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From a recent NYTimes article about his passing: > “Dilbert” was a war cry against the management class — the system of deluded jerks you work for who think th
by cainxinth 9mo ago
From a recent NYTimes article about his passing:
> “Dilbert” was a war cry against the management class — the system of deluded jerks you work for who think they know better. Workers posted it on their cubicles like resistance fighters chalking V’s on walls in occupied Paris. But their bosses posted “Dilbert” in their offices too, since they also had a boss who was an idiot.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opinion/dilbert-scott-adams-maga.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opinion/dilbert-scott-ada...
- catoc 9mo agohttps://archive.is/9JVkU https://archive.is/9JVkU
- raverbashing 9mo agoAnd while we don't have cubicles and TPS reports anymore, people have different grievances and ways of expressing their cynicism. History does not repeat but it rhymes indeed
- seanmcdirmid 9mo agoWe don’t even have cubicles anymore, it’s all everyone shoved onto the same table now.
- steveBK123 9mo agoIndeed it’s telling how bad things haven gotten that many would yearn for the cubicle now
- ghaff 9mo agoWell, and pre-cubicles, it was just a bunch of tables in a big room surrounded by managers in offices.
- AlotOfReading 9mo agoThe open workroom was a relatively short fad pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright. If you look at office buildings before that, they're much more similar to houses and apartments. Lots of rooms connected by hallways, staircases, and atriums. You can imagine the difficulty and expense of lighting a large open space without electricity.
- pm3003 9mo agoIn Europe I see a lot of companies with open space workrooms with some cubicles, maybe 30-40% of workers at those companies seem to work in them.
- coldtea 9mo agoNo, it wasn't. Most companies had separate offices, individual or with 2-4 desks in them.
- userbinator 9mo agoThere are still many companies with cubicles, although they do seem to be getting rarer.
- heresie-dabord 9mo agoCubicle, you say? LUXURY! We had to code 12 of us to a desk inside a cardboard box in the middle of the road. At the end of every day, Pointed-Haired Boss would replace us with A.I. and fire us, only to re-hire us the next day at half the salary. (With apologies to:) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Yorkshiremen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Yorkshiremen
- paulpauper 9mo agoeven worse lol it's like "I hear you hate cubicles, so we can solve the cubicle problem and save money at the same time"
- ivell 9mo agoWith clean desk policies in some organizations, you would be lucky to have a seat. Initial 5-10 minutes are spent on finding a place to sit.
- BobbyTables2 9mo agoNext, they’ll get rid of the table…
- sul_tasto 9mo agolike cage free eggs
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- rbanffy 9mo agoI used to say seeing Dilbert strips in the office is a warning sign. People shouldn’t identify with Dilbert.
- dragonwriter 9mo agoWhen in the 1990s-00s people posted Dilbert strips, it wasn't, IME, because they identified with the character Dilbert. They did it because they saw in their work environment echoes of the environment portrayed in the comic, of which Dilbert was as much a part as the PHB.
- michaelcampbell 9mo agoAll of us did in the day, and most of the strips were common from multiple people for a given office, for the obvious reason. This seemed so blatantly obvious (and the answer if asked "why did you put this one up?") that I'm agog at anyone thinking otherwise.
- dgxyz 9mo agoYeah that. Some ethics and management training programmes leveraged it because they thought it was popular. I still have a dilbert ethics training certificate somewhere as a reminder of how fucked up corp culture is. American corp in Europe for ref. Defence. Absolute top tier stereotype asshats.
- sandworm101 9mo agoThere is a Dilbert takeaway i use at work today: the only thing an employee really wants is more money for the same work/pain, or less work/pain for the same money. I dont do trinkets and titles. My people get as much time off as i can provide, and i will sign most anything that means they get paid a little more.
- eru 9mo agoTitles are useful, because they are essentially free to the company, and (some) employees value them. And valuing titles can be rational, even if worker herself doesn't care, because they can look good on the CV and to friends and families. Some 'trinkets' are worth more to the employees than they cost the company to provide. So it's rational to provide them. Think of Wally's beloved coffee for an example. Or look at Googlers' lunch.