness?” and other such nonsense will at best uncover whether the applicant has done some reading on interview technique.
Personally, I will of course show respect for the interview process as it currently takes place, but I can’t say I feel any. It reminds me of Parkinson (of Parkinson’s Law fame) describing how traditionally, British Civil Service posts were assigned on basis of exam results from old, renowned schools who taught their students to appreciate ancient Greek poetry. He felt the process was wrought with danger, as (quoting from memory) “very often, it turned out that the employees had quite forgotten their Greek Poetry when they needed it for the execution of their duties”.
Having great exam results in Greek Poetry, wearing a tie or having the ability to tackle the question “What is your biggest weakness?” are about equally irrelevant for job performance, at least as I see things - excluding of course jobs where any (or all) are integral to the job. Professor in Greek, say.
As for the OP, it’s matter of context. If you’re hiring the professional equivalent of a high-stakes poker player - someone who must control his communications at all times - a slip of the tongue is of course grounds for going with another. If it’s just a matter of an interviewee getting carried away and actually lowering shields for a second, I wouldn’t pay much attention to it. I’m sure I’ve let my tongue slip a couple of times during interviews, but I tend to get the job anyway.
'Cause everybody knows it’s impossible to operate a computer dressed in flip flops, muscle shirts and tube tops. That’s why I stick to gold lame jumpsuits with a thong worn outside the jumpsuit at all times. Because it’s the way things should be.
Engineers and IT guys who don’t care about how they dress or act? Get out of town!
Don’t be such a sap. It’s a common tactic for CEOs to try and appear to be “men of the people” to their employees to build loyalty. “Hey! I’m just like you guys! I hate wearing suits!” as he goes home to crap in one of his seven gold toilets in his mansion.
Here’s the deal - when you go into any kind of meeting or interview, no one knows anything about you. They don’t know what kind of person you are or how good you are at your job or what you ate for breakfast. The first thing they will look at is how you dress and groom yourself. If you are clean-cut and wearing a suit or a sports jacket, you LOOK like someone 90% of the population perceives as “professional”. And at the very least you have idicated that you CARE enough about being professional to actually look the part.
The second thing they will know about you is how you communicate. If you are using profanity in your professional communications you will be perceived as one of the following:
-not very serious
-angry
-immature
-offensive
-low class
so which one of these were you going for?
I’m not sure what people think would be a professionally acceptible use of profanity. I can’t curse at vendors and clients. I certainly wouldn’t accept a boss cursing at me so I won’t curse at my subordinates. So other than joking around by the water cooler, what is an appropriate usage of curse words in the workplace?
Or how about this? give me a couple sentences containing the word “damn” or any other profanity or curseword and I’ll tell you if I would let it slide in the context of the sentence.
How about:
“If you would make the use of the word “damn” the deal-breaker in an important hiring decision, then you’re a damn idiot”?
How’s that?
How about “go find a damn job somewhere else because you can’t behave like a mature adult?”
…also because you apparently lack the problem solving ability to use the word damn in a sentence that won’t make you look like an imature idiot to the interviewer.
I agree that the context is important. When used as an intensifier (“a damn good Margarita”) it’s acceptable, even in an interview. But generally speaking it shows poor judgement. I would not put someone like that in a position where she/he would be interacting with customers. Not because it’s wrong to say “damn” with customers, but because it shows the candidate can’t shut it off when appropriate. Also, depending on context, I’d be wary if it showed some lack of restraint re: anger issues.
No, I’m not an uptight biddy. Yes, sometimes I swear at work. But generally I try not to. It’s just the environment I work in. We have a range of people, from foreign workers who would never swear in the office to people who let out the occasional profanity when stressed out or playing around.
I wasn’t aware that the use of the word “damn” was correlative with a lack of problem-solving abilities. If that is the case in the people you hire, maybe you need to examine your own acumen as an interviewer.
And the image you want to present is one of them - not that of a marketdroid.
Well, he was famous for badmouthing Bill Gates, for playing hockey, and for catching shit from Wall Street for not laying off people like he was supposed to for their benefit. So, I offer that you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. He does have a big house, and made money from options during bad times even when he cut his salary down to $1. That was fine with me.
No, here’s the deal. You’re not interviewing with 90% of the population - you’re interviewing with the people who make the decision. Now, assuming that you’ve been in the field long enough to have a clue about what is going on (and I’ve already said that new grads wearing suits is fine) then you dress the part. Combed hair, no stubble - fine with me - but I’m like that anyway, as I said, I’m old. Jacket when no one wears a jacket - pointless.
When I interviewed for my current job I was already fairly well known in the field. Why would I want to come across as insecure? But I’d expect anyone with experience in the Valley in processor design to know enough to know that we don’t wear jackets.
Interviewing for a sales job is something else, of course.
Umm - I never said I used profanity. I said I heard people at the next table using it. I would have a problem with someone cursing up a storm. The case in the OP was someone letting a damn slip out during a story. That isn’t exactly cursing up a storm, and would be no issue for me.
One place I’d think it would fit would be working with someone you know well in the middle of the night on a really nasty problem. But profanity is not the only sin. During a demo in a trade show (in a demo suite, not on the floor) an engineer was asked about what he thought about doing it a certain way. “That would be brain dead” he answered. Let’s say we’d have been happier if he had said that would be a damn fine idea.
Minor, accidental profanity during an interview shouldn’t be a deal breaker. Major, intentional profanity, would make me wonder.
Let’s see, would I want to hire someone with significant expertise, smart and a great track record, who both answered all my questions and showed a deep understanding of the field, but who said “damn,” or a mediocre guy who’s been through three jobs in the past three years and is a bit shaky on the basics - but whose language is clean.
Need to think about that. 
When I interview people, I’m not interviewing them to lead a congregation, I’m interviewing to find the best damn engineer I can. If I let anything else get in the way (and getting along with people counts in the quality of engineering) I’m doing my company a disservice. When I was a manager, if one of my people had a habit of trying to shoot down good candidates for this, they’d be out of the interview loop really quickly.
Re “F-bomb”, I now have this vision of the Enola Gay pilots:
“Approaching target…copy that…over target…doors open…Roger that…steady…steady…FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!”
Curious, it is some time since I last interviewed people
- but when I did, my objective was to ‘crack’ their facade and find out what they were really like - a ‘damn’ would have got me interested.
I think the most amusing incident was when a fellow division of a smallish and very successful software house had a guy they were not sure about - for minor reasons.
I was wheeled in, told him we liked him a lot, cut the hair and lose the earings and he had the job. I think he was actually relieved.
I don’t much like this dress down stuff, in the old days I enforced the dress code, it was simple, our clients are bankers and we dress smarter than our clients. It used to spook the clients seeing a load of programming bankers.
Probably, if circumstances were right, I would take your interviewee out to the pub, get him three parts pissed and say: ‘don’t f/cking say damn in front of the clients’
The big problem in interviews is finding out what people are really like, if you know that you can modify their behaviour.
“As if that weren’t strange enough, next she wrote a book with that damn, mangy ill-tempered dog.” - George W. Bush, April 28 2001. (Link)
If it’s good enough for the President to say at a public event, it’s good enough for an interview.
[broad highland scots accent]
To be sure, the McNiggerWop’s were a proud clan, and Cuntfuck was the finest laird they ever had.
[/bsa]
I would not even raise an eyebrow in an interview if someone used the word damn. Use of euphemisms such as “drop the F-bomb” would make me dismiss a candidate immediately.
Why don’t you give the job offer to the straw man you just created?
You do what makes sense for your industry and the company you’re interviewing at. If you know that’s what’s expected of people in your field, then go ahead and dress how you like.
In my field of Manhattan MBA consultants, lawyers and bankers it’s unheard of not to wear a nice suit (usually blue or grey) to an interview.
Well, I don’t work for an engineering firm, I work for a professional services firm. To a certain extent, the engineering skills are secondary. The people with the skills we look for are a dime a dozen. The trick is finding people with the right temperament and attitude. We have hired people who have excellent technical skills but their manner is abrasive and inflexible and they are a disaster. Their coworkers don’t respect them, it creates a leadership problem and all this translates into bad client service.
It was a polite way of saying “I think you’re acting like a jerk”.
As I asked before, give me examples of appropriate sentenses using the word “damn” in an interview context. Otherwise, I’m not interested in your opinion of my interviewing style.
“Hi, my name is Eric Stratton, I’m damn glad to meet you.” 
“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”
sigh Which is exactly what I’ve been saying all along. If you interview for a banking job, where a suit. If you are interviewing for being a Google programmer, probably not a good idea.
AHunter3- very funny, from page one.
Some adults in 2006 are bothered by the word damn? I’m speechless. Seriously. Ususally people who feel this way are religious types, to which I say ‘if cursing is so bad (not that damn has qualified for decades), why isn’t there a commandment against it’? For people who this bothers, what actual effect does hearing a curse do to you? Make you physically ill? Make you feel “dirty”? As for the argument it shows lack of a good vocabulary, how unbelivably junior high.
Welcome to Earth! 