Your T-Shirt Probably Sucks

As much as we all love wearing T-Shirts to work, this is a practice that is doing much more harm than good. Chris Franklin shares his view on business attire and its impact of how you are perceived by upper management. The first step toward getting the recognition you deserve is being seen as a valuable asset.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the programming professional. I am your host, Chris Franklin. And today we're gonna talk about your T shirts. Probably suck now. I don't want to start off by saying, Oh, man, I hate your T shirt. In fact, quite the opposite. I love T shirts. I am an avid collector of T shirts. I have T shirts on every topic imaginable. I have T shirts about comic books, movies, awesome quotes from great people, terrible quotes from great people. I have T shirts that say really terrible, nasty things on them that I can't wear in public but are still fun to have. But here's the thing. All of those T shirts are something that I don't wear toe work anymore. Now I want to talk about why I have come to that decision, that I shouldn't be wearing T shirts when I go into my programming job. A lot of the other programmers that I work with do wear T shirts. Why is that? I have chosen not to do so. That's what I want to talk about today. So let's go all the way back 20 years to my very first job as a programmer. And at that job I was working for a businessman, someone who professionally started companies and sold products through telemarketing efforts. Okay, he had founded several companies and he was very well dressed. He had the largest house in town, up on a hill overlooking the rest of the valley. It was a really nice place in a very small town, so everyone knew who this guy was. And the fact that I had landed a job for him was a big deal. I got my first job. I was still finishing up my last year of school in my undergraduate degree, and he took me in and took a risk on me because I didn't know the programming language that they were using. I had learned Java and they were using C plus plus, but he said, I'm gonna take a risk on you. I came in. I did my interviews. I dressed very nicely during the interviews, and I matched didn't quite come up to the level of how he dressed. I was still just a kid, and he was a very well established businessman in the area. But when I came in dressed like that, he and I were the only ones dressed up very nice. His head of sales I met was dressed pretty nice, but he wasn't wearing a tie. Uh, and he wasn't wearing slacks. He was just wearing jeans and a dress shirt, and all of the programmers he introduced me to were wearing T shirts, ripped up jeans, sneakers, things that I wore to school on a daily basis. And I thought to myself, This is the place I want to work. I want to dress like that every day. That's what I'm comfortable wearing. I love my T shirts. I want to keep wearing them. So when I got the job, I dressed like that. I came in. I wore exactly what everyone else was was wearing. This is fine. Everything went fine for a while, but things started to creep in and started to show themselves. He didn't have very much respect for us. We weren't a very big company. We were only eight people total and three of which were all in administration side in management administration. The other five of us were programmers, and he didn't respect his five programmers at all. He kept asking us to work longer and longer hours for no extra pay because he demanded it of us, he would take our code and call it crap. He didn't talk to us very well, and at the time I didn't understand that. It probably had a lot to do with the way that he perceived us. He saw us as lazy programmers, and that's the typical stereotype that a lot of people in management C programmers as. And it's because of the way we dress. It's the because of the way we act is because of how late we often are. And that's not a generalization that doesn't have a founding in truth, because working in the trenches, I see it every single day, and I used to personify it, and that's not to say that everyone does. And if you're listening to this and you don't personify this good on you. I am so proud of you for being a professional already, because most of us as programmers are not very professional, so fast forward. A few years I I went to grad school. I continued wearing the T shirts and jeans and doing all that fun stuff, and I came out and I got a job at a government contractor. Now, if you've never worked in government contracting, it's full of suits. The whole companies. All of these companies are full of suits, so you walk in. You see everyone in management is wearing a suit, a tie, dress shirt, slacks, matching Belton and shoes. And these people just look sharp. Then you walk into the engineering wing and you see exactly the same thing. You see it. A lot of these other companies you see engineers wearing jeans and T shirts, hoodies, spiky, colorful hair. All of these things that you typically see in a counterculture or lower pump culture. You see a lot of that, and it's everyone thinks, Oh, it's engineers just expressing themselves. They're allowed to do so. They're paid a lot of money, but you don't see other professional professions doing this that get paid a lot of money. You don't see lawyers dressing like this. They come in looking very professional. So why, as programmers do we come in looking like this? It's because these companies have seen that the Big Four, the fang companies Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, they all encourage their engineers to dress this way because they were founded by people that themselves dressed this way. But a company like Lockheed Martin was not founded by these types of people were not founded by people like us. They were founded by businessmen. So keeping that in mind. When you walk into these companies and you see all of these executives wearing suits and you come in dressed in a T shirt, even though they've told you it's OK, it's going to change their perception of you, even if it's unconscious to them, it is still changing their perception, so you have to keep that in mind. So I worked government contracting. I then have worked for a number of startups, and I worked for one of the Big Four. And at that Big four, I wore my T shirts every day. Like a lot of the other engineers that were in there. It was at this point that I started to catch on, though I started to see these patterns that now are so clear to me. But at the time, living in the trenches, those patterns aren't obvious. And that's what I'm hoping this will help you do is to see those patterns aren't obvious, but they do exist here. I am working at one of the Big Four. I wear my T shirt work every single day and I work my ass off. I'm working a lot of hours. I have a newborn child at home, but I'm not getting to see him. He's going to bed before I ever get home at night, and he's waking up after I've left for work in the morning, I get to come home and basically watch my baby sleep, and I'm busting my ass, trying to get promoted to the next level while working for one of these big companies. But I'm still wearing jeans and a T shirt, and I'm seeing others that are younger than I am getting promoted up past me and I'm seeing others that have been there. The same amount of time is me with the same amount of background experience getting promoted and I'm not, and I start to wonder, what is it about me that's different from them? I put in Justus much work. I produce Justus much code. I do exactly what they do, but why am I different? And I started to notice it the way they dressed. They dressed differently than I did. I dressed with a lot of the other junior engineers. I dressed in T shirts that had funny sayings on them, and everyone knew me as the guy with funny T shirts. And it wasn't until I started asking around and talking to some of the seniors in the group that I discovered that that's what they call me the funny T shirt guy. I was the guy. I had a thing. I was that guy, and that's when it clicked. That's when I had that epiphany that ah ha moment that Oh my God, I am sabotaging my own career by living this personification. So at that point, that's when I decided I'm gonna take a step back. I'm gonna change the way these people perceive me. Unfortunately, due to some life circumstances, we had to move from the West Coast back to the East Coast to be closer to my wife's family. But at that point, that's when I said this is it. This is the perfect time to redefine myself because changing the way the people here at this current company perceived me is going to be difficult, so I took it as an opportunity. I came into this new, this new opportunity, and I dressed in a much more professional manner. Now. It still wasn't professional. It would be considered business casual. I wore jeans, but I wore a polo every day, and it did change the way that people perceived me. And it's not just because I had come from one of the Big Four companies, the company I was working for, It was still in the top 24 places, toe work, and it was very well respected. So it wasn't like, Oh, everyone looked at it and said, Oh, you worked at Amazon. You are great Know what they saw was I came in. I looked professional. I acted professional and I offered my ideas off the ideas I was offering. We're no different than what I had been offering at Amazon or any of the previous companies I worked at. They were the same types of ideas, but now they were being listened to, and that's when it solidified. That's the moment that the ah ha got super real, and I noticed people see you and perceive you in a very special way and that way is the way that you appear. And I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but everyone does it. And if everyone in upper management is dressed in a dress shirt and a tie and you come in in a T shirt, they're going to perceive you differently than they perceive themselves. It is an US versus them mentality, and it's not intentional, but it's something that you're doing to yourself. So if you were wearing a T shirt when you walk into a meeting with professionals, you are not going to appear as a professional and your ideas, they're not going to be taken as seriously. So just some things to keep in mind when you're looking at your own career. So changing in the Polos got me promoted my first promotion in over 10 years, By the way, my first promotion, I got promoted after I started dressing more professionally and I wasn't producing anything more. I wasn't giving more work. I was still working the same number of hours and I was still putting in the same effort. But now I was being recognized for the work I was doing. Then I decided to take it to the next step. I decided, What can I do that would take me to the next level? Could it be a simple is changing the way I dress, changing what time I got in in the morning. Other things. All of those other factors do play a part, and we're gonna talk about those in future episodes. But today I wanted to focus just on How do you address How do you appear and how are you perceived Based off of that? And I have to say the next step that I took made an even bigger difference. I stopped dressing in business casual, and I started dressing more like a businessman. I started dressing and emulating the people that were higher up the management change. I noticed that my own manager did the same thing and he had been promoted several times. And I thought, Why not give this a try? I'm gonna dress as he dresses. I'm gonna wear the nice button down shirt. I'm gonna wear the nice slacks. But I didn't put on a tie because I thought that was a little bit of a huge leap for me to go From jeans and a polo to slacks in a dress shirt and a tie, I thought it was a bit much, so I didn't jump straight to the time. Instead, I just dressed a little nicer, and I started being involved in more and more of the higher level architecture discussions again. It wasn't that I had changed my technical skills. My technical skills were exactly the same. I was just now being involved in conversations that I wasn't involved in before. So fast forward to today. It's now five years later, and I've gotten to huge promotions past that point. I'm now in architect at a well respected startup. I and I dress exactly as that. I wear dress shirts and I wear slacks or very nice jeans. I do still occasionally wear jeans, and that's OK because I wear the jeans with the dress shoes and the matching belt, and it makes a difference. Being coordinated. Looking professional, these people perceive us professional. Now why? Why is it that changing the way I dressed change the way that my ideas were being taken? I hinted at this before, but I want to focus in on it just a little bit and talk about it a little more. When you dress professionally and you work in a company that's being run by people who consider themselves professionals, they're going to respect you more because you're emulating them. You look like one of them. So they're gonna take your ideas more seriously than the slob sitting next to you in a Def Leppard T shirt. I love that Def Leppard T shirt, but it makes you look like a slob and these business professionals thes guys who are professional salesmen who are professional company founders who are professional financial people. These guys all have a perception that business attire should be worn in a business setting, and you are in a business. So if they perceive you this way and you act this way, eventually you will be recognized. Now, if you've been working at your current company for a while and you are known as a slob and you decide to just suddenly one day change the way you dress, it's not gonna work overnight. It won't be an overnight transformation in your current company, but it will happen, I promise you. Keep at it keep dressing, and people will start to take you more seriously. You don't have to come to them with better ideas than you came to before. Just continue presenting your ideas when you have them. Continue going to your manager and talking to them. Just look more professional when you do it and you will start to be perceived as a true professional. It's one of the biggest gaps in our industry is the fact that our culture promotes non professionalism and it hurts us as programmers were seen as lazy. Even though we work, our ass is off, for these people were seeing it as not caring for the company. And the biggest thing is we're not seen as assets were seen as costs. I'm gonna have another episode that's gonna go mawr into the difference between an asset in a cost. But know this. If you're an asset, your valuable, you can't be lost if you're a cost. How what's the first thing that gets cut when a company is struggling financially? Costs. Do you want to be one of those people cut or do you want to be seen as an asset? One of the first steps to being seen as an asset is being seen as a professional in the company, someone that others can rely on, others can count on and others can take ideas from. And the best way to do that is to change the way they perceive you. That's the best way to get taken seriously by management. That's all I have for today. Hopefully, this was useful for you. If you have any questions, please shoot me. An email. My personal email is me at chris. Stash franklin dot com. Feel free to send me an email at any time. I'll get right back to you. 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