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Comment by artsyca | Hacker News Reader

This is innate knowledge that is finally being verified by science -- eliminating distractions is as much about removing the need to filter as it is about creating the circumstances for increasing concentration

For precisely this reason I am such a stickler for proper professional dress: I find printed T's and athleisure utterly annoying and the cost of filtering out my colleagues fashion choices over the long term leads to a huge cognitive load whereas if we could all work within the established paradigm we'd all attain a way better state of flow

Guess we'll have to wait another century for the science to prove what everyone already knew since antiquity before anyone in the tech industry deigns to wear adult clothes - apologies for the dig but I have points to burn and a desire to be validated as counterculture

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Why stop at professional dress? Every citizen should dress in the exact same attire with a toned down color like grey, so not only lesser distractions to productivity, but cheaper and more efficient manufacturing processes. Same goes for buildings, cars and all other products. Let us just grey everywhere and focused efficiency and productivity.

That's the whole point! Tshirt culture effectively leads to that dystopia where everyone wears a jumper -- it's ironic but professional adult dress done right preserves the individuality. I challenge you to see the wisdom inherent in this unpopular opinion

The whole premise of Zuckerberg and his contemporaries wearing the same tshirt every day is precisely to be good worker robots like you describe whereas dressing up ironically gives the finger to the technology industrial complex and frees one to express their own preference

Before you 'yea but...' however understand that the trade-off is that we must agree to some form of standardization and effectively it's formal business dress

Also, if it's coerced, it won't work either, but at this point tshirt culture is coerced just nobody has really tried going against it -- try wearing a proper shirt and tie as an engineer, people won't even ask if you're going to an interview any more like they used to

Hey! Can you not tell when someone is on your side? I said grey collared shirts and ironed trousers for everyone. Grey all things. Good citizens must be allowed to focus on productivity.

I'm telling you I want colors, and more of them, but there's a difference between living in a world that children made and being a true adult -- most of us in this industry are crashing and burning in our 30's and 40's and it's not pretty

I'm on your side too orange8, but we went to different universities and had different childhood experiences and now our shared vision is getting cloudy with all this corporate hoopla imposed on us by the man

I am sorry you've had bad experiences within the industry and maybe even childhood. Stay strong and seek those around you for help, even if its just a chat.

I've had terrible experiences in this industry too -- look at TechLead, his wife left him! but we're being forged into something stronger than steel -- that's why I wear a silk tie, not because I'm trying to be some kind of corporate drone.. as Simon Sinek says, 'Start with why' -- nothing matters per se, but for the meaning behind it

And that's another reason I wear a danged tie, so people can recognize that I'm a little different from the hoi polloi eager to please their managers with feature after feature and ticket after ticket -- believe it or not I'm an extreme programmer in the strictest sense, perhaps not a 10x but definitely a 1% mind body and spirit is geared towards computer science believe me, another reason I wear silk, as a nod to the engineers who came before me and worked on the enigma or the Apollo space mission

If everyone else seems to be doing fine and only you have the problem maybe you should look a little closer to home to find a resolution.

Everyone's struggling without knowing it, look at society as a whole and the planet earth, it was the best of times and the worst of times

That line of reasoning doesn't work on a 10x programmer like myself, I'm above the mere mortals. Save it for the likes of Adam Neumann

This is exactly the reason why our industry suffers from gross diversity problems -- everyone who 'fits in' telling everyone else it's their fault for not fitting in -- oh sweet irony of ironies bring on the downvotes

You are literally taking a recent publication about attentional mechanisms in the brain and hijacking them to explain why you're annoyed with t-shirts, then turning it into a commentary on society.

I think you could use some perspective. This research is not so concrete that the application even makes sense.

Confirmation Bias! Tell me you never make the evidence fit the facts and not the other way around?

i do that sometimes, but i do my best to acknowledge that im going to be doing so before doing it, rather than after :)

My theory is that we've thrown out a large part of our humanity along with the bath water and technology of today is akin to the fire granted us by the mythical Prometheus. We're so busy dancing amongst the flames in our rags we don't notice that it's our humanity burning

i am not entirely disinclined to agree with that statement, at least as far as the uneducated masses go. but there are certainly those that know how to properly wield the fire and work towards the progression of humanity and i think it's somewhat silly to entirely discount them as they are the ones who have gotten us this far.

Yea, they're the ones wearing the puffy vests -> https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/monc...

And by the way, I'm not the only one suffering, check out this poor guy who permanently deleted his Facebook account by taking a dive off the fourth floor --

https://digg.com/video/qin-chen-facebook-employee-suicide

None of us an island -- it's called interdependence

Distractions are in the eye of the beholder ironically. Have you considered that /you/ are more of a distraction to them with your obsession with "being adult" to your own expectations - from childhood no less?

Just because imposing your prejudices on others makes you have to think less doesn't mean it is a good idea universally.

Yes, I think about it a lot, that's what makes me modest. I have people who's faces I can't remember but their asinine t-shirts are burned into my retinas. Managers who wore the same damned 'Reading Rainbow' tshirt days on end. Fuck you Paul!

I actually agree. The lack of seriousness in their dress betrays their lack of respect towards their work, and towards themselves.

Yea pimpin'! and those damned fleece vests put my high school religion teachers to shame

It all started with some engineers at commodore trying to show how fun loving they were and quickly became a fool's fashion show of kitschy tired old rags

>Yea pimpin'

Masterful trolling, or epic unawareness.

Dude, I grew up listening to gangsta rap and punk rock -- I always believed we were out to overturn the machine, not become it through fragile sensibilities and asinine perpetual adolescence --

>> It all started with some engineers at commodore trying to show how fun loving they were and quickly became a fool's fashion show of kitschy tired old rags

This just goes on to show how badly you are familiar with fashion.

Fleece vests come from the 90s trading floors. The traders would use shirts, then management started to reduce the temperature on the floors to make the traders more efficient. Vest was a great way not to get cold or too hot on the floor. Thus fleece vests are now associated with finance people.

I'm talking about the original nexus of homebrew computing and gaming that brought us tech fashion, but this is a very interesting tidbit of esoterica I will cherish

Funny enough I found an article on vests just this morning on digg -- do you ever experience these weird synchronicities?

https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/monc...

Or they see their work more as an extension of themselves when they can dress as themselves

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