Maybe it's because I'm a guy in his late 50's and there's this natural gap between my generation and the one starting their career, but I'm dumbfounded by the dress code and consumption patterns of some of our youngest members at the company.
Don't get me wrong, I know it's a natural thing for youngsters to dress differently from their parents. When I started my career in the early 70's, it was okay to wear a tie as large as a small pizza and grow sideburns thick enough for a squirrel to be able to hide inside. Nevertheless, we were dressing for business and regardless of what hues were considered trendy, tasteful choices could help your career greatly. When we were meeting with a client to force a mainframe maintenance contract down his throat, we were not dressed like we were about to climb the Kilimanjaro. Ross Perot had a similar dilemma at EDS back in the days, he could barely tolerate men who dressed with shirts other than white and growing a beard raised suspicions about your political viewpoint.
Which brings me to my point, guys and gals in their early 20's have no dress code boundaries. They tend to dress at work pretty much the way they dress at home. Shirts from The North Face, Merrell sandals, the only thing missing from their outfit is climbing gear. Horrible haircuts are now back for young men where you can barely see their eyes, therefore impeding their visual perception of nonverbal signals during important meetings. What are they thinking? What happened to decency? And don't get me started about piercing, whenever I see a perforated gal or guy in the office, I try to imagine the top career level that this person will ever achieve and the level is usually quite low.
If you want to have a chance in life, keep your skin intact and distance yourself from your grungie friends. Start shaving, and by shaving I mean shaving, not a 3-day look. Go shop at Harry Rosen, if you're not sure about how to wear a tie just google it. And for god sake make an effort to speak in complete sentences, life is not a MSN chat room. I don't care if your job is to maintain a SAN, you should dress like a CEO. Do yourself a favour and ditch that Hyundai shit box and get yourself an old Mercedes for the same price, you can get today a clean 190 for an astonishing price. Larry Ellison from Oracle did exactly that when we was a young stud, and now check what his net worth is.
All this of course won't give you more money from me, but you'll score higher in my mind and that's what's important.
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