dressCodes != qualityWork: Being Honest About Learned Behaviors In Software Development

It's wonderfully easy to forget how much of our day-to-day lives, world view, and causal relationships are in reality not truly ours; they were learned from our home base, our respective Bat Caves - our cultures. I say wonderfully easy because for many people the opportunity to see other cultures and their associated learned behaviors is never realised. However, when you do get a chance to see the world through the veil of a different society, it can lead to questions about your own that may be uncomfortable. And since software development is ALL about being uncomfortable (if you want to be good at it), I thought I'd tackle a topic that always rubs me the wrong way: culture-specific learned behaviors in the workplace. More specifically, the idea that a dress code has any objective effect on a final product deliverable in software development.

This is a highly divisive topic, but let's step back for a moment and establish some base definitions so we're all on the same page. An inherent or instinctual behavior is a response that you are born with, ie.one imbedded in your DNA. A learned behavior is exactly that, a conditioned response, often unconscious or integrated at a formative age, that forever colors your causal reality. Lastly, when I talk about causal reality I mean the set of actions and responses that make up how the reality around each of is constructed from moment-to-moment, often further reinforcing learned behaviors so deeply that we are fooled into treating them as inherent.

Now that the boring logistics are out of the way, we can move on to something a bit more interesting: the history of dress codes and how they came to mean so much to so many.

Historically, the idea and implementation of defined, situational dress codes was a conscious effort to differentiate individuals and groups along social, economic, racial and gender lines. After all, it's much easier to make subjective mental models of a person than to actually analyse why your mind works like that in the first place.

First point: If you hold any allusions about some storied history of good manners and professional conduct generating dress codes, you are mistaken. They were created for the sole purpose of dividing individuals and pre-defined groups based on subjective criteria (that the excluded groups didn't have any hand in making). 

Slowly this bled into the workplace and was co-opted into a division between professionals and non-professionals, a bar for how seriously to take someone. By the time the industrial revolution was over, the then-current generation was conditioned to denote a business suit as being 'worth' more than a mechanics uniform, which in turn was higher on the professional scale than say wearing shorts and flip-flops. Through the years this has spread to encompass facial hair, piercings, tattoos and other standard deviations from the norm.

Second point: There is an important distinction between dress codes and codes of conduct. I am in full favor of establishing the latter, as those support how we treat each other on an objective level. Do unto others and all that. I'm singling this out because mixing these two ideas together is very common. However, how a person treats a co-worker is in no way dependent on what either person is wearing. 

I honestly don't know where or when the "Look Good, Feel Good" and "Dress for Success" axioms historically come from, and it really doesn't matter for the scope of this article. What matters is that these sayings are taken at face value all the time without any further analysis. The truth is that what these kinds of sayings are propagating is more learned behaviors, and beyond that learned responses to other peoples learned behaviors. It's a vicious cycle, and very hard to break out of. But that's exactly the point; if you or your company want to implement a dress code go right ahead. I am simply advocating that you do it honestly, with full knowledge of why they exist in the first place. (Plus, my hope is that this approach will make it harder for intellectually run companies and industries to keep them around for the long-term).

We've seen some widespread removal of dress codes in software development, with varying success. Silicon Valley and the start-up culture are at the top of the list, but many companies still think product driven industries need that presentation layer to be able to make money. To some extent this is true, because it is so ingrained in our society that it seems all pervasive. No one every said change, introspection, and action were easy.

Third point: In software development, an industry where programmers are not their products (unlike say, the entertainment industry), dress codes are objectively useless. In some cases they even hamper morale and job longevity. Our competency is not dependent on our attire in any way.

This is not going to be a popular view with many, and believe me I understand where the push back will come from. Software development is a business, and as it stands dress codes are part of that. And that's perfectly fine. But let's be honest about they're advocating. Whenever I bring this up argument with any older generations of businessmen and women I get the same rebuttal -"how can you expect someone to take you seriously or buy your product if you look like a slob?". And to this there is a simple answer - by realizing that slob is a subjective label generated from a learned response to how someone looks. Remind you of any other learned behaviors? 

This kind of system only works because of a wide buy-in from a society, but don't feel discouraged, this is it's greatest power and greatest weakness. If you own a company small enough to enact real change, I encourage you to objectively consider why you think you need a dress code. Is it really because you need one, or because you're simply to afraid of what your customers will say? Change happens from within. Get to it.

*This first appeared on MOBILE CYBERPUNKS. You can find the original article here.

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Harrison Ferrone is an experience-driven software engineer, game developer, creative technologist, and Certified ScrumMaster working out of Munich, Germany. His first LinkedIn Learning course was published in 2016, with more going live in the coming months. He mainly focuses on Swift, C#, and Unity, but recently began branching out into C++ and Unreal Engine 4. When he's not coding or reading everything he can get his hands on, he's chasing the feel of golden era hip-hop and taking afternoon naps with his girlfriend and their three cats.