Sure - these days employers are a lot better at disguising that as a reason for firing people.
People really do make judgements based on appearances, for better or worse.
You couldn’t have picked better examples of things where there is a superficial way of doing things and a good way of doing things that are, unfortunately, difficult to distinguish to the untrained eye.
It’s easy to make a security plan, for instance, that looks nice and shiny and comforting and yet is utterly useless. Schneier calls this security theater. The TSA’s entire existence is based on security theater; it is a façade designed to be politically acceptable. The same thing goes on in IT departments. The endless treadmill of new password policies is just one of many useless security policies.
The smart IT guy is indeed going to be contemptuous at best of policies that promote superficial implementations of documentation, comments, security, etc. You have apparently confused this with contempt for the real thing, which is useful but usually more expensive and time consuming than management is willing to pay for.
Check your dress code, assuming you have one. Every workplace dress code I’ve ever seen has had language like “clean and in good repair” or “free of stains or tears.” Looking more slovenly than usual* may be a moot point, whether your boss minds or not.
As for the people who are shocked, shocked I say, at the notion that someone who doesn’t care about clothes has a couple hundred dollars of clothes in one load, I have to wonder where you buy your clothes, or how much stuff you wash at once. If you’re buying new, office-type clothing is going to run you in the neighborhood of $20 per article, even at Walmart. If you have, say, three pairs of pants and seven shirts in a load of laundry, that’s a reasonable sized load and a couple hundred bucks.
*Bear in mind I’m nobody’s idea of the office fashionista. I’m the sort of grown-ass woman who wears Eeyore pajamas and doesn’t change when someone calls to say they’re coming over. I wrinkle clothing, even wrinkle-resistant stuff, just by thinking about putting it on. I perpetually dribble things onto my bosom. Animal hair appears on my clothing five minutes after I lint-roller myself when I’m not even in the same building with any animals. When I say the ink stains look slovenly, I mean slovenly.
Get a can of hair spray and spray it on all the ink spots. Let it set for a few minutes and wash the clothes normally. I’ve used this method a hundred times, and it definitely will take out the ink. Good luck!
It’s the alcohol in the hairspray that works. And alcohol is much cheaper.
I was going to ask the opposite. Most retail or department stores in a typical mall sell dress shirts for anywhere from $50 to $150 or more. The cheapest I’ve seen dress shirts is $30 at Men’s Warehouse.
That’s nothing special about IT, though. THere are very few fields that 10 years from now the clothes anyone was wearing would matter over the content or quality of their work.
That issue is beside the point.
Just because you think it doesn’t matter doesn’t make it so. If the company wants an environment where people don’t come in looking like slobs, than it is important to the company.
Exactly. And this is where we get to the irrelevant “moral” question. When the OP, or anyone else who disagrees, is the owner of the company and maker of the rules, he or she can decide what is acceptable. If one thinks it’s immoral for employees not to be able to walk around looking however they’d like, fine; that’s a completely different matter. If the OP’s current employer falls under that category, fine again; but then I don’t see the purpose of this thread. If the owner has a certain standard and an employee doesn’t want to adhere to that standard, it’s his or her choice to remain in said company’s employ or not.
Maye someone should start a thread regarding what should or should not be acceptable work attire, since I think that’s more to the point. Or better yet, “should an employee’s talent trump the dress code?”
Either way, this has veered so far away from what was actually posed that I can’t keep straight what we’re actually talking about anymore.
Look, man, I know you’re a high roller here and all ;), but a trip to the J.C. Penney website will show you you can get a men’s dress shirt for $15 even before they’re on sale. I’m not expecting GQ out of a back-office IT drone.
Deliberately so.
Er, I AM IT management. There are a lot of IT guys who simply do not understand security whatsoever, but who believe they do and who do not want to follow the plan. There are also a lot of guys who are openly contemptuous of “security theater” but who also don’t seem to understand when the contract says “must meet NIST 800-53 Moderate Baseline or better” that you don’t get to then skimp on those requirements just because you think they’re theater. Your judgement on what security measures are relevant is not more important than whether or not we get paid for the contract.
Those bad behaviors in IT personnel, in my experience, correlate uniformly with slovenly personal hygiene and dress and other unprofessional work habits.
Your opinion of what matters and what actually matters may not be the same.
I have never once met an IT guy who was both a slob to the extreme of wearing STAINED clothing and who also (for example) kept up documentation to my and/or corporate standards.
So if someone is stealing, for example, you think that requires “legal maneuvering”?
Enjoy your well-dressed drones and your life in middle management. You have an incurable “employee” mindset, I fear.
Then you are not very familiar with IT , back in the dot com days there folks who came to work in their PAJAMAS, but still kept their documents together enough to sell their ideas for MILLIONS.
I found this thread… Erm, it was interesting. There were a few times I was like “I have something to say on that!” Then it went in a different direction. Therefore I will over-simplify my responses and be unapologetic about not explaining further.
- Try to get the clothes clean, or get new clothes.
- A skilled slob is still a slob.
- Stop being butt-hurt, it’s not helping.
- Now a grammar fight? Srsly?
- Now a discussion about what constitutes legal termination?
- Can’t you be fired for any non-protected reason (in USA)?
- I will now take a Tylenol and go to bed.
End of line.
You should strive for that, Oh Great Spotted One.
Become a nurse, we often have pen stains on our pockets. So I will tell you rubbing alcohol often gets fresh stains out, and can fade older ones, but no guaranteeing you will have clean fresh clothes.
About pen and ink stains… I will wear black or navy pants with pen stains in the pen pockets.
I will NOT wear scrub tops with stains at all. Fortunately they seem to be making scrubs out of some miracle release fabric and pen stains (and all stains) seem to come out much better than they used to. Or maybe I am just buying better fabric than when I was a student nurse.
As for wearing your clothes NO NO NO. Especially if the stains are near crotch, butt, or nipples.
I was going to argue with you, but then I remembered the startup I used to work at for the past 2 years had Wear Pajamas to Work days.
The purpose of having a dress code at work really has nothing to do with the performance of individual workers. My performance doesn’t suffer if I work from home in my sweatpants. Although it may suffer if I get distracted by the TV, etc, but I digress. The corporate dress code is about maintaining a certain image and brand for the company. Tech nerds like to think that doesn’t matter, but if it doesn’t matter, then why do Silicon Valley startups let people wear Birkenstocks and T shirts?
If you are in technology at a company where a “creative, casual place for eccentric geniuses” is not the image they want to portray, chances are they are not going to be as tolerant of eccentric dress habits.
You ever notice how most of those innovators are out of business, and the ones that are left all seem to be able to look presentable at stockholder meetings?
I really don’t get the thread. My only thought to OP was “You’ve got red on you.”