Your workplace doesn’t have a dress code. Or so you think.

In reality, there are a bunch of hidden rules for personal grooming and appearance, and people — not everyone, admitedly, but some non-zero proportion of the population — expect you to follow them. Sometimes the rules are sensible, sometimes they’re arbitrary, but they have one major purpose, as far as you are concerned:

If you follow the secret dress code, life will be easier for you.

It’s a matter of efficiency. People will pay more attention to you if they’re not distracted by your appearance, and will be more likely to listen to what you say and do what you suggest. You’ll be able to put less effort into face to face interactions, and spend more time on what you enjoy.

Geeks are usually pretty hard to distract by appearance; we’re so used to dealing with people online that sometimes we don’t even notice someone’s physical appearance when we talk to them in person. But we’re not impossible to distract. I’m sure you can think of someone you’ve met whose personal grooming was so far beyond anything reasonable that you remember it more than you remember anything else about that person.

It’s worse when dealing with non-geeks, because they’re yet more easily distracted by what seem, to us, to be irrelevancies. But that’s the advanced course; for now, I’m just going to talk about the very basic requirements for life in the cubefarm of your average casual, high tech, “no dress code” work environment.

Basic hygiene

Your goal here is not to smell offensive. Even geeks notice this stuff. Five years after the fact, I can still remember how one big hairy Birkenstock-wearing geek told me, in tones of disgust, about the smelliness of a big name hacker who had crashed on his couch when visiting our city. You can be as hairy or weirdly dressed as you like, but for $DEITY’s sake, shower daily. And brush your teeth at least as often, and wash your hair with sufficient regularity for it not to appear greasy (usually every couple of days, but this varies widely).

Exceptions: in cool weather, when you have not done any physical exercise, and if you are not personally prone to body odour, you can sometimes skip a day’s showering. Everyone does this from time to time, and it’s not usually noticeable. If you pull an all-nighter (or longer) and there are no shower facilities on-site, that’s another exception. People will let you get away with a bit of stinkiness if you’re working extraordinarily hard. But — and I say this as someone who’s walked into an office after a weekend crunch and been hit by a wall of BO — save your stinkiness for special occasions such as major release deadlines. If they’re working you so hard you never have time to shower, you need to find another job pronto.

Hair

Long, short, bald, brightly coloured, interestingly shaved, dreadlocked. Anything goes. Just keep it adequately clean, and if your hair is long (and not meant to be dreadlocked) reasonably tangle-free, at least to the casual observer.

I worked with someone who washed his hair infrequently and was the least competent ponytail user I have ever known. Every time I walked past his cubicle I’d see lank strands of unwashed hair shoved any old way into a rough clump behind his head. He never brushed his hair into the ponytail, or even ran his fingers through it to pull it all back reasonably smoothly. Through this disgusting rat’s nest I could glimpse his encroaching bald spot. It seemed that he’d pushed his hair back only to keep it out of his eyes, with no thought whatsoever for how it looked from behind. Practical, yes. Was he a good coder? I have no idea. All I think of when I think of that guy was his hair.¹

As for facial hair: once again, anything goes. None, stubble, a full beard, goatee, whatever. If you have a full beard, keep it free of food scraps. If you’re trying to explain the design you’ve come up with for the system you’re developing, you want people to be listening to you instead of staring at the crumbs.

One note on stubble however: try to make it look like you’re going for a raffish, casual look, rather than the lazy, slobby look. It’s hard to define the difference, but in general up to 3 or 4 days’ stubble looks OK on most guys, assuming the rest of their personal grooming is up to spec. However, a week without shaving, in conjunction with otherwise poor grooming, just looks slobby.

Clothes

Acceptable attire must meet three guidelines: coverage, condition, and style.

Coverage means you should cover all the usual parts of your body. This is often expressed as follows: “Do you have a dress code?” “Yes. Wear clothes.” The only time this gets interesting is in warm weather. Just how much can you uncover? In most casual workplaces, shorts are fine, and you may be able to wear bare feet depending on your occupational health and safety rules. However, it’s generally not acceptable to take your shirt off. The only time I’ve known it was in an extremely casual workplace during a power shortage (and hence no aircon) at the height of an Australian summer.

As for condition, what I’m getting at here is that your clothes should be in good condition. They don’t have to be brand new, but in general you should save anything with rips, tears, stains or extreme fading for outside the workplace. Jeans are OK with a bit of fraying around the heels, and a couple of specks of paint on a tshirt aren’t the end of the world, but that’s about the limit.

Style is another “anything goes” situation, within the limits of common sense. Nobody cares how fashionable your jeans are or whether you wear hiking boots or Chuck Taylors or Birkenstocks. However, if you wear something which nobody else at the company wears, you may make yourself conspicuous.

I know of an ISP which, in the late 1990s, had its tech support department almost entirely staffed by goths. Wearing black fishnet to work there — even for the guys — wouldn’t have been at all unusual. Wearing it to a less idiosyncratic workplace, entirely populated by guys who wear pretty standard jeans and tshirts, would cause rather more of a stir.

If you dress in an unusual fashion, people will remember you as “the guy in a skirt” (or, at the goth ISP, “the guy who wore beige”) instead of “that brilliant graphics programmer” or “the really competent sysadmin”. You need to have a strong personality and really good geek cred to override that kind of reputation. Guru-level programmers often get away with looking like freaks because their code is so good nobody cares about anything else. Are you sure your code is that good?

Note that dressing too formally also counts as unusual. Wearing a suit at a high-tech startup company is no more appropriate than wearing a sarong on Wall Street. Your goal is not to be an outlier on the personal appearance bell curve. If you’re lucky, you’ll be working somewhere with a fairly wide spread in any case. This is usually correlated with both the industry you’re working in and the geographical location of your office: companies based around San Francisco, for instance, are likely to have a wider range of dress than those based in smaller, more conservative cities.

Uh, what was the point, again?

As with most etiquette, the point of this exercise is increase the efficiency of your passage through life. Think of it like applying regular security patches to your OS: a little bit of regular attention that provides you with a certain degree of protection against more serious inconvenience and/or ridicule. We might all wish that people didn’t judge based on personal appearance, or that the software we installed didn’t resemble swiss cheese, but alas, we live in an imperfect world. Suck it up.

Note 1: And his rudeness. But I digress.