The unfair thing isn’t that it’s not written down though. It’s that it’s implicitly “wear whatever you want, except don’t look like old fashioned corporate Amer

The unfair thing isn’t that it’s not written down though. It’s that it’s implicitly “wear whatever you want, except don’t look like old fashioned corporate America” but claims to be “wear whatever”. Like the other poster mentioned about hardware vendors at Apple wearing suits, it’s probably not personal it’s just stereotypes at play. Google has a particular penchant for “watch out for tailgating” and expects all employees to challenge folks without badges. It’s not common to see other Google engineers in anything particularly formal, so it becomes a clear “hmm, I should make sure that person has a badge” or alternatively “hey security person, I don’t think they have a badge”.