I interned at an IBM R&D site in Winchester (UK) for a year in 1988-89 and none of us interns wore suits, or even ties. I don't recall many of the f/t IBMers doing so either. It was pretty informal really.
(Not disputing your story, just providing a different perspective.)
I work with a lot of government departments. The "policy" is not a thing that can enforce itself, and often barely exists at all. Rarely is it actually written down!
Mostly these things boil down to a vetocracy where all managers in some hierarch must say 'yes', otherwise a single 'no' is a final 'no'.
Hence, the trick is not to ask because the more people are involved the higher the chance that one of them will say 'no'.
The manager in that office you worked in most likely made a decision themselves and didn't punt it up the hierarchy, and hence nobody told him 'no'.
The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting.
PS: It's hilarious to see this effect play out as a consultant, because often I deal with different "randomly" selected subsets of the same organisation and the difference in their day-to-day can be stark. It just boils down to which managers take individual responsibility, and which regularly beg for permission to do their job. "No."
> Hence, the trick is not to ask because the more people are involved the higher the chance that one of them will say 'no'.
So in my case at IBM the trick to being able to keep a hand-and-a-half sword in your office is to just have it appear there one day. My boss did a bit of a double-take the first time he saw it but that was the only reaction I got.
They did have a "no firearms in the building" policy but that didn't extend to medieval edged weapons, although there may have been a change made after I left.
And I thought I was crazy for keeping a crowbar in the office...
(I work at a particle accelerator and we need to protect ourselves for interdimensional breaches)
Do you truky, in your heart of hearts, believe that?
It is obviously a joke, but I bought it after several visitors asked us if we didn't have a crowbar xD
Wouldn't you also want to keep a can of spray paint to draw the Elder Sign? You know, in case it was needed in a hurry.
Come to think of it, does an Elder Sign still work if you spray it onto a wall using a template? I think you need to investigate that the next time there's a breach... you've got plenty of interns right?
I need to ask me Warhammer colleague...
> The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting.
My version of this:
For my friends, everything; for my enemies, pull security in.
> The corollary to that is a clever bureaucrat can kill a proposal simply by inviting many decision makers to a meeting.
Not particularly clever. My experience is that low-level team/line managers typically already have the authority to say "no" to their own people; but they don't want to take the blame for saying "no" (they want their team to like them!), so by punting the decision up the chain, they're effectively punting the blame for saying no up the chain (under the expectation that anything so punted will get a "no" response.)
Some this backfires, though: everyone above them says yes, and so they have to be the one to say no. (They may end up lying if asked, vaguely saying "someone important" said no.)
Sometimes this backfires badly: not only does everyone above them say yes, but someone somewhere up the chain loves the idea, and turns it into an "initiative" — i.e. something the line-level manager is now locked into doing.
> Sometimes this backfires badly: not only does everyone above them say yes, but someone somewhere up the chain loves the idea, and turns it into an "initiative" — i.e. something the line-level manager is now locked into doing.
I've seen a variant of this (repeatedly!) where a sales person will suggest the bronze/silver/gold/platinum edition of some product to a manager, the decision goes up the chain (unnecessarily), and then someone near the top says: "Platinum sounds the best!". Nobody dares take responsibility for suggesting "anything less than the best", so it gets locked in.
Meanwhile, the platinum edition exists only to make the silver and gold pricing look reasonable, so now... now... the consultant has to implement a solution based on the "bells & whistles edition" which takes 10x as long and has a bunch of issues. E.g.: "clustered" versus simply "active-passive" or weird nonstandard high bandwidth ports instead of ordinary Ethernet, etc.