I worked on the American trading floor of a Swiss bank. After the crisis, Zürich decided to reign in us free-wheelers. So they came out with a new dress code [1]:
"Among the 'dos' and 'don’ts' for women: 'Make sure to touch up hair regrowth regularly if you color your hair.' Men are commanded to, 'Schedule barber appointments every four weeks to maintain your haircut shape.'
Neither sex is allowed to 'allow their underwear to appear,' wear short-sleeved shirts or, strangely, cuff links."
We all bought ridiculously-coloured suits (the bankers, being bankers, went along); the rules were pared back. Goldman Sachs has always had an antiquated dress code for people who will never come within fifty feet of a client.
Goldman Sachs has always had a ridiculously antiquated dress code for people who will never come within fifty feet of a client.
When I was much younger I didn't understand the concept of people who never had to deal with clients having a dress code but now I sorta do: the company is trying to create or promote the concept that everyone in the company is a member of the same team and have more in common with each other than they do with outsiders. Whether or not this actually works I don't know, but that's the only thing that makes sense. Same reason I guess the military puts everyone in camo these days, even people well behind the front lines.
Common dress absolutely drives a certain esprit de corps. The irony in my example is that the corporate code ruined the informal one we'd developed over the years (white dress shirt, fleece or vest and brown shoes with tan slacks or black shoes with light pinstripes). Before the rebellion, I could identify, on the street, our teams (and who were the interns--black suits with skinny ties, almost all of them). Afterwards, each desk went its own separate way.
In an office setting, dress is better used as a signal than a driver. If your team isn't, over the years, picking up cues from one another then maybe there's a level of social bonding that you, as the manager, are neglecting to forment. (Or your team doesn't have to be that close to be effective.) Social psychology gives a lot away for free if you're halfway perceptive.
It would seem that as an American you refer to a white shirt - but what do you term that which I (as a Briton) would call a dress shirt? (Worn with evening, or the most formal of morning attire. That is, with your -ahem- tuxedo!)
I've been searching around (self-proclaimed) 'all American' clothing sites - it seems 'shirt' -> 'dress shirt', and 't-shirt' -> 'shirt'.
I suppose it makes sense that as a new garment starts to dominate it adopts the shorter name - I haven't really noticed it over here though, except with polo shirts, but even there I'd say the more common contraction is 'polo'.
If Cialdini's Influence is to be believed, everyone says they don't treat people wearing (or driving) nice stuff better, but subjecting this to scientific scrutiny reveals that they overwhelmingly and significantly do.
If that's true then dressing well is pretty damn rational in general, and especially if money's on the line.
As an Indian immigrant to Minnesota in the 1970s, my dad adopted a habit of ALWAYS wearing a suit. This gave him the benefit of the doubt in a lot of interactions where he wouldn't have otherwise had it. He kept up that habit for a long time and wore a suit to parent teacher conferences, my 4th grade violin "concert," etc. It most certainly got him a deference from others and did its job admirably.
He never got OK with my habit of wearing jeans and T-shirts even as an adult because he couldn't grasp how different my experience was from his.
That's something I got from my dad as well - dress for the job you want,not the one you have. I also found that dressing well fixes at least some of the age discrimination you face as a young person, you get treated much better while wearing a suit and a tie than when just wearing a t-shirt or a plain shirt.
Well, obviously that was an advice given by a working man trying to punch above his weight and be treated seriously in situations where most people from his background weren't. It worked for him, and it worked for me when I was looking for jobs, houses, had to do official business and run a company. I suppose a situation like you described has never crossed my dad's mind because it's just such a unique problem to have. As with any advice - use common sense?
Ideologies defy common sense; if someone believes a suit is always appropriate, they might not accept that there are contexts where it isn't. Likewise the other way around.
For some roles, it's not petty. For example, for a sales role, you'd expect your salesman to be able to fit in at a client right from the first visit. If they can't do that at your company, that's a negative indicator for them.
My dad, whose dad was from Poland, did the same...always wore a suit to seemingly just try to make the statement that he wanted to belong...similarly thought it not feasible for me to wear jeans and t shirts.
I tend to do the opposite. I distrust people who wear suits, especially in settings where it's not common to do so. I see it as a possible indicator that they are trying to hide their limitations.
For example, people giving their talk wearing a suit at a scientific conference? Very high chance of bad science. If you do amazing research you don't need a suit to impress anyone, the ideas you present will be more than enough.
>I see it as a possible indicator that they are trying to hide their limitations.
Fir myself, I don't know if I see it as that, but I certainly see it as an indicator that they might be the kind of person who judges /other people/ based on how they dress.
I don't care how you dress, but if you care how other people dress, I'm definitely judging you for that.
so you are biased to hipsters who who take care to dress like it looks like they don't care, and you might be the kind of person who judges /other people/ based on how they dress.
100%. I actually grew to like wearing a suit because when you're wearing a suit and somebody else isn't, there's a certain kind of cultural deference you get in many situations that is pretty handy from a business and a social perspective.
Ish. Precisely because the suit is a corporate uniform, it can be medium-to-low status in a lot of contexts. Traditionally, servants would always dress slightly more formally than the people they serve, so being overdressed can send the wrong message. If the suit isn't of impeccable cut and quality, you can often look like a used car salesman or an overly-eager intern. The extreme example would be arriving at a cocktail reception in black tie - you risk being directed to the kitchen and handed a tray of canapes.
As often as not, a well-cut sport coat and trousers play as higher status than a suit. It explicitly signals that you're dressing well by choice rather than diktat. Many semi-formal flourishes can carry this connotation - brown dress shoes, a knit tie, an oxford shirt or a flamboyant pocket square.
I've never been forced to wear one in my professional life, so I dunno about that. But I'll wear one by choice on occasion. Even when I was working a day job I'd just wear a suit some days. My boss would think I was interviewing (I wasn't, usually), but it's really just because it is an easy, straightforward confidence boost.
Ehh. Every boss I've ever worked for after my initial out-of-college gig has known that I interview regularly, once every quarter at least; it was never anything personal or because of dissatisfaction, just "I like networking and I like seeing how the trends in the market are evolving". I usually didn't wear a suit to those, though, for the other reason: tech people get weird about well-dressed people and think they're "fakes" or whatever.
> tech people get weird about well-dressed people and think they're "fakes" or whatever.
There's some historical precedence there. Up until ~10-15 years ago the fakers and know-nothings used to always wear suits. They were the guys who pulled the purse strings, but had no clue.
Unfortunately, since then they've learnt to mimic the dress of their prey. So now instead of the "empty suit" you have an "empty hoodie".
Here in Australia, it is only sales people (cars, real estate, finanicial products), politicians and the CEO in front of the press. There is a very good reason not to trust anyone in a suit anymore.
Hahaha oh man it's hard to tell on the internet but I hope this is facetious and you genuinely don't think restaurants are going to ever move you ahead in the queue.
It's just an observation that the more professional you look, the better you'll be treated. Yes, that's a fact. Yes, it's probably a sad commentary. And I rarely wear dress clothes - but I know when to, and I don't complain.
Anecdotally, I have worked at restaurants where we wouldn't seat people who were wearing denim, no matter how expensive it was.
Same way you differentiate between different stuff in the same class--quality, style, that sort of thing. I've never worried about that part of things, though, because the jump from "no suit" to "well-fitted suit" feels bigger to me than "well-fitted suit" to "well-fitted, expensive suit", and I mostly wear one because I like them, so I haven't indulged.
I've failed dev interviews for dressing too up and too down (both oddly in the same search!). If you can ascertain the standards ahead of time it's definitely helpful. In the absence of trusted guidance my current policy is a suit no tie and a shirt colored other than white and stubble or beard. It certainly won't tick everyone's boxes but if someone is looking for evidence that you own a suit it's there, and if they're looking for evidence that you're not trying to win the job through pageantry it's there. If they're looking for some more specific aesthetic qualifications they should have specified.
Yes, but I wouldn't want to spend time with someone who treats me better if I wear a suit rather than jeans, nor would I want to work at a place where such an attitude is common. I'd rather pass up on all the opportunities nice clothes would give me, so I can be myself and surround myself with people who think and feel like me. We are all apes trying to act like something else. A couple of pieces of cloth matter not.
But as GS just learned, if you relax the dress code, you can pay people less. so, dressing well is rational for employees, but dropping back offic dress code is rational for employers
Presumably, they can pay less / attract more staff for the same money because the talent they seek has a desire to not follow their dress code, which they will trade against other monetary and non-monetary benefits.
In that situation, voluntarily following a dress code that you don't enjoy following is illogical. As illogical as taking a voluntary pay cut.
When you attain a certain level of enlightenment and become aware of the mind hacks being employed by the powers that be, well then you can no longer stand them. Or, you chose to take part of them and use as leverage to achieve your goals I Suppose.
Those are not contradictory. You can choose to live most of your life so that you get as much freedom as you can and is important to you. But also use your knowledge as tools to take advantage of your environment.
Too many people makes it about conformism or morality. But really it's giving too much credit to it: we are just making animal behavior very sophisticated. It's no use to blame or get angry, or it's good to just do like everyone else. Just make the best of it, it's the reality you live in. And if you want to change it, you need to see it for what it is anyway so starting by that is always a good step.
A strict dress code is a double-edged sword for a professional services company. If your staff look identical, you're actively promoting the idea that they are interchangeable commodities. Think about the private-sector employers with the strictest and most distinctive uniforms - by and large, they're fast-food restaurants. That's not necessarily the brand image that an investment bank might want to portray.
The word "company" itself is military in origin, Latin "companio", soldiers who lived and ate together in a mess/barracks. In the modern day armies still use the term, several platoons make a company, several companies make a battalion.
Schools and sports teams also have uniforms, if that helps set your mind at ease...
Thanks for your opinion, but you are completely wrong. The military and commercial worlds have been cross-pollinating each other's organisational ideas for centuries. The fundamental problem is the same: one of coordinating large groups of people to achieve a common goal via a hierarchical structure.
Taking small similarities between 95% of society vs a specific entity designed to manage dangerous crisis to justify anything. In that case dress code, which is also overkill.
This is no longer all that true. A lot of "trouble" one finds, even as a teenager, can keep you out of the military. You might be able to get a special waiver. After all, they want to only enlist upstanding citizens into the military. The days of offering young offenders military service rather than legal trouble is basically over.
It does still remain on of the US's largest jobs programs, though I'm not sure this is the goal of the military. It does make reducing military spending rather tricky since so many livelihoods depend on it.
You're a part of the same team and you need to wear these outfits which you will likely never wear outside of work, but the huge bonus goes to the client favoring sales team, and no - we won't pay for the garb we require you to maintain the illusion that we are all equals!
Honestly, one of the things I absolutely love about tech/Silicon Valley is nobody cares at all how you dress.
Although, I noticed the sale force offices unofficial uniform:
Brown shoes brown belt designer jeans and some dry-cleaned blue shirt and a blazer...
"Look at how casually uniquely I conform to the office uniform!"
SV absolutely has a dress code. Try showing up to work as an engineer "overdressed" in a casually dressed team and see what happens. Or dress like the sales team when you're part of engineering, etc.
I'm old enough to not care sometimes and to play the game sometimes and to know the difference
Tell a suit wearer that they should dress casual tomorrow and they'll say OK. Tell a geek they have to wear a suit tomorrow and they'll freak out. Now tell me who cares more about clothes?
As a current Goldman Strat I can confirm that the hoodie-wearer is certainly out earning the majority. Only the traders are paid well, everyone else is on a less than competitive wage based on an illusion of how it "used to be". Historically (10+ years ago) the total compensation was accounted for by a big bonus but these days it is non existent.
Almost every VP I know in NYC/LDN makes less than a fresh grad at Google in the bay area.
True. There is a broader point that holds though, average tech salaries are above or equal to some careers that assume daily suits, even if NYC investment banking isn't one of them.
I think it's mostly tribal signalling, " I am not a suit" kind of thing. Although never having to deal with dry cleaning is an incentive, too.
> Honestly, one of the things I absolutely love about tech/Silicon Valley is nobody cares at all how you dress.
Things aren't quite as loose as you seem to think. If you want to see where the boundaries are, start gradually dressing more and more informally, and note when you start drawing criticism from your manager and senior coworkers. I expect you'll get more attention than you want if you were to come to work shirtless, say.
I dress for myself. I dress well, casual and comfortable. I shall not wear a suit to suite others, nor will I dress like a bum. I have found a set of clothes I like, looks good and I feel comfortable I. And I buy five-to-ten of the outfits and I wear the same thing visually every day, though they are physically different garments.
So to get the tech vibe, start giving out free Goldman Sachs t-shirts and golden colored jeans to the techies. If you give it away for free, all the techies will start wearing them all the time.
I've wondered about that for signalling. Say for example there is a revered tech company in your city. Get their tshirt and people might assume you work there. Go to Meetup and more people may want to chat with you etc.
I was pretty happy with what I got for the money I paid. I got a solid red suit, and for $100 USD, I got a set of pants, the suit, and a tie, and they have held up pretty well.
Lehman's was suit-for-everyone too, though what was really aggravating (other than women seemingly being allowed to wear beach clothes and forcing the room to be heated until all the men in suits sweated) was the 'dress down' Friday which was a second expensive wardrobe which required a stay-at-home spouse to maintain. So the techies generally stayed in suits on a Friday.
Cuff links FFS - when I dress up (about once a year) I always wear dress shirts with cufflinks. Sounds like the code was written by the sort of person that orders red wine with fish :-)
"James Bond: Red wine with fish. Well that should have told me something."
The point of the cuff links ban is not to let the lower tiers look as good as the executives.
Protip for interested readers: if you must wear a suit and are on a budget or confined by a dress code, try to pick one off the rack with the best fabric you can find. Take it to a tailor, which is not that expensive. Have the jacket cut to fit, and have the buttons on the sleeves altered to have actual buttonholes. As you are able to afford it, spend the same amount of money as the total cost of the suit on shoes, 2 shirts, and 3 ties. Learn about tie stripe patterns (which often have coded military or school affiliations, a sort of secret handshake); otherwise, fine ties that work with your hair or eye color. If you're not experienced or confident in shopping for clothes, get a friend who is. Woman often understand men's clothes better than men.
I'm not into suits and ties either, but when you have to wear them you might as well take comfort in knowing that you look good instead of feeling awkward.
As for dress shoes being hideously uncomfortable, that's really a matter of fit and quality. For years, I walked several miles per day in NYC in leather-soled dress shoes and they were perfectly comfortable. Now I kinda' regret that I wear a pair of running shoes to my tech job and all my nice dress shoes are gathering dust in my closet.
Having grown up in Switzerland, I understand where the advice came from. There, bankers are more servile. It could be seen as inappropriate for a banker to be dressed as if about to enjoy something luxurious. As you observe, however, it translates stupidly across cultures.
I remember working in a bullpen among other young, enthusiastic, hard-working, poorly groomed males coding in the horror show that C++, CORBA, and Oracle could put on for a production environment during that first 90s dot.com build up.
Meanwhile the president/CEO guy came wandering through the production gallows with our manager speaking about how next-round VCs were going to show up tomorrow for a looksee.
I asked my manager if we should dress up for that. The CEO threw his hands out and said, "No, no, no! Wear that penguin shirt and flip flops and shit. We are a start-up."
If you view human beings as perfectly rational machines then dress codes make no sense, but that's not what we are. Dressing formally puts you in a different frame of mind. It reminds you that your work is serious and that different standards apply to how you act and talk than in your casual personal life. If you dress to work the way you'd show up to a dive bar, then you're that much closer to behaving like you do at a dive bar.
Economist Tyler Cowen makes another good argument for formal dress: it is a vehicle for social mobility.[1] In a society that values formal dress, you can signal your intent to move up the social hierarchy by how you dress yourself. If you want to become an elite, then dress like one and people will take you seriously. But when the elites adopt casual dress in their professional lives, what is left are much more subtle and hard-to-adopt class signifiers: manners of speaking, interests, childhood experiences, travel, etc.
Yet another problem is that dressing "smart casual" is actually more difficult and expensive than wearing a suit. A suit is a great equalizer. A $2000 suit is not all that different than a $300 suit. And you can very easily get away with having only two or three suits. But smart casual is much more difficult, subtle, and expensive to pull off.[2]
> Dressing formally puts you in a different frame of mind. It reminds you that your work is serious and that different standards apply
I wonder, if appearances matter that much, would your staff believe that they can be publicly wrong, admit mistakes, or take any risks that would lead to either scenario? Would they ever ask a question, when it signals they don't already know everything? It seems like once you take on such a formal dress code persona, the ethics of "serious business" might strangle your company's long term survival odds.
> In a society that values formal dress, you can signal your intent to move up the social hierarchy by how you dress yourself. If you want to become an elite, then dress like one and people will take you seriously.
IMO, when a peer dresses formally, I trust them less. It signals an endorsement that appearances matter more than results, and that promotion up the social ladders is important enough to you that you might end up screwing me over if given the chance.
Ideally, social mobility shouldn't rely on the promoting the richest person up to managers and executives.
> Dressing formally puts you in a different frame of mind.
Actually, it makes me feel like I'm talking to a sales person. It is as if dressing up is used to conceal something about the intentions or shortcomings of the person. I probably don't explain it in the right way, but that is more or less the feeling it evokes.
Pretty much ditto. Well, maybe not ditto, but similar affect (and yes, I have suits I have to wear for public facing activities at work).
There's this assumption of "universal reference" in social signals, so for me to be told that "wearing a suit puts you in a different frame of mind", as in one which makes you work/feel better about yourself is completely wrong...in the sense of what frame of mind it puts you in.
For me, a suit is the uniform of the con-man, the salesman, the fraud, the bludger, the twit. You put on a suit because you want to fool people who can't think rationally and they're incapable of making judgments except by what you look like through signals of conspicuous consumption.
Imagine being constantly told that you should dress in a uniform with such connotations to make yourself psychologically feel better/superior (especially compared to clothes that you have yourself chosen because they do make you feel better).
Or, maybe we could just judge employees by whether they get the job done or not instead of how they dress up.
I've employed plenty of people, if anything those who were overly busy with how they looked tended to under-perform and used their dress as a way of compensation.
But when the elites adopt casual dress in their professional lives, what is left are much more subtle and hard-to-adopt class signifiers: manners of speaking, interests, childhood experiences, travel, etc
I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.
American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class.
Sorry, and I know that this is on NYT, not you, but what the utter fuck is that paragraph about the sandwich shop?
Walk through, say, Boston's North End. It's like walking into Italy. There are old men sitting in front of cafés muttering in Italian about the way the young folk dress. There are fresh pizzas and sandwiches with their smells wafting through the air. The streets are narrow, mostly pedestrian, and cobbled, with few cars coming and going. And, yes, if you go into a deli in the North End, you can buy cured meats with Italian names.
This is not a wealthy neighborhood. There was a period of time in the past when Italian-Americans were the subject of quite a bit of prejudice and stereotyping. It's news to me that Italian culture is somehow "completely illegible" to the poor, and I can't help but feel that whatever point the author wanted to make is lost or perhaps flawed.
(Somebody will say that the North End is uniquely Italian. Sure, but I grew up on the West Coast and learned about Italian sandwiches from an Italian sandwich shop anyway, because Italian sandwiches are not somehow confined to a tiny corner of Boston. Again, what the utter fuck.)
That's sometimes a sign that you're onto something. Donald Trump was mocked mercilessly. Looks like he got the last laugh.
The sandwich shop example is a little weak, but I agree with Brook's point. There is a cultural segmenting of American society into the top 20% and the rest, and it's a strong barrier to social mobility. At the college I attended, there was a clear social barrier between the kids from upper middle class urban families, and those from lower middle class suburbia. The differences in interests and life experiences were profound and hard to overcome. Ironically, the much derided fraternity system was one of the few effective measures for bridging that gap, by creating common experiences and a new shared identity.
And half his family / cabinet is implicated in relaxing sanctions against the Russian kleptocracy in exchange for information damaging to his political rivals.
Regarding hard to adopt class signifiers, this is definitely true, however, this is the case regardless of whether everyone is wearing a suit or an anime t-shirt. As for the second part, that's also true, but the argument is a bit moot because having a "smart casual" dress code is not really that much different than a suit dress code. It is casual only in name. When I hear casual I think of a job I had where people wore almost anything they wanted (from "smart casual" to sports jerseys with low-hanging shorts) And I didn't notice any dress-based discrimination there, not even subtle.
But my main problem with the idea in the article is:
> The problem is this: If everything is casual, what exactly do you do to show your seriousness?
> There isn’t such a simple way to visually demonstrate you are determined to join the ranks of the upwardly mobile. Looking smart on “casual Friday” may get you a better date, but the boss will not sit up and take notice.
You show this through professional accomplishments - deep and wide technical ability, doing your job well, being reliable, resolving problems others get stuck on, ending up as one of the people both coworkers and clients gravitate towards for advice/help with difficult problems and so on. This stuff gets noticed.
The author seems to hold the view that it should be possible to rise up by playing the game of workplace social dynamics and that the fact that this is difficult in our field compared to more traditional fields presents a problem. But is that really a bad thing?
He is likely not a software developer, but I've heard this "I don't know what I have to do to be taken more seriously" sentiment (only a couple of times) from people in SD. However those were people who were weaker technically but had a strong desire to get ahead, manage projects and people, etc. Their problem had nothing to do with discrimination based on social class and everything to do with discrimination of superficial and/or narrow professional knowledge. At most companies, expertise shows, and usually very quickly.
His "positive" example of China etc is:
> The young and ambitious really can set themselves apart from the slackers, even if doing so looks conformist and stifling when multiplied and observed on a larger scale. Societies of upward mobility, when based on large and growing business enterprises, look and feel somewhat oppressive. Much as many of us might not want to admit it, the casual and the egalitarian are closer to enemies than to allies.
But why would we even want the "young and ambitious" to set themselves apart through the way they dress or by conforming in other ways, and why would we want to decide who is a "slacker" based on that? People can set themselves apart by being exceptional at what they do. Nobody can claim this doesn't, overall, work very well in the software industry. The author is basically complaining about the lack of ability to advance in your career through superficial means.
I know some people prefer money over morality and integrity, but personally, I am satisfied that these guys have to struggle to get people to work for them. In my ideal world, people would grow spines and would not work for these shady big companies.
Goldman and its ilk may be responsible for the financial crisis, but the financial crisis was painful for ordinary people because Wall Street stopped performing its function in the economy. Business ground to a halt and companies laid off workers in large part because credit dried up.
If these big shady companies are immoral because of that time their operations slowed, imagine what would happen if you got your wish.
GS relaxing its tech dress code is the first sign of the of the end of the business cycle. The second is a management committee member taking up DJing.
Goldman Sachs might get more traction with tech talent if they drop their proprietary in-house language and database; Slang and SecDB. See 'Confessions of a Slang coder at Goldman Sachs' [1], and 'The hidden weakness inside Goldman Sachs?' [2]. Of course, it is considered by some to be the secure sauce behind their secret source but I expect its a factor, especially if they are trying to hire from the Silicon Valley crowd.
If you want my attention, the thing to offer is an actual office with an actual door that closes. (Private, semiprivate, whatever—just not a thousand of my closest friends and a jet engine or two.)
Odd, I worked at Goldman Sachs in London in approx. 1999-2001 and visited the New York office a few times and remember it being the usual "smart/casual" (veering to very casual). When did it smarten up?
I visited their NYC offices in 2008. we were talking to them about some openstack/cloud stuff at the time. I went in jeans and a polo. My contact there emailed after saying the meeting went well, but to please wear a dress shirt and no jeans next time. And I wasn't even an employee! ;)
During those years, London switched from suit (with tie) to suit (tie optional).
I don't recall New York being much more casual, but it might have.
Back then, in NY, they put a foosball table on the 26th floor (IIRC) of 85 Broad St for the quants ("Strats"), in an effort to compete as an employer with the first dot.com boom (foosball = cool, right).
Once the tech bubble burst, the foosball table was gone pretty quickly though! :)
The London head office was in a listed art deco building on Fleet Street, beautifully renovated with a great gym and waterfall, quickly dubbed the "NASDAQ 5000 memorial waterfall"... (It only hit 5000 again in 2015)
I never got the point of dress codes. When everyone dress (boringly) alike I tend to view them as mindless drones and my respect for them drops to near zero.
Show up in some unusual or creative outfit however and I'm so much more willing to believe you are an intelligent and interresting human being.
I feel like a black and white picture doesn't really contribute to the conversation. I assume it's meant as a joke but either way, I try to downvote when something doesn't contribute (as opposed to when I don't agree).
Hello? It's not just a black and white picture, it's the 1927 Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics, the joke being that most of the "mindless drones in suits" in it won Nobel prizes.
I figured they must be prominent people, but in that picture I don't see much. It won't be pink and purple but I can imagine tints of green and other colors that shake things up a bit.
I have different opinion on this one. I will be very happy to wear suit if you pay me executive level salary and I don't mind even if I work as an individual contributor and write code. But if you tell me that it is an organizational policy and you have to be dressed smart because you might bump the CEO of the company or any future client in the elevator but we will still pay you a salary of 60-100k and sit a cube all day head down and keep working your ass then sorry to say that "Goldman sacs, go f yourself"
I once saw a press release about Goldman or one of these other big money firms and how they were going to build software "like a startup". In the photo that accompanied it were a group of guys wearing hoodies that had some lame slogan on it, trying to woo Silicon Valley talent to come to finance by showing how they were cool now.
Under the hoodies were expensive shirts and ties.
The picture had exactly the opposite effect of what it intended- it showed how fake and false the 'culture' they were portraying was.
I think 400 is likely attainable for the hedge funds, no idea about other fields. The HFT guys pay about 250 (total comp, e.g, salary and bonuses) for a newly minted PhD.
No way. £250K for a new Ph.D. with zero experience in industry? Even a low latency whiz kid with deep Linux kernel optimisation will just about maybe make £250K in a very good year.
So, if you want us "techs" to work on antiquated languages like Slang, then cut us some slack in our slacks.
Tech is IB land is billions of dollars, yet, the actual end delivery, the systems, the codebases, the platforms are of a far lower quality than most outside could ever suspect.
Bonus-driven development is partially to blame there though.
Oh cool... If only this happened six months ago when I had my interview. Then again, attire was the smallest problem of the interview.
I remember reading Glassdoor to see what working for the company as a dev was like and most of them complained about how low the pay was compared to tech.
Maybe they should pay more for a wider talent pool?
I've only ever done tshirt and jeans stuff. I couldn't imagine wearing a suit every day, but it might be fun to have a "dress up Fridays".
Ideally, anyone could wear whatever they want whenever they want. In practice, it doesn't seem to work out this way, even at the tshirts and jeans companies.
Only if you are a Trader or an Investment Banker (note not the other 98% of people working at the firm i.e. Tech, Quant, Operations, Finance, HR) in which case you are already the handful of people such as the ultra high paid at Google as either your career is going to be very short once they find out you can't make money or you are very good (very few people) and you will make a fortune.
In London at least this was not the case. Startup salaries today are often at the same level as bank internships. The US (particularly SF) is a very different market.
You are comparing a bank to a startup which is an absurd comparison. Compare Goldman to Google and guess what Google wins (even in London).
Banking salaries have been static for 10+ years. Bank internship salaries are designed to allure and impress but 5+ years in and the salary does not change.
On another note there are some startups who can pay very very well in London but they do not advertise these salaries.
I honestly think finance is overall a worse deal, I used to think it was the panacea of making money. There is the chance that you can make 600 - 800k in finance as a senior developer, but you need to either be incredibly intelligent or incredibly hard working, generally you need an ivy league degree.
A year or so ago I received an offer from a well known quant hedge fund, I spoke to a google recruiter to see if they could match, to my surprise right there on the phone he told me they never get beat out and that they would beat the offer by 50k.
The hours are much better in tech, you get treated better, and at Facebook/Google/Amazon/other big tech firm you have less variance in pay.
That recruiter must have been pretty inexperienced to talk like that.
You should seriously question your compensation if a recruiter is willing to top you up 50k without a second thought. Chances are you are severely underpaid.
When you have another offer on the table the best move for the recruiter is to make the serious offer then and there and try take care of the situation to avoid any further bidding.
They want you for as cheap as they can get you but if someone else is willing to pay more then almost always they can afford it.
There are also a lot of fintech firms which pay more, and specifically advertise themselves as more 'hip' (e.g. Jane Street et al). Though I would imagine the good jobs are very hard to come by these days.
Started family, needed stable income and insurance, salary was still plenty to finance savings and a comfortable life in NYC. They also let me go remote without a second thought when I asked.
I quit last year to look after my kids and do my own thing, although the decision was driven more by boredom than any desire for more pay.
I sometimes wonder if I dressed better if I would be further along in my career, but honestly I think it's just made it really easy for me to identify people who understand and value my work.
There's this one guy high up in my company who I'm almost entirely convinced got his job because he wears nice suits and has an English accent. We have junior employees who know more about his area of speciality than he does.
I am just now realising that this case is still ongoing. That's crazy. A DA literally made it his mission to get the verdict reinstated:
'On April 4th, 2016, almost nine months after Aleynikov was acquitted by the NY Supreme Court, the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's office filed an appeal seeking to reinstate the guilty verdict'
Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I would not be surprised if Goldman kept applying pressure behind the scenes to ruin him.
>'On April 4th, 2016, almost nine months after Aleynikov was acquitted by the NY Supreme Court, the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's office filed an appeal seeking to reinstate the guilty verdict'
'After Vance very publicly staged an accusation and spending 5 years and reportedly $10 million on prosecuting the Abacus Federal Savings Bank for larceny, the bank and its employees were found not guilty on all 80 charges. Despite its small size, the Chinese-American family-run bank was the only New York bank so charged during the Great Recession, despite Vance admitting that Citibank, among others, had behaved badly. The story is well told in Steve James' feature-length documentary, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 11, 2016.'
n=2 is not much but there is at least initial indication of a pattern where this DA is very specifically seeking cases where he is in a much better position (more manpower, resources) than the prosecuted party to win. Going after the little guy. Nice.
I like wearing a dress shirt and wool pants because I like looking good. I'm not allowed to wear a tie (heavens forbid a coat) because I'll scare the other engineers and developers. At my last job, I wore a dress shirt (with a collar) and jeans one day, and my coworkers made me go home and change into a t-shirt and jeans. Seattle/Redmond area btw, it's incredibly relaxed here.
Dude. The answer to that request is to laugh and say "if you think I'm going to rely on my personality to get laid, you're kidding yourself.". And then, just always dress well.
There's never anything wrong with looking the best you can. There are far worse things to be known for.
It wasn't a request. It was teammates constantly asking where I was interviewing across the day. One team member made that same "joke" four times in a row, in the span of a few minutes.
I can't recall being in any work situation since the 80's where dressing up was even a good idea. I mean, wearing suit, tie etc would identify you as being non-technical and hence not worth listening to.
Fascinating to hear that there are still workplaces with dress rules in 2017.
I don't think you understand who is thought to be "not worth listening to." This industry is filled with the software development equivalent of CAD technicians thinking they're engaged in deeply analytical work and are generally well respected simply because they can regurgitate some trite CS trivia.
The reality is that the effects of the industry's arrogance have simply shifted form over the years. You think being able to dress in shorts and thongs at work is a measure of being respected ("recognition that the quality of our work isn't measured by how we dress") but that's simply not true.
There are very few successful companies where more than a very small handful of technical people are listened to or respected.
"Among the 'dos' and 'don’ts' for women: 'Make sure to touch up hair regrowth regularly if you color your hair.' Men are commanded to, 'Schedule barber appointments every four weeks to maintain your haircut shape.'
Neither sex is allowed to 'allow their underwear to appear,' wear short-sleeved shirts or, strangely, cuff links."
We all bought ridiculously-coloured suits (the bankers, being bankers, went along); the rules were pared back. Goldman Sachs has always had an antiquated dress code for people who will never come within fifty feet of a client.
[1] http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/797245