It's kind of a mixture of clothing as a status uniform and rejection of that norm. Lawyers, managers and bankers wear suits and display their white collar statu

It's kind of a mixture of clothing as a status uniform and rejection of that norm. Lawyers, managers and bankers wear suits and display their white collar status, a high position in the social hierarchy. Salespeople continue with suits as a form of mimickery -- you won't get thrown out of the building quite as fast with a suit versus a hoodie or polo. But the image of suits in the workplace has been tainted with corporate looting, fraud, deception and mismanagement. Dressing like you work for Goldman Sachs is akin to declaring those behaviors as an aspiration. The causal dress counter-culture blurs the status lines that dress codes would otherwise draw. It reflects a mentality that people want leaders (or maybe even to be leaders) who are judged by the quality ideas, execution, and outcomes, versus their position in the org chart. Or the abolition of leaders entirely, holocratic style. It's true that at some level, Zuckerberg has enough status to show up to Facebook offices in a hoodie, and he's rich enough that even if investors gave him the boot he'd be well off. But I don't imagine most programmers showing up to work in hoodies do to broadcast how important they are.