My husband is a software engineer. If you've hung around any IT folks in the U.S. for very long, you know that they make business casual look fancy.
I once asked my husband what the presenters at a "No Fluff, Just Stuff" conference wore. I was surprised to learn that most of them wore jeans, and probably wouldn't be respected if they had shown up in a tie. For engineers, it really is a matter of what you know being primary.
Software engineers are the folks that have to work overnight the day a product goes live. How neat your code is trumps how neat your clothes are.
The corporation where my husband works has recently decided that the quality of dress might be more important than the quality of work. They can't quite make up their mind if the IT department is allowed to wear jeans or not and considering taking disciplinary action against those who don't show up in khakis.
Imagine the time that was wasted in meetings on this inane topic when the IT department was coming upon a major product launch. Yikes!
I'm all for presenting yourself in dressy clothes when it matters. If I give a presentation, even at the weekly Toastmasters meeting, you guarantee I'll be in a blazer. If you're departments such as sales, human resources or you sell fine jewelry, dressing to the nines is probably appropriate. There's also plenty of legal precedent for having different dress codes for different departments or regions. (See this post on the Human Resource Blog about when it's okay to have variations in dress code.)
To be culturally competent, there's going to be mixed standards if you have a combination of fields in one company. Gone are the days where one size fits all and everyone wears a tie.
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