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When I (male) interviewed for a tech role at Amazon back in 2000, one of my interviewers was a woman in a sundress (it was summer), with large, visible tattoos and a nose piercing.

The men were dressed casually, in jeans and t-shirts, but seeing her able to feel comfortable as herself made me excited to join. This was at a time that Starbucks made baristas cover up visible tattoos, and many professional tech roles at large companies still required "business casual" of khakis & polos.

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Not enough is said about the cultural shift that happened as a result of technology giving economic and social power to the West Coast counter-culture scene.

During the first dot com bubble, dress code at Goldman was still (non-casual) business. This lead to the absurd situation that teams on the West Coast came to the office in a suit and tie, would then change into slacks and hoodie to meet with tech bro startup clients, and then change back into the suit at the office.

Around 2000 or so GS relaxed the dress code, and, to compete better with tech in hiring, even put a foosball table somewhere in their NY headquarters on 85 Broad Street. Then the dot com bubble burst, and the foosball table was gone rather quickly.

Yes, now you can dress however you like, paint your body and hair however you like... but God have mercy on your soul if you say or think (or did in the past 30 years) something Twitter doesn't like. I'm not sure it's actually an improvement, to think about it.

Moving social opprobrium from assumptions made based on look to documented speech and action? I don't know; that seems like a strict improvement.

In any case, these seem like two unrelated changes (West Coast culture of looks-acceptance coinciding with a global telecommunications and searchable data storage networkb that feed existing culture of lack of words / deeds acceptance).

Oh it's way beyond "social opprobrium". And no, I don't think these two changes are entirely unrelated. Maybe not direct consequences of each other - tolerance of tattoos of course does not directly cause intolerance of free speech - but likely having related causes beyond mere coincidence in time.

I think the related cause is that the people with the tattoos helped build, enlarge, and improve the global telecommunications infrastructure.

But the consequent public shunning is an existing practice grown to the scale of the public being global facilitated by the global telecommunications infrastructure; it's not new and it doesn't stem culturally solely from the people who built the system. It would have been too expensive in the past to know what racist thing somebody said in confidence to a friend before boarding a plane... Now, they can broadcast it worldwide and people globally will have done extended commentary on it amongst each other by the time the plane lands.

But it's not the West Coast folks managing the commentary... They have handed a tool to the world, and this is how the world chooses to use it.

So you think you could say something counter-culture in a GS-like strict dress code environment and get away with it? Or is your point that bigoted rants would have been better accepted in a boardroom in the 90's when the old boys were smoking cigars with each other?

Wasn't Starbucks, the example of a restrictive culture, a West Coast counter-culture kind of company though?

I read it as that being the point - that back then even starbucks made their employees cover their tattoos. That's why it seemed like a big deal to OP that Amazon didn't.

Interesting observation. What were the implications?

We exchanged privacy for the right to wear slacks to the office and show our tattoos, it seems.

Privacy, freedom of speech, cultural diversity, civil public discussion... And now nobody is going to the office anyways. Was it worth it?