You're not an outlier here, but here is a bubble inside a bubble. I wore a shirt [0] and tie for my first job interview (video rental store, got the job before I sat down because no other candidate was wearing a shirt and tie) and have worn a suit for every job interview since (although I often take off the jacket once we're sat down).
Apropos of the general subject, I've had to give feedback to more than one person in their probation period along the lines of "buy a belt and use it, nobody wants to see your underwear or what your underwear should be covering". There are some shockingly badly dressed software engineers. Comfortable and casual is one thing, but your clothes falling off you or exposing parts of yourself nobody wants to see?
[0] I think in US English, one would call this a "formal shirt". In England, it's just a shirt.
I think the culture as a whole keeps moving away from formality, which I don't find to be bad. Many times, formality is just an inauthentic pretense meant to make people in positions of power feel comfortable. Clothing is a form of self expression, which employers don't want because <reasons>.
fwiw, the phrase "shirt and tie" in American English is understood to be a button up shirt (I don't think most people specifically call this a "formal shirt") and tie. The "and tie" acts as a contextual modifier since it's rarely assumed someone would be wearing a tie with a t-shirt or something casual.
I've moved in the other direction in recent times, to some extent because I'm sick of the software engineer uniform. I wear a shirt (the kind with buttons) pretty much every day - some of which are made to measure and feature my own selection of colour and contrast colour, threads, collar type, cuffs and so on - and I often dress more formally at conferences (and sometimes on holiday, depending on what I'm doing) on my own time than I do at work.
"Clothing is a form of self expression, which employers don't want because <reasons>."
I wonder if my relatively formal attire in a sea of software engineer uniforms marks me out as one of these self-expressers - perhaps one day I'll be asked if I could please wear a t-shirt to work :)
That's just me; I like to look sharp. I expect that I am judged on that by some - look what he's wearing, I bet he can't even write code! - but as people here have implied in these very threads, if a company turns you down because you're well-dressed, you probably didn't want to to work there anyway!
Apropos of the general subject, I've had to give feedback to more than one person in their probation period along the lines of "buy a belt and use it, nobody wants to see your underwear or what your underwear should be covering". There are some shockingly badly dressed software engineers. Comfortable and casual is one thing, but your clothes falling off you or exposing parts of yourself nobody wants to see?
[0] I think in US English, one would call this a "formal shirt". In England, it's just a shirt.