When I first started in the work environment 35 plus years ago… Thinking back in 1995… I was in a retail print shop known as Kinkos. The dress code was business casual however we had to wear a button-down blue shirt with Kinkos logo and khaki pants. Sneakers were allowed but look down upon. This was a rule not the exception. Even on hot summer days we have to have the button down but we could wear short sleeve button downs which were cooler (temperature wise) then having to wear long sleeves in the summer. I spent 5 years there and towards the end the company started to relax the dress code a bit and we could start wearing golf shirts with the Kinkos logo. This was around 1998 when that came into fashion. But we still had to wear a khakis. It was the traditional business bro look for the early 2000s.
My next job required me to wear a little bit more of a formal button-down shirt tie and jacket with khakis or dress pants and dress shoes. This was an in an office environment and was my first developer job. Programming cobol perl and Pascal. This was about 1998… Then all the sudden around 2000 the business casual became the dress code. Most of the sales people that were over the age of 30 at the time kept the formal business dress code going while anyone under 30 that was in sales was doing the business bro golf shirt khakis… Meanwhile in the bowels of the building where the mainframes and web servers were the developers and programmers started to shed even the golf shirts for more over the top button down think guy fury or Hawaiian shirts. Some days they were even wearing shorts.
Nowadays with the work at home culture it’s whatever you can get away with in your basement. I was on a company call with 150 plus people today and just went through the images and again anyone over 50 seem to at least have a golf shirt on and anyone under 30 especially the 20-year-olds fresh out of colleges couldn’t be bothered to put anything other than a sweatshirt on. There were a couple people in either marketing or accounting that look like they had pajamas on.
My dude this is coming from somebody who is wearing a UMass sweatshirt. I haven’t worn hard pants since before the pandemic.
Just my observation that all form of dress code seems to be out the window. Unless you are at a highfalutant shindig with bankers and power brokers the non-tech type dress code is optional.
