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Silicon Valley has a dress code
- slvv 13y agoI'd love to hear whether there are equivalent trends among women in the field, or what the challenges of dressing to be taken seriously as a woman in the valley are.
- Varcht 13y agoI'd find that interesting too. I was kind of shocked to see the majority of comments on tfa to be attacking the author for not doing that. To me it seems like it would be much more civil and productive to nicely request a follow up on women's fashion or (horrors) write it themselves.
- seanhandley 13y agoAgreed - the response was rather rabid. Frankly, men are easy to taxonomise into dressing habits. Female fashion is much more diverse!
- jamesdutc 13y agoNot at all surprised. I work in NYC, and the last time few times I was out in SV to speak at conferences and such, I was attired in my standard suit & tie. (I'm the guy with the dopey photo and name-in-bold on http://nycpython.org/ http://nycpython.org/ which I run.) This ends up working to my advantage. No one expects the guy in the suit to go up on stage and show off a Tweetable FFT in Python or give an in-depth talk on CPython internals.
- hnriot 13y agoTweetable FFT in Python haha! obviously if all you're doing is calling the np.fft package it would fit in 140 chars, but this is the same false argument that people make all the time, "5 line web server" etc.
- vhffm 13y agoOnly tangentially relevant, but he may be referencing this tweet: https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/399982619242156032 https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/399982619242156032
- jamesdutc 13y agoYep, that's the one! This came up at PyData NYC this past November. @jakevdp did most of the work; I just shortened it a bit to fit the 140-characters. https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/399982844803424256 https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/399982844803424256
- noinsight 13y agoOn that site it says you've attended PyCon Finland. What was it like, any good? (Obviously, I'm from Finland and I'm curious about what you think of the Python scene in Finland, I don't hear about Python much generally.)
- jamesdutc 13y agoPyCon Finland was great! http://fi.pycon.org/2013/ http://fi.pycon.org/2013/ I believe it was the first time they held the event; everything was well-organised and went smoothly. I gave my Generators talk, which went over pretty well. I met a lot of really cool Python programmers, and I'm looking forward to attending and speaking if they hold it again this year! (By the way, swing by #python.fi on IRCNet!)
- jyrki 13y ago2013 was actually the fourth time (I've been one of the orgs before) :) edit: And glad to hear you liked it!
- miohtama 13y agoCheckout: http://www.meetup.com/HelPy-meetups/ http://www.meetup.com/HelPy-meetups/ http://python.fi/ http://python.fi/ https://twitter.com/pythonfinland https://twitter.com/pythonfinland https://www.facebook.com/python.fi https://www.facebook.com/python.fi And because this is Finland come to #python.fi at IRCNet. We have had 100-150 PyCon attendees during the last two years. Meetups in Helsinki have 20-30 attendees. Disclaimer: I am one of the organizers.
- pbreit 13y agoArticle doesn't support the headline very strongly.
- steffan 13y agoBesides the obvious omissions of women, it's always hard for me to take an article seriously when there are obvious spelling errors.
- overgard 13y agoOh jesus, not this. If you included the subtleties of women's fashion you'd make the article about 4x longer. There's just way more going on there.
- steffan 13y agoI'm not trying to white-knight here. I know plenty of women engineers that fall into those categories as well - engineer/hoodie, sales/suit, etc. Would it be that hard in the Bay Area to find a woman engineer in jeans and a hoodie? It doesn't require an in-depth analysis of the entire breadth of womens' fashion to imply that yes, there are women engineers, and yes, a lot of them dress exactly like the men.
- stefan_kendall 13y ago"You know plenty of women." Great anecdote, bro. I'm sure that represents an accurate percentage representation of the population.
- steffan 13y agoNowhere did I make any claims as to the representation of women in the engineering / SV population other than that it is a non-zero quantity. Is it really that unreasonable not to ignore their participation?
- wyclif 13y agoAgreed. I thought, "Great, more political correctness juking on HN, exactly what it needs." What percentage of VCs, engineers, and coders are men again? To write an article like this isn't sexist. It's describing fashion for 90+% of the field as it exists now.
- overgard 13y agoMore proof that refusing to make a fashion statement is just as much of a statement as wearing something bold. (I'm not some crazy fashion person, I just think it's funny the way nerd culture shuns those that actually try)
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoI don't see anybody in that story refusing to make a fashion statement, quite the opposite. This is especially true for "nerd culture". Very few subcultures are less tolerant of people dressing differently.
- benched 13y agoIt's less of a statement. I put no thought into what I wear. If that's making a statement, I think it's a weak one.
- tikhonj 13y agoNo, there is still no dress code. Sure, there are trends and there is fashion, but it's all optional! Most programmers dress like other programmers, most designers dress like other designers and so on because most people dress like other people. It's just easier, and that's how fashion works. But you don't have to! There is no actual dress code. There are no actual rules¹. And most people in the industry won't look down at you for dressing differently (except maybe subconsciously). And people take advantage of this: I know plenty of engineers who wear button-down shirts, nice sweaters and blazers because the can--not everybody goes for jeans and a t-shirt. What people actually wear is not important. The dress code--or the lack thereof--is only important because it illustrates a deep principle that I think is very important to the SV culture: departing from petty rules and embracing as much individual freedom as possible. After all, individual freedom includes the freedom to conform! It's the freedom that's actually important, not what people do with it. ¹ Well, there are some ground rules--you can't just walk around naked all of the time--but they're very limited.
- mrxd 13y ago> Well, there are some ground rules… A while back I noticed some people use this phrase "ground rules" to talk about rules without making them seem so rule-like. Another one is "rules of the road". Thank you for demonstrating this phenomenon.
- overgard 13y agoJust for fun, try wearing a suit to a programming job. Nothing ostentatious, just a well fitted medium priced conservative suit. You'll quickly learn there isn't an explicit code, but there is certainly an implicit one. You'll get about the same reaction as if you wore parachute pants with a neon shirt.
- mikeash 13y agoThere seem to be a lot of people who think that "you must wear a suit" is a dress code, but "you can't wear a suit" is not. I assume it comes down to never considering that someone might ever wear a suit voluntarily, so thinking that forbidding it has no actual effect.
- jmduke 13y agoAs a general rule of thumb: judgmental people exist regardless of hobby, profession, or city of residence. Software people aren't some mystical species immune to bad personality traits, but I'm confident that the majority (if not the vast majority) of them won't particularly care what you're wearing as long as you're not an asshole. I'm not in Silicon Valley, but in Seattle, and I don't dress the part of an engineer -- lots of Ralph Lauren button downs and 511s -- and yet nobody has revoked my license to write code yet. Wear what you want to wear.
- cromwellian 13y agoI wear collared pull-over shirts and shorts with sandals practically everyday except when very cold. I don't own a single pair of jeans, when I need pants, I wear business casual. Among Googlers I don't think the t-shirt + jeans model fits engineers. I think it correlates more with what state your office is in and what your age is.
- jinushaun 13y agoSo true. I got so tired of dressing down all the time that I actually dress up instead. No one suspects I'm a programmer when I do.
- tomkinson 13y agoSilly.
- crapshoot101 13y agoTo this day, one of my greatest fish out of water experience is walking through the Mission in a suit and tie on my way to a formal dinner - I think I would have been less conspicuous if naked.
- spaceborn 13y agoGood god, the comments on this article. You'd think the author went deliberately out of her way to not photograph women, and that she did so as a personal affront to the commenters.
- stefan_kendall 13y agoA convenience sample is going to exclude women when you're targeting entrepreneurs, VCs, and engineers in the wild. It could also be that the author was just less intimidated by approaching men than women. I would feel awkward walking up to strange women and asking them if I could photograph them for an article I was writing. Maybe the article should be titled "Men's fashion in Silicon Valley", which would be more accurate.
- te_chris 13y agoThe author reads (or maybe doesn't know enough about clothes/fit) too much into the engineers choices: you can normally tell by awful fit of the clothes on people who just aren't that into fashion and don't need to be outwardly presentable. It's not that difficult and hardly a general rule, but anecdotally if the clothes don't fit that well then likely an engineer. To the author: read a few fashion blogs (hell even complex) and compare to your photos, those who had to be presentable were in clothes that fitted nicely.
- slvv 13y agoIt looks like the author has added a short piece explaining why she didn't cover women. I'm not really sure why she wouldn't have just included the one or two relevant sentences here in her original article. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/why-no-women-story-silicon-valley-fashion http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/why-no-women-story-si...