I think this is an important article. One part that really resonated with me is the studied informality, in a way that becomes a kind of shibboleth for class membership.

"The name that we gave to the culture there was “studied informality”—nobody wore suits and ties, nobody even wore standard business casual. People were wearing sneakers and all kinds of casual, fashionable clothes. There was a sort of “right” way to do it and a “wrong” way to do it

This actually does remind me of something PG wrote a while back in an essay about informal dress codes and programmers.

"Nerds don't just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.[1]

I feel a little bad bringing this up, because I don't mean to be hard on Paul here, or dredge up an essay written 15 years ago. I'll also admit I found the statement entertaining, though it had a bit of the competitive nerd quality to it, something I found a bit off-putting even though I meet more or less every demographic check mark for "nerd" for my generation, down to dungeons and dragons and programming in basic on an appleII.

But then there's this part, from the Atlantic article, about suits. "that was in some ways, I think, more off-putting and harder to navigate for some of our working-class respondents than hearing “just wear a suit and tie every day” might have been. The rules weren’t obvious, but everybody else seemed to know them."

Over time, I'm come to believe that the "informal" barriers to entry for programming may be far more exclusive than the formal barriers in law or medicine. We haze through whiteboard coding interviews, we (well google and many others) store results in a double secret database with scores that a candidate is never allowed to see. There's no specific degree you take, no dress code you follow, no formal, well recognized board or exam, conducted consistently by people who are known experts in their field.

I've read articles bringing law and medicine up as a counterpoint to low levels of women in programming and stem fields. After all, women were clearly discriminated against, both in terms of formal barriers and informal hostility, in law and medicine, and yet women are now at much higher levels, in some cases a majority of law and med students in elite schools. So, the argument goes, why do we conclude that discrimination is the cause of continuing lower participation in STEM?

Here's the thing - the formal barriers to entry can be addressed in a formal way. The vague, culturally implicit shibboleths that software uses to enforce entry may be vastly more insidious and difficult to even recognize, let alone abate.

I don't cheer our informal culture and dress code the way I used to. No, I'm not saying I want us all to wear suits to work (or have an ABA style organization put a 150K degree in between programmers and the right to program), but there's something about the "prophylactic barrier against stupidity", the distain of a more formal culture, that I think may be more discouraging to people who aren't
as familiar with these cultural habits.

I'll leave you with this - I'm a programmer, but my father is a physician. He was invited to speak a meeting for a society of African American physicians. He wasn't sure how to dress for a lunch meeting, but decided to go formal, with a suit. He said if anything, he was ever so slightly underdressed. Casual dress wouldn't have been anything remotely resembling a prophylactic barrier against stupidity, it would have been a sign of disrespect.

There's a lot here, in this article, to think about.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html