I wore Doc Martens to a job interview once, because I couldn't find my dress shoes, and I figured no one would notice, since the dress slacks would cover most everything up. I didn't get the job.
But basically I can say "I've done that" for every job interview mistake you ever hear about.
I only read down to Frowner's first comment, but what's so horrifying?
Most of the participants are totally wrong on the basic Gender Studies / kowtowing questions, but I will say that it seems to be one of the calmest threads about gender I've ever read.
We're a courtier society.
Welcome to civilization.
I also don't get it. Frowners answer, while good, didn't seem different from a number of the other comments, and none of the comments by that point in the thread (I haven't read much further) seem anything like horrifying. What am I missing?
Well if Ben's AskMe thread doesn't do it for you, you could always check out this one or this trainwreck.
What's the thingy that allows you to render a white-on-black, or in this case white-on-green, online text in more readable form? Jesus has championed it several times, I think.
Wait. Something called Readability, maybe.
Readability is really pretty good. The only thing to watch out for is that sometimes the underlying code of a page gives it problems that lead to it rendering only part of an article. At least in the free versions I've used.
Hrm, I agree that Frowner's comment didn't seem very different from some previous ones ("check references"), but some remarks about disrespectful behavior seem a bit unfortunate and clueless.
OT: "The open steppe! A fleet horse! Falcons at your wrist! And the wind in your hair!"
The Metafilter thread is interesting for the way some commenters keep worrying the question of whether she wants the job. I can't help but think that surely, if she applied for it and showed up for interview, she's interested. I suppose if she's really hot shit she may have other offers on the table, but really? Do we think that if only this were her first choice, she'd be wearing feminine shoes and sit up straight and be peppy, because that would show that she wants it? Ahem.
I find the discussion of the interview dress/work dress double standard interesting, because as tech workers go, I'm pretty dressed up for work - at my last few jobs I'm probably the only person who never showed up to the office in jeans or a t-shirt, any time of year. So I can wear what I consider ordinary work clothes to an interview and meet the "dressing up for interview" checkbox, and then just keep wearing the same things once I start at the job.
(T-shirts are a real problem for me. Souvenir t-shirts are a major part of the culture, and I have dozens and dozens of them, but never wear them. They feel.... sloppy, in an uninformed-youth kind of way.)
13: It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to think that the more desperately someone wants something, the more hoops they'll jump through to get it. The issue, as I see it, is more whether it makes sense to erect the hoops in the first place, or use them as actual evaluation, or whether it's just pointless status signalling.
The issue, as I see it, is more whether it makes sense to erect the hoops in the first place, or use them as actual evaluation, or whether it's just pointless status signalling.
Well said. Certainly, erecting said hoops and expecting interviewees to jump through them as a matter of course, on pain of apparently intense worry that the interviewee is disrespectful of authority, seems a fair distance from the business of actually hiring employees and coworkers with whom one can work fruitfully.
On the other hand, I suspect a lot of people in hiring positions aren't exactly making conscious choices about these things: they're just plain suspicious about gender nonconformism.
16, 17: Exactly. Do you want to hire the candidate who desperately wants the job, or the one who has enough options that she can afford to pick and choose? The candidate in question sounds like someone I would absolutely love working with. But then, maybe not someone some of my coworkers would be able to deal with.
I've never gotten a real job via normal cold interview, and stories like this terrify me. I really need to get off my ass and stop relying on this freelance gig which is (barely, barely) paying my bills and actually apply for corporate jobs, but I have literally NO idea what norms this person is violating, except maybe combat boots. . .but are regular 'dressy boots' okay? What ARE we supposed to wear to interviews?
If you wear a bright enough headlamp to interviews, the interviewer won't be able to get a clear look at the rest of your clothes.
What ARE we supposed to wear to interviews?
If you're that confused, best to just wear nothing and remove all doubts.
Hm, to me, there seemed to be a number of people who seemed to think that slouching, or not actively selling oneself, or not taking the question about attendance with the gravity it was thought to deserve, individually and jointly constituted things to worry about, and that surprised me; also, there seemed to be a number of people who were willing to leap to conclusions about the applicant's underlying psychology on very little information.
But perhaps those answerers just stood out more as I read it.
there seemed to be a number of people who were willing to leap to conclusions about the applicant's underlying psychology on very little information
New mouseover?
there seemed to be a number of people who were willing to leap to conclusions about the applicant's underlying psychology on very little information
I have the impression that this is how people in general think hiring is supposed to work. (My job interviews, let me not tell you about them.)
||
I think it was "Totalitarian Dictatorships Eat Free Day" at my hotel this morning. I found myself sitting at breakfast between some athletic teams from Syria and North Korea. Then I found the whole place is full of North Koreans. They looked surprisingly ... normal -- western-looking (though dowdy) clothes, one of them had an expensive digital SLR, they weren't hoarding the food from the all-you-can-eat buffet or anything. I couldn't spot any minders, but the must have been there somewhere.
|>
Further to 25: now I'm kicking myself for not thinking, when I was alone with one of the Norks in the lift, to offer 50 USD cash for the warmup jacket emblazoned with "DPR Korea". It would have been too small for me, but what a unique gift for the ironic hipster on your Xmas gift list!
Most jobs require lots of putting up with stupid bullshit. So people in authority don't want to hire someone who radiates a complete intolerance of bullshit. We don't have to make intolerance of bullshit a personality flaw in order to see its inutility in an office.
Aaah, America, home of rugged individualism, the brave, the free -- as long as they do wear the right gender appropriate clothing to their interview.
28: you're being unfair. Anyone who wants to wear unconventional clothing at work has the option of starting a venture capital-backed startup where people can even bring their pets to work. It's part of what makes America great.
I wonder which would be worse to wear to an interview: combat boots, or a "DPR Korea" warmup jacket?
I suppose if the interview is for the DoD the question answers itself.
But look, you are basing a hiring decision on very little information. So, of course, you read too much into every little detail. Because you have nothing else. The only comments worth anything on the thread were the ones who said to check her references. That's, by far, the best evidence of what it's really like to work with someone. Otherwise, subjective issues like slouching and a failure to sell oneself are the only things to go on.
This sort of issue is maddening. I think people are generally very good at picking up "There's something strange about this person" even when they can't articulate what's wrong. And just because they can't pin it down, doesn't mean that what they're perceiving isn't a problem.
But of course sometimes, what they're seeing as strange is something that they'd recognize as wrong to make decisions on the basis of if they could articulate it clearly. So you get something like this, where there's no good way for someone outside the situation to tell if the interviewers are correctly perceiving "This person is a weirdo who's likely to be a management problem" or whether they're seeing "This person is imperfectly gender compliant, which strikes me weird," and interpreting their discomfort as meaning that the interviewee will be a problem.
31: The only issue with references is an increasingly common reluctance to give them. My organization's official position is that you should refer them to HR who will only confirm dates of employment. (I think we've discussed that before.)
33.2: And the degree to which it might be a "problem" would be as dependent on the culture of the workplace in question as the actions of the interviewee. And in my ideal world (business) organizations full of hidebound conformists get ground up and spat out by the free market, their leaders disgraced, their investors pauperized. Just like happens to media organizations that keep getting their stories wrong.
New mouseover?
It's going to take something extraordinary to displace Grapes&Fucksaws, which may be the best mouseover ever.
Frankly, I don't think the company should hire this person. Not because there's anything wrong with her, but because the fact that they're concerned about her totally awesome response to a ridiculously bullshit question (especially for what seems like a position for a person with a good deal of experience) means they're uptight squares who deserve to have another uptight square working with them. This type of stuff screams "not a good fit" (on their part, not hers).
Although I usually bemoan not-a-good-fit-ism as it is often cover for discrimination.
Although the questioner, who is, I think, going to be her immediate supervisor, likes her just fine (which to supplement my earlier comment, suggests that whatever is setting off the other interviewers isn't actually evidence that she'd be a bad hire). I wouldn't jump to "not a good fit" just because people she won't be working with directly aren't crazy about her.
I have an interview soon, and reading something like this is like fantasy indulgence. What would happen if you just went in and answered questions honestly and dressed in clothes you like to wear? It's unheard-of.
A woman dressed and behaved like this for an interview at my alma mater, and she was not hired. One faculty member said about 50 times that she shoulda dressed up if she actually wanted the job, and she'd look a lot prettier and more energetic if she stood up straight and smiled more. It was the first time I heard the back end of this shit as a student. Yes, mom was right; no one will love you if you don't dress pretty, wear perfume, and act sweet.
Yeah, what disturbs me is the inability to tell what is actual evidence for her being a bad future employee and what is just sexist expectations. I hate that "If this is how she acts in the interview!!!" stuff. Some people are just more honest than others.
The linked thread's "not a good fit" and "she must not want the job" responses, and the described responses by the applicant herself, make me wish I could hire her. I place a high value on honest co-workers who will identify bullshit and the typical interview is full of meaningless bullshit in great heaps.
Honestly, I wish that interviews involved more opportunity to demonstrate the work in question instead of be grilled about it. I think there are people who love to interview candidates because it lets them ask stupidly prim questions like the one about appropriate attendance and those people seek out so many opportunities to put someone else on the spot when vulnerable that they've shaped the whole interview culture. The best job interview I've ever had was one in which we talked through a few technical questions and troubleshooting examples together, in a give-and-take style, and I was able to ask questions and get answers. It felt like working with the people who interviewed me. No one asked what my greatest weakness was. It made me feel like a human being rather than just another supplicant at the feet of the gods. I have mad respect for the woman who's described in that AMF thread because she wasn't willing to play the obeisance game.
The whole topic of references makes me a little panicky, though. I'm trying to find three people to write letters of reference for an application to a local post-baccalaureate program and I'm having trouble tracking down any of the people for whom I worked and whose opinions of me I would at all trust from the last, oh, decade. The telecomm industry is not a stable place and those people are almost entirely long gone.
I hate that "If this is how she acts in the interview!!!" stuff. Some people are just more honest than others.
Here I am being the forces of conformity, which I do kind of hate. And people get dinged for this kind of thing when they shouldn't. But where there are clear and not unreasonable rules of behavior (say, for an interview), that the person knows about and could reasonably comply with, and they don't comply, that means something about whether they're going to comply with your expectations of them as an employee. Someone who shows up for a suit and tie job interview in an Iron Maiden t-shirt is announcing that they're not going to go along with anything they perceive as bullshit (or that they're so socially dysfunctional that they can't pick up on standard dress codes), and you shouldn't hire them unless you think they're worth it under those circumstances.
The problem is where the expectations are unreasonable, inequitable, or poorly communicated, so the behavior that comes across as non-compliant isn't meant that way and isn't good evidence of inability to cope socially. And it's really hard to tell from a verbal description of the interview what's going on.
(I've done that 'stating the obvious dryly and dully but at great length' thing again, haven't I?)
Tech interviews are a whole different level of awful -- although I've never gotten any of the classic Microsoft bullshitty "how many piano tuners live in Minsk" problems -- but I'm pretty sure nobody would blink at combat boots.
A less fraught example of insignificant mistakes being significant: I was asked to write a longer statement on my interest in a position, and realized after turning it in that I had mistaken the organization's name (substituted one word for a similar one). From one perspective, it might have virtually no bearing on the skills they told me they're looking for, but lack of attention to such important presentational features is an indicator too. I was rather surprised when I heard back from them the other day, although I think I'm being held in reserve.
although I think I'm being held in reserve.
For the false flag operation.
Thing is, academics living in the post-tenure world frequently have the same attitude toward dress codes as people in IT: deliberately looking like you don't care about your appearance is a way to signal that your mind is on more serious things. I remember reading an article about the "minstrelsy of genius" used to get venture capital. If you want funders to think you are a genius, dress like you hate them. This works in academe, too. In each case, you get points for having unkempt facial hair.
But here's the difference: job seekers in academe are not allowed to participate in the "my mind is on higher things" dress code. You are still expected to dress like you are going for an interview in the corporate world. It kinda bugs me.
I don't know, maybe my experience is not commonplace, but that's how things have struck me.
But here's the difference: job seekers in academe are not allowed to participate in the "my mind is on higher things" dress code. You are still expected to dress like you are going for an interview in the corporate world. It kinda bugs me.
Much like how supervisors/managers in the corporate world are allowed to be rude and cavalier, while expecting their subordinates to be scrupulously proper, no?
But where there are clear and not unreasonable rules of behavior (say, for an interview), that the person knows about and could reasonably comply with, and they don't comply, that means something about whether they're going to comply with your expectations of them as an employee.
I would dispute that!
First of all, your example is a contrived extreme; if you're interviewing at the kind of place where interviews are normally conducted at suit-level formality, and you show up wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt, that's quite a difference, and it's pretty implausible that someone even in the position to receive that kind of interview wouldn't know that that attire is probably too informal.
However, it's quite possible, even, I would venture to guess, quite not uncommon, for the mismatch between the interviewer's expectation regarding attire and the interviewee's actual attire to be much slimmer. And one thing that makes this possible is that not all interviews are conducted at the same level of formality. Consequently, an interviewee may think that her attire is perfectly acceptable—and it might be perfectly acceptable, construed as work attire—though the interviewer thinks that for an interview one should go the extra mile. (Why? Probably the interviewer yearns to exercise power.)
But, even if the interviewee knows that about this discrepancy between work- and interview-level formality and chooses not to honor it, I don't see that this means there will be problems with their compliance with your expectations of them as employees. Because the work/interview discrepancy is, not just in their opinion, but in actual fact, bullshit (except perhaps as a signal for willingness to comply with bullshit requirements and other such debasement when it's in one's own self-interest, which, who knows, might be a quality you choose explicitly to seek in your employees). But of course your expectations of them on the job are not bullshit! Perish the thought!
And to the extent that your expectations of them are bullshit, it might be good to hear that occasionally, so that you can stop expecting things that are bullshit of your employees, so that they, in turn, can devote more of their energies to things that will actually help your organization do whatever it is that it does.
A putative Chinese tale/simile: the world is like a huge tree that lots of monkeys are climbing. The monkeys higher up, when they happen to look down, see lots of smiling faces; while the monkeys lower down just see a bunch of assholes above them.
48, 49: This gets into dress codes/demeanor rules subtle enough that it might as well be "Tell me what number I'm thinking of." If the applicant has to guess whether they're applying for a job under "Dress to demonstrate compliance" or "Dress to demonstrate free-spiritedness" rules, and both are kind of plausible, that's just nuts. (As is expecting anyone to dress to demonstrate free-spiritedness. If you're going to hold somebody's clothes against them because they're too formal, you're still demanding that they comply, just making them comply with something really hard to guess.) It's an aptitude test for a skill with very little to do with any plausible aspect of performance.
51: Unless you're the lead dog, the view never changes.
When I start a company instead of interviews we'll have inner-views, where the candidate and hiring manager meditate together to cut through not just the bullshit of the hiring process, but the bullshit of external reality.
It should be noted that when monkeys smile it means they want to rip you to shreds.
That reminds me of a great joke I once heard:
Q: How can you tell when a monkey wants to rip you to shreds?
A: The bow is moving.
54: Taking fMRIs the whole time.
Sorry, your homunculus slouched.
your example is a contrived extreme
And was intended as such, to indicate that there is some level of non-compliance with interview norms that would uncontroversially signal someone likely to be interpersonally difficult. At which point we're talking about degrees.
But, even if the interviewee knows that about this discrepancy between work- and interview-level formality and chooses not to honor it, I don't see that this means there will be problems with their compliance with your expectations of them as employees. Because the work/interview discrepancy is, not just in their opinion, but in actual fact, bullshit (except perhaps as a signal for willingness to comply with bullshit requirements and other such debasement when it's in one's own self-interest, which, who knows, might be a quality you choose explicitly to seek in your employees). But of course your expectations of them on the job are not bullshit! Perish the thought!
The question is whether you're interested in hiring someone who has implicitly stated an intention of evaluating all of your expectations of them as bullshit or not-bullshit, and complying only with the ones that are not-bullshit. Someone like that might be an excellent hire either if (1) you thought that none of your on-the-job expectations were bullshit AND you thought that their judgment of the difference between bullshit and not-bullshit was very good, or (2) if you thought that their judgment of the difference b between bullshit and not-bullshit was very good AND you thought that at least some of your expectations were bullshit AND you wanted someone to help you sort out which those were. Without those preconditions, someone who isn't going to comply with those of your expectations that they see as bullshit is going to be difficult and annoying to have around.
59: Hiring farmhands is so complex these days.
classic Microsoft bullshitty "how many piano tuners live in Minsk" problems
I like how the category of "unusual questions that require creative thinking" has been distilled down to a standard set of rote questions and answers.
I like how the category of "unusual questions that require creative thinking" has been distilled down to a standard set of rote questions and answers.
The better and/or more desirable the job, the more the interview resembles an interesting conversation and, as Patrick O'Brian has Stephen Maturin remind us,* "Question and answer is not a civilized form of conversation."
* I think in The Truelove.
And was intended as such, to indicate that there is some level of non-compliance with interview norms that would uncontroversially signal someone likely to be interpersonally difficult.
Well, you still haven't established that such a person would be interpersonally difficult. The extremity of the example makes it implausible that the person would be ignorant that they're dressing in a way that's extremely unusual for an interview (you seem to think that this could only be a defiant act, but I don't quite grasp why). But they might be in every respect except dress the perfect employee. And dress is only an important factor for some jobs.
The question is whether you're interested in hiring someone who has implicitly stated an intention of evaluating all of your expectations of them as bullshit or not-bullshit, and complying only with the ones that are not-bullshit.
Actually, I don't think even that need be the question.
Someone might just take it (implicitly and explicitly!) that all your on-the-job expectations are perfectly reasonable and to be heeded and all that stuff. You want them to do something, they do it—they know that if you had to explain the rationale behind every decision the office would not be very effective, and you personally would be inconvenienced a great deal, etc.
But we already know that the interview/on-the-job dress discrepancy is bullshit. There's no need to take it one way or the other.
This thread has forced me to reckon with the fact that I have conflated and/or confused key traits of Flippanter, Frowner, and perhaps Nat Politanianaona. Is Flippanter an anarchist? Was Nat ever a lawyer? And just who is Frowner? I feel suddenly unmoored.
(you seem to think that this could only be a defiant act, but I don't quite grasp why)
No, I meant to identify non-compliance of a sort that would either be intentional or diagnostic of being really unusually bad at identifying expectations. Someone wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt to a suit and tie interview may intend to be compliant, but the fact that they can't figure out how to seems to indicate (while, I agree, not conclusively demonstrating -- maybe they just have a narrow cognitive deficit limited to fashion) that they're going to be noncompliant generally either from recalcitrance or incapacity.
That the interviewee might be recalcitrant only in the interview, while intending to be compliant on the job, is possible, but seems to indicate poor judgment. Why would you do that?
If the job involves sales or interacting with the public, a certain amount of clothing social intelligence is actually part of the job. It's very specific to the job how bullshitty this part of the interview is.
Is Flippanter an anarchist?
One sympathizes with Ernst Jünger's Anarch conceit, but must also acknowledge one's authoritarian inclinations.
Ok, either actively defiant or a confused attempt to demonstrate compliance.
Whereas it would never have occurred to me to think that an applicant is supposed to take positive steps to demonstrate that he or she is biddable, yea even steps that serve no other purpose than indicating willingness to jump through hoops just because they're there.
I thought it was sort of understood among adults, just as it's understood among adults that one arrives on time to one's job, that an employee carries out the tasks assigned to him or her.
One sympathizes with Ernst Jünger's Anarch conceit, but must also acknowledge one's authoritarian inclinations.
One loves you and one wonders if you love one.
I thought it was sort of understood among adults, just as it's understood among adults that one arrives on time to one's job, that an employee carries out the tasks assigned to him or her.
Privileeeeeeeeeeeeeege huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuunt!
Yes, latent sexism, maybe the interviewee would be better off not getting an offer from such a stodgy place, etc., but you know what's baffling to me? The "didn't try to sell herself", "doesn't give a damn about the job" part.
Obviously, it's possible to imagine examples where it matters, like the Iron Maiden t-shirt thing. Or someone applying for a sales position who doesn't act enthusiastic, where the ability to act that way is an essential part of the job.
But in general, in the original example given and reasonably similar cases - dressing down a bit, slouching, scoffing at some questions that frankly are dumb, generally being more casual than the rest - obviously they want the job, or they wouldn't be there. Do they want it badly enough? Well, so what?
"Do they want it badly enough" seems like a dumb question to ask. Again, it's possible to imagine examples where it actually does matter, but in general, enthusiasm just seems meaningless. Maybe the unenthusiastic interviewee's dog got run over the day before, maybe the unenthusiastic person would be great at the job and just doesn't happen to act enthusiastic personally, maybe the enthusiastic guy is just acting on advice that enthusiastic is the way to act in an interview and couldn't actually care less. Same for the unenthusiastic guy - maybe they really need the job but have decide that acting desperate would only make things worse.
19
What ARE we supposed to wear to interviews?
A comment late in the MeFi thread puts it well: "That all being said, if she dressed up to the standards of a day at the workplace, then attire is a red herring. The reason you over dress for an interview is to erase the chace that you'll underdress."
One loves you and one wonders if you love one.
One loves one, no wonder to the dismay of an occasional other.
70.3: Isn't it also sort of understood among adults that one dresses at an appropriate level of formality for whatever one happens to be doing? And isn't it reasonable for an interviewer to understand a gross failure to abide by the prior maxim as indicative that the interviewee may generally fail to understand those things that are sort of understood among adults?
To flipflop from the position I've been arguing with Ben, I couldn't agree with 74 more (particularly as a congenitally underenthusiastic job applicant.)
Hoist by my own petard!
I do think there's a difference in kind between the interivew-attire expectation and the on-the-job expectations. I also don't think the attention to the gross discrepancy is all that useful, since it's not clear at all that whatever lessons one can extract from that (and as I said I'm not sure there are many) will also be extractable from the sort of less extreme mismatch exemplified in, e.g., the askme post. After all, based on earlier comments you seem to think that the understanding regarding interview attire is based on the need of the applicant to positively assure the interviewer, "I am pliant and biddable!"; one might well think that that's silly and unjustifiable, but also that those expectations about workplace conduct that relate to doing one's work and getting there on time are reasonable and abide by them. (And part of the expectation about doing one's work is that one doesn't apply this kind of analysis to it piecewise.)
It's obviously imprudent to act on these considerations, but it just doesn't seem like the inferences you're recommending are justifiable. In part, this whole conversation seems like a reprise of some of the relationship-type discussions we used to have when Tia was around, where one thing that I found consistently baffling was the willingness of many to assume that there was basically one way things worked, and everyone was aware of it and bought into it, so that if you had someone behaving in an apparently strange way, you could easily fix their purpose and meaning in so behaving. Someone who dresses in a way not to the interviewer's taste is either defiant or bad at being a supplicant. Those are the options!
"Do they want it badly enough" seems like a dumb question to ask.
Unless it's followed up by something like, "… to take x amount of abuse."
you seem to think that the understanding regarding interview attire is based on the need of the applicant to positively assure the interviewer, "I am pliant and biddable!"
Not really. Even though I got to 76 through being a smartass about your prior comment, it's probably the best statement of what I meant -- where you've got a fairly reasonable, clear, broadly shared social expectation (like dress formalishly for interviews) that someone violates, it seems to me like a fair deduction that they're the sort of person who may habitually violate conventional expectations of behavior. Which depending on the job might be a reason to think of them as likely to be generally a difficult employee.
This is going to break down almost instantly at the edges -- maybe the dress expectations aren't reasonable or clear, maybe the interviewee didn't actually violate them except in the eyes of someone hopelessly persnickety. But it's sometimes going to be a useful way of evaluating people you don't know much else about.
Man, your writing style is contagious. Not that I'm all the way there, but it's clearly rubbing off on me.
The original story reminds me of a few things that I find easy to overlook: interviewing, like many management and administrative tasks, is difficult and frustrating for interviewers as well as the poor interviewees; an interview doesn't a very good way to obtain useful information or, often, a representative picture of a candidate's personality; the vague sense of something being "off" in an interview may be as common among interviewers as interviewees.
It sounds more and more like dating.
Let me pause to express outright bafflement at 81.
80 doesn't read as nosflovian to me. For one, I don't think nosflow writes em-dashes that way, does he?
My first glance at you told me you were not the type to obey. So I went to my thesaurus, and I came back with these alternatives: to show devotion, to be loyal, to show fealty, to answer the helm, to be pliant.—General enough, I think, and still leave plenty of room to dominate.
Don't worry neb, you can slouch and wear a blouse, slacks and combat boots to the interview and we'd hire you anyway.
I resent the highly offensive "metalheads are slackers" stereotype implied by the Iron Maiden T-Shirt example.
Fair enough, somebody else's combat boots. Which blouse were you thinking of?
87: Cough Beavis and Butt-Head cough.
I'm assured that this one is well thought out.
87: Maiden fans are big slackers, but you can count on Judas Priest fans to wait until after work to get stoned.
I don't support encouraging people to dress and present themselves however they want. Suck it up and put on some better clothes! Workplace aesthetics are important, too, and if the bottom-line needs of this particular capitalist organization suffer in order to maintain a higher level of aesthetic standards for the workplace in particular and society as a whole, I view that as a net positive.
As someone who has often bumped along on the low end of appropriate dress for 30+ years in the workplace, who early in their career was reprimanded on a number of occasions about it, and has also had to "deal with it" from the manager/supervisor side a few times I feel qualified to say that this is all so situationally-dependent as to render all of our idle chatter about it even more meaningless than usual.
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
The weird thing is that metal musicians themselves are the hardest and most painstaking workers in the business. Of course this means they may be distracted if you hire them for a job other than "metal musician".
I was just bullshitting in 93, because this conversation is boring, but now I think I'm getting persuaded by my own argument. There is something noble and magnificient in a firm that is willing to sacrifice its bottom line in order to employ only those who are willing to dress properly and avoid slouching. Keep fighting the good fight!
I just checked back to the MeFi thread, and she got the job. Woohoo!
97 -- Fuck. The triumph of profit over beauty, once again.
The weird thing is that metal musicians themselves are the hardest and most painstaking workers in the business.
That's what we said when Yngwie Malmsteen applied for a summer associate job, and looked how that turned out.
Over the years I've come to acknowledge that all this "dress the part" stuff is important. There will always be hoops to jump through and dress codes to follow.
But I still really resent it, and my heart is never really in it. Why can't I show my willingness and ability to do the work you want me to do by doing the work you want me to, or by having been willing and able to do work like that in the past.
Teaching is similar. If you want to be treated like an authority figure in the classroom, you need to dress like one. But dammit, I want people to recognize my authority on the basis of my knowledge and expertise. My heart is never really in this dress for success stuff.
Is it easier to reconcile yourself to if you think of it as a binary? In a reasonable workplace you shouldn't have to worry about dressing better than anyone else, or dressing with any particular flair or verve. Just achieving whatever the local standard of normal is.
If you want to be treated like an authority figure in the classroom, you need to dress like one.
This is tricky, actually, I think -- there is definitely a "trying too hard" look that doesn't help at all.
(Which, I should say, I'm generally skidding along the lower edge of. I am a sloven.)
I think Last Chance Community College should have pajama day.
91: I'm assured that this one is well thought out.
And I think it would nicely accentuate the slouching.
Pajama day seems a bit fraught to me.
there is definitely a "trying too hard" look that doesn't help at all.
Yes, wearing a mortar board and gown in middle school classrooms is deprecated.
Is a chain store business suit no longer standard for men and women alike?
Is a chain store business suit no longer standard for men and women alike?
In the university classroom? Indeed, it is not.
Some do wear such a suit, and it varies by discipline, but it is not remotely universal.
Speaking of inappropriate office dress, there was a team of bikini-clad women carrying fake swords who were in the elevator of my (stuffy, corporate hi-rise) building last week. Apparently, they put on corporate training events featuring . . . bikini clad women with swords? They claimed to do different events all over the city, and were going to an accounatancy firm that's in the building. I couldn't get more information before I had to leave the elevator.
I couldn't get more information before I had to leave the elevator.
Security guards can be pretty persistent when they put their mind to it.
Oh, are you talking about university classrooms? Sorry I'll go back to sleep. Although last time I had anything to do with a university about 40% of faculty did wear suits to class - the older cohort and those from continental Europe. The rest seemed to be on a mission to raise their students' self esteem by making sure they (the students) were better dressed.
Surely grade-school teachers are, on average, even more poorly-dressed than university faculty?
116: Measured by $$ spent on wardrobe, probably. By aspirational dressiness, no.
My own teaching uniform is pulled-together (which is to say both well fitting and, I'm afraid, expensive) but casual. The trying-too-hard look I had in mind when writing 104 is the baby-faced grad student in a cheap suit, which can end up looking quite a lot less authoritative than something a bit more relaxed does.
117 written with tenured and tenure-track faculty in mind.
Apparently, they put on corporate training events featuring . . . bikini clad women with swords?
Go on.
118. Why does a 24-y-o in a suit look more out of place in a classroom than an office?
I'm just remembering elementary and even high school teachers who would wear garish holiday-themed sweatshirts and the like. At least when university faculty are poorly dressed, it's probably going to be bland and uninteresting.
121: Because they've got the dress code wrong. Current dress code for college teachers doesn't require a suit unless you really want to wear one. A 24-year-old in a bad suit is demonstrating ignorance of the standards. (And anyone holding this against them is a twerp, people should be cut slack, and so on. But that's what's going on.)
When I was an undergrad and gave a talk at a big conference, I wore a suit. My advisor saw me, looked amused, and said "people won't believe you're a physicist; those shoes are too shiny, for one thing."
I've seen exactly one person in my field, a seniorish grad student, give a conference talk in a suit. At the next coffee break, conversation was about the suit, not the talk: "Who the hell was that guy in the suit? What's he trying to sell?"
I'm just remembering elementary and even high school teachers who would wear garish holiday-themed sweatshirts and the like.
One day I was standing around in a circle with some friends, and one teacher, wearing such a garish sweater. It was nautical, with shoulder fringe, buttons, boat steering wheels, etc.
I was absent-mindedly playing with the tassels*, and she stepped away, and the tassels came off in my hand. I was horrified. She said, "Don't worry! They're velcro! I can just stick them anywhere!"
She was a really wonderful, warm person, but jesus christ on the garish sweaters.
*I know that sounds weirdly intimate, but we were all standing around in a chummy schoolgirls way.
Why does a 24-y-o in a suit look more out of place in a classroom than an office?
I find pretty much anyone under about 35 looks weird in a suit.
I used to know a guy who wore a suit everyday. During undergrad. He looked pretty cool, but they were 3-piece tweed suits, and he was a working class Glasgwegian, so the effect was more Salvador Dali meets some DH Lawrence character than Mormon/salesperson.
They're velcro! I can just stick them anywhere!
Actually, the best places require paste.
… which apo is only too happy to provide.
Oh I hate that I missed the flowering of this thread, as I find it interesting but it's now definitely at the point of "too much to response to, too far back."
The tangent issue I've gotten into arguments about is cover letters. (My position was that they're a worthless act of hazing. I don't know that this will ruffle any feathers around here, but the person I was arguing with was deeply Cover-letter-identified.)
My BIL is in essear's field (playing with strings). I had to lend him a tie for his wedding. He owned none, had bought one when he bought a suit, and then lost the tie. I don't think he has worn a suit (or tie) since.
Mankind will not be free until the last interview suit is kindled into flames with the last cover letter.
I wear diapers. I don't have to, I just like the way they feel.
126 - To be fair, this was the suit.
I just remembered that I was hired at my current position despite going to the interview, dressed in a highly unconventional manner, wearing a suit but no tie, because I was very out of practice and couldn't tie my tie. And I was late to the interview because it took me so much time to decide to give up on the tie. And yet they hired me. What a truly mysterious world!
There will always be hoops to jump through and dress codes to follow.
One of the things I love about my job is that the boss when I was hired wore a suit (without a tie - very strange) every day and when pressed on what our dress code was he seemed annoyed at being asked to nail it down. He didn't like me wearing jeans but he didn't want to say that I had to wear slacks because, I think, he probably wasn't allowed to declare that so he had to do a lot of hemming and hawing about dressing up compared to our colleagues as my position occasionally involves pulling rank on other groups and being able to "look the part." I started wearing jeans on Fridays to his woeful chagrin and life went on.
Eventually he left that position and I started wearing jeans all the time because I had no boss anymore to tell me otherwise. When the new boss arrived to replace him, I kept on wearing jeans and untucked shirts all the time because I knew that however things were on the day the new boss arrived would be How Things Have Been Forever. Still all good, and I am plenty dickish enough to make up for any wardrobe slackness when I have to pull rank on other groups.
Incidentally, is the rule "button-down shirts go with sport coats, not with suit jackets" that I learned from my mother dying? I noticed at least two middle-aged managers breaking it at a recent round of interviews.
136 ftw. Please tell me ftw doesn't get edited out like hearts and emoticons. I must be allowed some internet cliches.
The only job I've ever been happy at was the one where my interview didn't feel like a game of "guess what I want you to say."
At the interview when I joined my current firm, my to-be boss's boss briefly fell asleep while interviewing me (turned out he had narcolepsy and retired soon thereafter). Apparently he wasn't interested in geographical trivia about obscure central European nations A bit unsettling.
I interviewed for my first law firm job with a terrible, awful, horrible snotty cold and fever -- soaking Kleenexes with snot every minute or two. One of the partners offered to send out to get me some soup. But it was a summer associate position, and I'm pretty sure all they cared about was our grades.
"button-down shirts go with sport coats, not with suit jackets"
What sort of shirts are you supposed to wear with a suit? Pull-overs?
I'm a pretty princess! In diapers!
Button-down used strictly applies to the points of the collar, not to how the shirt closes. Shirts you wear with a suit have the collar points held in place only by their own stiffness -- slightly more casual shirts have buttons attaching the collar points to the body of the shirt.
(I think. This is from memory, and I'm weak on men's fashion.)
Button-down used strictly applies to the points of the collar
Ah, so it does.
Actually this is kind of interesting, and goes along with Minivet's question:
Button-down collars have points fastened down by buttons on the front of the shirt. Introduced by Brooks Brothers in 1896, they were patterned after the shirts of polo players and were used exclusively on sports shirts until the 1950s in America. It is still considered a more sporting style, and, particularly outside America, traditionally dressed men still do not wear suits with this style of collar.
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Computer fixit guy diagnosis: hard drive damaged.
Kraab response: it's mostly backed up! Because for once I did the Thing You're Supposed to Do.
This probably means I should put my important papers in my safe deposit box and get a termite inspection or something.
|>
66: I am not now, nor have I ever been a lawyer.
To the OP: I thought Frowner's response had the most coherent ideological context for "check her references", but then I would, wouldn't I?
On interviewing: Pretty much the best candidate I ever interviewed, and man, she was something -- super poised and smart and together -- was a pretty crummy employee who quit halfway through the semester.
At my old corporate job, there was one division head who was absolutely nuts about dress code stuff. I know I've mentioned her here before. It probably wouldn't have been a big deal, 'cause after all, it was a corporate setting downtown, even if we had no client-facing roles, but her own administrative assistant was notoriously slobby, wearing worn out stretchy pants with big ugly old sweaters all the time. THAT made people incensed.
you could wear a shirt with the collar held in place with a pin, too.
i don't really like tradition, generally, but when you can't be hired if you wear anything not available to a man in the 1890s, (and half of those things are off limits too), tradition is really the only thing left.
but yeah, you can wear button downs with suits. or pinstripe sports coats.
just make sure your jacket sleeves and pant legs are too long.
ahh, freedom.
This thread has served to remind me of the looming Spring weddings I'm to attend and the fact that I really ought to go and get a new suit.
Is it cheap of me to want to own just one suit, suitable for both weddings and funerals? Those are really the only two occasions I need to be be-suited at this stage in my life, and it only seems to come up once or twice a year.
sounds slovenly, not cheap. cheap is when you're sad target no long sells their sorta decent suit.
I don't own a black suit since i'm not an artist and everyone in my family has good genes.
Those are really the only two occasions I need to be be-suited
But how often do you need to be bee-suited?
I don;t even own a suit ... that fits. Have gotten by with just sports jackets for the past 15 years
156: Owning one suit for both weddings and funerals is slovenly? I don't follow.
I need a new suit. I have a job interview coming up here. And while the job I'm applying for is too hands-on for a suit to be part of daily attire, for some reason I have the funny idea it's the sort of place where one would be expected at the interview. I have nothing I'd care to wear at the moment and need to go out tomorrow to have a look around.
I feel a little bad that, even as I'm preparing for this interview myself, I am in the process of interviewing others to work in my current office. But there's nothing to be done about that; I have to fill positions where I am to keep projects going, and can't exactly explain to applicants that I'm hoping to bail myself. I don't know if I will be leaving and I'll be screwed if I'm not don't fill certain vacancies quickly. It is, however, somewhat interesting to be on both sides of the process at once, given all the various anxieties it provokes.
This was alluded to a couple of times upthread, but one of the oddest things to me about this discussion, and the one on MetaFilter, is that interviews these days, at least in certain environments, apparently proceed as though the question on the table is whether the applicant is a good fit for the organization, and not much whether the organization is a good fit for the applicant. That seems strange, and possibly self-defeating, to me.
Back in my day (!) -- that is, on the handful of occasions on which I was in a position to interview and hire -- I spent as much time acquainting the interviewee with the office's culture and environment (i.e. whether it would fit for him or her) as I did trying to determine whether he or she would fit it. I talked as much as the interviewee did, and encouraged the asking of questions.
The type of interviewing style I'm hearing described, though, sounds highly one-sided and somewhat hostile or defensive. Maybe I'm imagining this.
This was alluded to a couple of times upthread, but one of the oddest things to me about this discussion, and the one on MetaFilter, is that interviews these days, at least in certain environments, apparently proceed as though the question on the table is whether the applicant is a good fit for the organization, and not much whether the organization is a good fit for the applicant.
That's the case in virtually all job interviews, yes.
162: IME/O, it's the interviewee's responsibility to ask the questions they need answered to figure out if the organization is a good fit for the interviewee. But you're right, it's crucial, and it's something I've always kept in mind whenever I've been interviewing for a job.
it's the interviewee's responsibility to ask the questions they need answered to figure out if the organization is a good fit for the interviewee
That seems weird to me. What's the interviewer's responsibility, then?
The interviewer is there to represent the interests of the organization. Sure, at some level if someone's going to be unhappy in a given job, as an interviewer I want to know that (and I always give interviewees the opportunity to ask as many questions as they want), but it's not really my responsibility as an interviewer to force the interviewee to consider things from that perspective if they don't want to.
166: I somewhat understand that, though it seems to make the interviewee's task into a bit of a guessing game: What might I (interviewee) want and need to know about this place? Hopefully I have correctly understood its general standards, its pace and culture overall, so that the things I don't think I need to ask really are things I don't need to ask, and it's not a mistake going forward, as they say, if I didn't ask them, or it wouldn't be a mistake if I did ask them and thereby sound like a complete idiot ... and so on.
In certain areas of organizational endeavor, I have no doubt that things are routinized to a degree that one office is about the same as another. On the other hand, would a person (interviewee) want/need to know that Apo's office has a Pajama Day??
This was alluded to a couple of times upthread, but one of the oddest things to me about this discussion, and the one on MetaFilter, is that interviews these days, at least in certain environments, apparently proceed as though the question on the table is whether the applicant is a good fit for the organization, and not much whether the organization is a good fit for the applicant. That seems strange, and possibly self-defeating, to me.
Isn't that mostly a side effect of our endemic buyer's market for labor? Very possibly when you add in the associated employee submissiveness, it's a net positive, for profits at least.
Yes, buyer's market. It's a net positive for profits, in theory. Possibly not, so much, if you consider broad ramifications. Management seems to become querulous at times about how hard it is to manage staff; there's a lot of worry about potentially difficult employees; people look for signs of such potential difficulty. I don't need to spell it out, I hope.
Part of my question did have to do with whether this interviewing attitude has been going on for quite some time, or is a more recent phenomenon, what with the economic downturn and all.
More broadly, anyway: you can't quash people indefinitely and expect it all to work out fine in the end.
In certain areas of organizational endeavor, I have no doubt that things are routinized to a degree that one office is about the same as another. On the other hand, would a person (interviewee) want/need to know that Apo's office has a Pajama Day??
Eh, IME this really isn't a thing. I have a few stock questions I ask when I'm interviewing for jobs (e.g., "What's a typical work day like?" or "How directed is the work?") that get me started on the kind of conversation you're talking about having, and from there it's pretty straightforward to figure out what I need to ask more about.
Again IME, the more important thing than directly addressing this sort of question is actually paying attention to the vibe of an interview; the times I've had problems in jobs, it's been as a result of ignoring the messages I was being sent in my interview process. It's rare that an interview will go one way and the job a completely different way.
170: Okay. I understood your "IME." It was really the "IMO" -- in my opinion -- aspect of your 164 that threw me. I don't have a strong stance to take on this right now, but I still do think that an interviewee can and should benefit from being introduced to the company as much as the interviewer benefits from being introduced to the applicant, and a non-forthcoming attitude on the part of the interviewer just seems stupid.
I imagine we understand each other overall, though.
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I am speechless:
|>Transocean Ltd. gave its top executives bonuses for achieving the "best year in safety performance in our company's history" -- despite the explosion of its oil rig that killed 11 people, including nine of its own employees, and spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The company said in a regulatory filing that its most senior managers were given two-thirds of their total possible safety bonus.
Oh jesus. This kind of thing makes me ill.
I've done very few interviews, but most of them have involved a section, usually towards the start but not the very first part, where the interviewer(s) went into more detail about the job than the description could in the interest of helping the applicant decide on their side of the "fit" question.
The one of the worst interviews I ever had was an HR one that consisted almost exclusively of two things: extremely vague questions about work environment like "what's your ideal work environment?" or "what are you looking for in a job?" and very quick, curt responses to my answers that indicated without saying outright that my answers were not satisfactory. They gave me a task to do before deciding if they'd give me a "real" interview and I did it, desultorily, having decided that, hey, I need a job, but please not with them. I did not get the next interview.
*which were hastily-but-hem-and-hawingly-arrived-at BS, I should add, as I was completely blind-sided, having expected an interview like every other interview I'd previously had, that is, an interview in which the actual job and the skills required for the job were discussed.
172: "two-thirds"? So, not a hundred percent, then? Well, what more do you want?
According to calculations by The Associated Press, the total value the company assigned to [CEO] Newman's compensation package was $5.8 million.
Nobody deserves to earn that much money. Nobody.
I guess this thread's mostly dead, but I wanted to respond to the general tenor of LB's remarks, and perhaps especially this one:
The question is whether you're interested in hiring someone who has implicitly stated an intention of evaluating all of your expectations of them as bullshit or not-bullshit, and complying only with the ones that are not-bullshit.
I wonder if LB's framing of the problem has anything to do with the fact that she's, well, a lawyer. Law is all about taking the existence of a norm as a reason for action, entirely irrespective of that norm's merit. (Indeed, a popular view within general jurisprudence is that this is the single most important aspect of law.) So one might well expect a rather more rule-following, even rule-fetishizing, atmosphere in the legal profession.
Another point that didn't really get addressed here, but that struck me when reading the MeFi thread (and again, when seeing the Transocean exec pay comment): I worry about the meritocracy-as-dystopia angle here, too.
I mean this in two ways. First, I suspect that in some organizations, a lot of the hiring process is about a refusal to acknowledge the irreducible uncertainty involved in asserting a straightforward correspondence between a particular person's identifiable qualities and history, and whatever 'marginal product' they contribute towards a larger organization or goal. And so the whole process becomes much more baroque and high-stress than it need be, simply because one can't just admit, "hey, these four all seem okay, we really can't know which will be better in practice."
The more troubling part then comes when the 'rigor' of recruitment/promotion/etc. systems is taken as a further justification for excessive hierarchy, and excessive privilege for those at the top. A feedback loop: the importance of the task justifies Recruitment Theater, which then justifies the self-importance of the task-masters.
Bah, too tired to write clearly tonight.
178: I really didn't learn the same things in law school as everyone else.
"The more troubling part then comes when the 'rigor' of recruitment/promotion/etc. systems is taken as a further justification for excessive hierarchy, and excessive privilege for those at the top. A feedback loop: the importance of the task justifies Recruitment Theater, which then justifies the self-importance of the task-masters."
HR doesn't want to say they don't have some secret hiring sauce and get replaced with 10$/h temps either.
Err, not that I'm saying LB fetishizes rules. Just that I'd expect it to be a common trait in law offices.
Duncan Kennedy, "Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy." Not that I've read it personally.