Wearing a suit to an interview is a mild form of hazing

Depends entirely on how much the job pays.

I once laid off a guy like that. Everybody in the company thought I was crazy for letting the genus go.

A month later, nobody could remember his name.

In message , Mark McDougall writes

One interview for a software engineering post I attended I had been travelling for a few days beforehand so I wasn't particularly presentable; definitely no suit and tie. The three bods interviewing me wore suits. I gave the worst interview of my life (for technical reasons

-- it was a terrible skills match but the agency that arranged the interview didn't care). I crawled out under the door and went home. The agency phoned me at 8 o'clock the next morning to say the company was offering me a job doing testing (at the same hourly rate as the developer post).

In the end I wasn't the Worst-Dressed Sentient Being in the office, by a long chalk. I might have taken third place though. It turned out the suits who interviewed me were an aberration; the top technical guy wore rock-climbing boots and had an inflatable model of the Starship Enterprise hanging over his desk.

So loose the jacket and the tie and relax

While hiring a marketing droid, I would also expect that the person used appropriate dressing, but since I have only been interviewing technical people to be hired to my project group, I have never thought about this.

However, if some appeared at the interview with a shiny suit (which in fact might create suspicions that this person is quickly moving to other jobs within a few months), I would be much more suspicious about that person :-)

Paul

It was so amusing to watch how the bunch of the puffed up fools thinking that the world is working for them are beating up the poor lamer.

VLV

Why did you go? - I refuse to even go to phone interview with companies that aren't a match for what I do and what I want to do. Agency be damned - if they can't match me properly they can bog off!

(then again I'm permie, not a contractor, so the rules of the game might be different...)

Techie footwear is an interesting thing. You certainly don't see your usual chav-about-town flashy "NO TRAINERS!" casual shoe much in techie evironments; you're far more likely to see the thirtysomething or fortysomething techie in boots that they wear just in case a footpath or hill or fell or something should happen to appear in the middle of the lab.

pete

"O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us."

Ken Asbury

The agency lied to me shock horror! I was going to be in the area anyway (several hundred miles from where I was living) visiting friends and I'd been out of work for about six months or so at that time. I did have some older specialised knowledge they were looking for particularly but I was better suited to whaling on the kit with an ICE and a logic analyser trying to break it in new and interesting ways than I would have been sitting in a cubicle writing pure code. Most of the programmers didn't know what end of a soldering iron to pick it up by which is a bit of a limitation in the embedded biz, I think you'd agree.

Funny, that's what *he* said.

Yes. I've also seen 50 meters of climbing rope on the floor and chocks on the desk...

A very *very* good guy I used to work with kept an ice-axe around the lab. Mainly 'cos he kept forgetting to take it home, but we did occasionally get him to take it out so we could admire it. ;)

Your average embedded-systems guy in Britain couldn't tell Yves Saint Laurent from Pierre Cardin, but you bet your ass he's got an opinion on Berghaus vs The North Face. ;P

pete

... snip ...

Twenty years ago I had the reverse experience. At one point some idiot was put in charge of me (without ever advising me) and drove me out, largely IMO because he couldn't stand being shown up when I helped him over various difficulties. He had the ability to unload me because he was an MD and I was not (this is in a medical facility).

Last I heard, 5 to 8 years ago, I was still remembered and he was considered a joke.

This caused me to lose tuition assistance for my children, and the main portion of my eventual pension. Yes, I am still bitter.

Seriously, I just can't believe you wrote THOUSANDS of lines of bug free C code each day. You should have been using werty's token language, you could have reduced your LOC to 50 - 100 lines per day. Even BooBooGump only writes 1200 lines per day!