I wish them luck. I understand their need to have folks in the office, and this is one way to make that more attractive.
But it is only one factor. Good management, strong teams, and a whole lot of "soft" stuff is even more important than beanbag chairs and foozball tables. The "good management" part is where most companies go pear-shaped. I wouldn't want to go to Buckingham Palace every day, if I hated the people I worked with/for, and felt like my work was being treated badly[0].
Although I work exclusively at home, and have no desire to ever dress "business casual" again, I think that a good* office environment can be extremely conducive to great work.
Wow, that comic really makes me question how much of todays complaning about work and life struggles has been a multi decade persistent thing - not just hardships facing this particular generation. (As someone who was 5 in 1996 and didn't see this first hand.)
I think work is just like everything else in this regard. Providing you have standard white collar job, as things continue to improve and get better, we just find new things to complain about. e.g. parent poster complaining about 'business casual' when it wasn't that long ago business casual was a nice step down from having to wear a suit. The workplace continuously adjusts but so do our expectations.
I worked in a Wall St. firm in the 90's and wore suit and tie every day, even though my job was neither customer facing nor even in New York.
I quickly realized I didn't mind it at all once I found correctly fitting shirts. If you consider a tie to be too constricting, you have the wrong shirt.
Even as borderline OCD (self diagnosed, so likely wrong), I never found particular clothes to be a hinderance to me typing (I'm a software dev), and I'm one of those guys that can't stand tags in t-shirts and rip them out. I think 90% of the angst over "comfortable" clothes is a learned cultural thing, and overblown. IMO.
Are you sure you aren't just unconsciously repeating the same prejudice, but from a different click?
How will the people around you react to you using a suit? If it's badly, you are as much forced to wear a certain kind of clothes as the GP was.
Anyway, just because there is a dressing code, it doesn't mean that the culture normally associated with it dominates. Those are two different things, where one is a huge problem, and the other mostly irrelevant. It's always better if you react to problems that are rally there, instead of noisy proxies.
That's a valid point, but all of us, every day, are subject to rules, mores, peer pressure, etc. No one TRULY does exactly what they want, all the time.
Different people can value these rules in different amounts, and to your point, I didn't value "what I'm wearing" as much as some other people do, so I get you.
The trad thing is that your old clothes become your casual clothes, mostly. Except athletic clothes—but half those are dress or business-casual now, anyway, like OCBDs and polos—most of our modern athletic clothes counted as underwear, before, if they existed at all. And it doesn't really work for full-on formal wear like dinner jackets or morning dress.
A bunch of suiting trends come from this. Suit jacket with ruined pants? Now it's a blazer, so, casual wear. Handmedown worn 3-button suit that you're wearing casually at college, with the top button pretty much permanently unbuttoned? You've just invented the 2-roll-3 jacket style. And so on.
We've replaced this behavior with simply having all our clothes be disposable-cheap. Mending a hole and adding patches to keep wearing something's not really worth it when it cost $20 to begin with.
Agreed. For someone whose experience of suits is the ill-fitting obligation for the occasional wedding or funeral, it will be shocking and unbelievable to read that a custom cut dress shirt is more comfortable than a t-shirt, and suit pants, soft and silk lined, more comfortable than jeans.
It might be shocking to realize that not all body types fit well into a suit, regardless of how well tailored it is. I used to be tall and lanky, great for a suit. Then age happened, and now I'm much more round that beanpole. Nothing fits well, and I've tried custom shirts etc. I just look like a well dressed, round person. I'm not more comfortable at all, in fact the opposite.
Plop me in a pair of shorts with a t-shirt or better, a hoodie and I feel great.
Interesting. I've been told that the suit is so ubiquitous over history and nationalities, because it flatters older and portly gentlemen more than other items.
I would say in the last generation, we’ve really had a ton of incredible new textiles be developed. Spandex and its blends in particular has added a lot of comfort in clothing, and wasn’t even that widespread ~15 years ago in comparison to the degree it is now.
> It's always weird to watch Office Space and see the guys all wearing ties. I can't imagine having to do that for a typical software job
I believe this changed in the early 2000s. The dot-com crash reset Silicon Valley. And the Enron scandal reduced corporate America's pull on it. (Steve Jobs wasn't an icon when business casual began taking its hold.)
In my case, it ended in 1994. The company where I worked at the time already had casual Fridays. Business casual, mind you; it was quite some years later before I got to see the whole jeans-and-sneakers casual Friday thing. During the summer of 1994, they went to business-casual-every-day. Then, as a morale booster (probably, as I look at it now, because the execs knew a 40% layoff was months away), the management decided at the end of summer to let us stick with that. The only time I wore a tie to work after that was on a day when I was going to have to leave early to go to a funeral.
When I joined an east coast computer company in the mid-80s, ties all the time were already gone for a lot of engineering positions (though more senior engineers and managers still tended to wear them). Suits were pretty standard for marketing for marketing and other business roles.
Around the time you say, casual Fridays came in. The funny thing is the CEO got annoyed at one point because a lot of the engineers felt they need to underdress relative to the business people who were now dressing business casual on Fridays and increasingly most days.
I'd say that over the next couple decades, things got more and more casual to the point where ties, much less suits, are pretty uncommon in settings where not wearing one would have seemed out of place 25 years or so ago.
At trade shows, as I recall, at some point in the 90s, IBM booth staff showed up at one big show wearing branded polo shirts rather than suits. At which point, most everyone else went: If IBM isn't wearing suits, I guess we don't need to.
A company in my town still requires suit and tie for men, dresses or long skirts for women. If you leave your chair, you need to put your suit jacket on. You can take it off when sitting.
The amount of money it would take for me to put up with such ancient, sexist and conformist bullshit is hard to imagine.
Even long after Ross Perot had sold EDS to General Motors, it was still frowned-upon for men to go to an EDS cafeteria without wearing their suit coats. Saw this in 1993 and, even as a lowly temp worker while between permanent gigs, I felt plenty of pressure to conform (and I did, because I wanted to be asked back for more work).
A lot of what people complain about in white-collar offices have been problems people've complained about effectively since such offices started to become common (the 1950s). Including how little actual work is required for most companies to function, and how much of "working" is just presenteeism.
And actually, some things have gotten worse. I think requirements for natural light used to be much stricter in older buildings (that's where you get all those u-shaped ones) so you were more likely to be near a window, for instance.
“After your boss has taken away your door, your walls, and your storage areas, there aren't many options left for the next revolution in office design. One of the following things is likely to go next: the floor; the ceiling; your happiness."
Scott Adams was blasting open concept offices before it was cool to blast them.
I worked briefly for a transportation company helping with a migration to Solaris. I was the FNG, and everyone else was primarily Windows so I stuck out like a sore thumb. My manager (and his manager) were really nice but had experienced a bit of turnover. My first day showed why.
All of the sysadmins worked from one room, with a "datacenter" in the room next door. Imagine a single room, with desks lined up around the walls. No cubicles, and barely enough room for a keyboard/mouse/monitor and room for a soda or coffee. Crappy chairs too. Since I was the FNG, I got the desk in the back corner underneath the A/C duct. So I was perpetually frozen.
No one looks at each other since our desks faced the walls. The walls between our room and the "datacenter" had no soundproofing, so whenever I spun up the Sun gear (T2 cpus) the noise was like a helicopter taking off. Even over the A/C blasting down on me, I would hear these servers when I did a reboot.
I think the average salary at the time was around $70K or so, and there were 9 of us crammed into that crappy little room. So roughly $1M in compensation, but they couldn't find a real spot for us to work. Screw that place...
Hah, interesting; my first job out of college ('92) was using Suns with Solaris. I think a later generation than yours; we had pizza boxes but I was lucky enough to have one of the newer vertical 4" wide by about 10" high models. The name escapes me.
They weren't so loud, but those older ones, yeah I remember them.
When I entered the workplace in 2003 I was lucky to get a peg for my coat, had to hot-desk during the day - there were 6 people on shift but only 4 computers. You'd go out to fix a printer or something and when you came back to base someone's taken your place
The Dilbert world of the time had cubicles, it was glorious. 3 years later the IT crowd had an entire room with just 2 people in, with their own phones, computers, desks etc.
Now of course I'm in a far more senior position and no longer deal with printers (literally have a high-viz saying "We don't do printers"). If I went into the office I'd still have to hot desk, although only on a per-day basis.
That's the problem, there. One-size-fits-all approach.
Every job is different. A lot of it is up to the management. If they get it right, things are shiny. If they get it wrong, they're sitting on their beanbag chair, alone, waiting for the movers to take the furniture away.
But every company (and internal culture) is different. Some, I intensely dislike, but have to admit, they get results. Others, I like the culture, but I don't feel they get much done.
Also, every employee is different. I know people that dress up in bespoke suits for work, in a cube farm, every day, and absolutely love it.
I know people that hate remote work, and can't wait to get back into the office.
Different(folks).different(strokes)
Good managers, especially first-line managers, are worth their weight in gold, and are usually disregarded by upper managers.
A good manager can make an open-plan or cube farm job an absolute joy, and a bad manager can make a corner office career a nightmare.
I like to think I was a good manager. I kept really good employees for decades, in a pretty banal environment, and for a fairly low salary. They could have gone anywhere, and they knew it, but they stuck around, anyway.
But it is only one factor. Good management, strong teams, and a whole lot of "soft" stuff is even more important than beanbag chairs and foozball tables. The "good management" part is where most companies go pear-shaped. I wouldn't want to go to Buckingham Palace every day, if I hated the people I worked with/for, and felt like my work was being treated badly[0].
Although I work exclusively at home, and have no desire to ever dress "business casual" again, I think that a good* office environment can be extremely conducive to great work.
* As in "not like 99% of today's offices."
[0] https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-02