I ran into a gentleman dressed in librarian glasses, a soiled hoodie , cargo pants, dishevelled and boots with laces untied.
He was well spoken so I asked if he was an engineer. I asked because that precise dress code, hoodie, cargo pants, unshaved, glasses, untied shoe laces is the uniform of engineers in engineering schools from Stanford to MIT (particularly MIT) and everywhere in between. Its not just graduate and undergraduate students who dress like that it is the dress code of working professional engineers (see Steve Wozniak, infact the man resembled Wozniak down to the way he spoke and facial features).
I asked him if he was an engineer because of his intense speech and dress code and he said, “No I haul g-rbage”. I was flumoxed, then I tried to pretend to be impressed and started speaking about the service he renders to the community and how we all need to recycle.
In the back of my mind I was thinking, “Ofcourse! that is how menial workers , blue collar folk and manual laborers dress!” . No one gave me that memo because when I showed up on the first day of my embedded systems class at Columbia University in a suit jacket, the Cornell graduate who was in my project team said, “Well this guy is dressed in a suit so we know he won’t be doing any real work”. I mention the Ivy leagues because students at these universities generally dress better (but of course not in the engineering sciences , the Cornell graduate’s undergraduate major was physics). Turned out I was not able to contribute much to the project which was unusual and highly embarrassing for me (my individual work in the same class was not only above par but completed in the lead group as always). The class itself was an event. I was returning to electrical engineering after a traumatic undergraduate where my alma mater left me with a critical spirit that wrote diatribes & polemics, and deprived me of the certitude , organization & incremental knowledge of electrical engineering. The Cornell grad was also very unhapy and kept blaming the Jews for the 2008 financial crisis so a part of me is disappointed I did not atleast dispel one stereotype about people in suits.
Dress code is important though. Engineers at IBM used to wear garters underneath their pants to hold up their socks. The best gentlemen wear apropriate clothing always (John Whitehead of Goldman Sachs was famously asked to “go home and change out of your pyjamas, young man” by Samuel Sachs because Sam Sachs did not approve of his linen seer sucker suit). This is not an advocacy for overdressing nor for a dress code but an observation of the state of affairs in a profession & the world. I personally am an admirer of the frei korpse kultur (FKK or free body culture) and informal wear but I also adore formal attire.
When did engineers begin to dress in hoodies & informal wear? I suspect it is about the time when they started acting like a “secret society” with their own “lingo” and terminology which was inaccessible to the masses (and the client) so that people had to ask them to “speak in English please”. A classic Time Magazine article speaks of this clique or “secret society” which tries to protect its trade secrets & ensure job security by hiding the plain truths in terminology and arcane jargon.
I noticed this when I was working at the Federal Reserve Bank . There were a group of ethnic software engineers from 3rd world countries who told me “not to write code too quickly and don’t make it perfect because we will be out of a job”. When I asked them to explain what they meant they said, “if you write the code quickly and complete the project too quickly they may decide to fire us, if you write it too reliable they will not have any need for us to come back and fix it”.
There was no danger of my writing fast, reliable code since my improper schooling & education had left me a rather unhappy soil for production. Nonetheless, I walked away indignant denouncing that group as a mafia and was summarily let go from that position not much later. The kind of people who enter an industry decide the repute and dress code of that industry. Do you have desperately poor people from 3rd world countries who want “jobs” over truth & virtue & love (for customer and humankind and life and matter)? Do you have leaders who murder animals in cold blood as a sport or use profanities & obscenities regularly to make a point? Do you have CEOs who code or work on “spreadsheets” in a strip club or when attending a festival celebrating love?
If there are people who need reform then let us reform them rather than create a lifestyle centered around them, perhaps? If there are inadequacies we have to deal with then give us that spirit & perfect & beautify us but don’t start a cult or club of similarly misguided, please. None ought to be doing undignified work or even “efficient” work but only work suitable to the highest dignity. And if someone is forced to handle hazardous waste in an unkind society then alteast at the workplace they ought to dress in hazmat suits , shower regularly before and after work and have stringent procedures and discipline warranting the seriousness of the act. Give us all the fairest spirits from the start & if we digress then may the Good Shepherd rescue us & transport us to the fairest pastures with safety and freedom & plenty (Ezekiel 34).
In light of the above, I would like to say that despite my admiration for the profession and subject and the people perhaps I am not like such folk . I am not calculating at all so I did not expect to be good at mathematics (I merely understood it & its applications) which made me good at it. However, I am not exactly proud to share that trait with people from over crowded, over populated developing parts of the world who ace math tests because their lifestyle, culture , geography , diet renders them as sharpened instruments unfit for love (or something higher) but suited to solving some problem. Why live as an eye sore or an offense to the fair & beautiful & good in some club or cult of the improper ?
I was ushered into it by improper advice of some neighbors and then by the Dean of Engineering while I yearned for higher ideas & outlooks. To those who are undecided about a field of study : go to the department of that field or the workplace and see the people : are they beautiful? are they sweet & nice & kind ? are they fair? do they dress well ? are they loving towards one another and the world? do they speak only wholesome words or is their language littered with epithets?