Originally Posted by
golasalle
I feel that it's all about the environment that you'll be working in, as well as the field. My wife is an accountant and a backpack would never be acceptable to her environs. In my little patch of IT, a backpack is completely acceptable for just about everything except meeting with a CEO. (Although, I have met a couple Fortune 50 CEO's and they didn't seem too terribly concerned that I had a nice backpack vs a leather bag.Then again, I'm the customer!)
Yeah, that's one thing nice about being a techie--it's pretty much accepted that we dress practical rather than fancy.
I've attended multiple trade shows in pretty casual garb and it's only a slight handicap. They obviously prefer the guys in the suits--not that I'm being dismissed as not a real customer, but that the guys in the suits are higher in the pecking order and thus represent bigger sales. There's also the issue that flashy presentations with little substance work much better on suits than techs.