Interns Get Fired En Masse After Protesting Dress Code at Work
Mad Men: I worked at IBM Office Products Division Headquarters in the 1970s. Dress code was full suit with a white shirt. I was a systems programmer on the IBM 360 Mainframe. One day I walked from my office, into the hall, to the print room 2 doors away without my suit jacket. I got &quot;written up&quot; (a very bad thing).<p>In those days even IBM Field Service Engineers who repaired Selectric Typewriters wore suits. Their shoes were so well shined you could see your face in them.<p>These days I work from home. Sometimes I walk the hall to the cafeteria (the kitchen) without my suit jacket. I expect to be written up sometime soon.<p>Here&#x27;s a clue a very senior manager (Ralph Gomory, IBM Research Division President) once gave me...<p>Managers make decisions. Only go to management with your need for a decision and always present the options.<p>They went to management with what was, in essence, a complaint. Worse, it was a complaint that had nothing to do with the business. Clearly they were not keeping the business uppermost in their priority queue. So management made a business decision and fixed the problem.<p>We had a &quot;mass revolt&quot; among the systems programmers across all of the IBM internal sites. We would only get &quot;upgraded processors&quot; after the customer returned an old one. We were working on trailing edge equipment. Unfortunately our internal memos (the &quot;Tandem Memos&quot;) got leaked to Computer World (the big newspaper of the day). I got called &quot;on the carpet&quot; by senior management. I expected to be fired.<p>Fortunately IBM Corporate management saw that we were complaining about the business, not about personal issues. They changed the policy and we got leading edge equipment.<p>Mass protests sometimes work but they need to focus on improving the business. Unless you&#x27;re in the fashion business it is hard to see how dress code protests matter.