I'll challenge this statement. I stopped shaving, ironing, and wearing more than many duplicates of one outfit explicitly so I could get serious about my work.

I'll challenge this statement. I stopped shaving, ironing, and wearing more than many duplicates of one outfit explicitly so I could get serious about my work. Time is my most valuable commodity, and I intend to use every moment I have attacking problems I care about. I like to think that I don't look like a slob, but by the qualities you cited, you would disqualify me off the bat, and given the rocks I've moved in my industry tenure, that would have been an absolutely misaligned signal and you would have lost out. Everything is about image _in some professions_ and _in some eras_. I will certainly stand on the side of trying to change that through my own actions, and given that the peers and mentors I most respect have similarly chosen to discard traditional models of image, I find myself in company I'm quite comfortable with. (And as sister posts have cited, the sheer existence of successful sites like CL, Enom, and HackerNews (which for all its minimalism and polish is by no means a "modern image"; I say this with nothing but pride to be very clear) indicates to me that even in site design image may be a cost function but is no substitute for quality. I have had clients JUMP at products that as you say, look like they're from the 90s, because they solved _real issues_ that they needed solved.)