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-ada...

And 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

We don’t even have cubicles anymore, it’s all everyone shoved onto the same table now.

Indeed it’s telling how bad things haven gotten that many would yearn for the cubicle now

Well, and pre-cubicles, it was just a bunch of tables in a big room surrounded by managers in offices.

The 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.

In 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.

No, it wasn't. Most companies had separate offices, individual or with 2-4 desks in them.

There are still many companies with cubicles, although they do seem to be getting rarer.

Cubicle, 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

even worse lol

it's like "I hear you hate cubicles, so we can solve the cubicle problem and save money at the same time"

With 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.

Next, they’ll get rid of the table…

like cage free eggs

I used to say seeing Dilbert strips in the office is a warning sign. People shouldn’t identify with Dilbert.

When 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.

All 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.

Yeah 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.

There 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.

Titles 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.

I believe a lot of workers want a fulfilling career, a sense of purpose and the knowledge their work matters. After they have their material needs covered, other aspects start becoming dominant.

I feel your pain. I’ve been to some highly dilbertised companies myself.

Very true, Wally is my spirit animal.

For what it's worth, the only company where I posted Dilbert art (two animation cels that my wife bought for me from eBay) was nothing like the Dilbert world. It's just that I loved Dilbert and I thought it was a funny decoration.

But if there are no Dilbert cartoons on the wall, it might be because the PHB has banned them.

This is also a warning sign.

this feels like the setup to a Dilbert strip

A CEO once told me with a straight face that a specific Dilbert cartoon on a cubicle wall was bad for the morale.

He was right about the bad for the morale part.

It's why I don't watch The Office or Office Space. Just too much like the real office.

Someone told me early in my career that the longer you work in an office, the more Office Space transforms from a comedy to a documentary. They weren't wrong...

Also Silicon Valley, albeit for a narrower audience. It’s so real it’s triggering.

The day before the night I first saw Office Space, way after becoming an underground hit, I had my first encounter with the TPS communication barrage. It made the movie funnier and my work life sadder.

Similar thing happened with Idiocracy recently...

Parks & Recreation for anyone who's worked in a Government department.

Then you've totally missed the entire point.

It shows the work environment shares negatives aspects depicted in the comic strips. This is reason for alarm.

My former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.

Did she just not get it? Or did she get it, and it was some weird flex making us watch it with her? I still don’t know.

Your manager had a boss, too. She had to deal with the oddities and frustrations of corporate life and expectations, too.

Even your CEO has a board to deal with.

I always think it's strange when people draw a mental dividing line between ICs and managers and think people on the other side are living in totally different experiences of the world.

I actually think managers struggle much more than ICs, because they have to deal with quirks of their multiple reports + their boss’s.

Yeah, I sometimes miss the more simple IC life. Office politics is a more of a problem in management, but also dealing with humans all the time is just more messy.

A decent manager, especially a low level manager of ICs, will work hard to shield her charges from the full impact of the company's bureaucracy. And even a mediocre manager can't help but do some of that: they usually still have to approve time off requests and deal with the paperwork for performance evaluations etc.

I get that we’re all part of the same system, but I consider Office Space a nihilistic rejection of the entirety of that system. It’s not just “my boss is dumb,” it’s “this whole system is anti-human and dumb, and we’d all be happier working outside with our muscles.”

And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.

> but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

Having been a manager: I bet your boss didn't want to be there any more than you did. They were forced to do corporate team-building and they recognized the absurdity of it all.

So they tried to come up with something entertaining that they could claim was passably work-related. They were trying to do their best by you within the constraints of what was mandated by their job.

This looks like a nice gesture. You are too occupied viewing your manager as "the other" to recognize when they were trying to bond and do something nice for the team within the constraints of their job.

You're lucky. At corporate team-building retreats I never got to watch any fun movies. One had us listen to lectures by a manager whose primary experience was as a little league coach and who thought leading his team was the same thing. The other involved the manager giving us a psychology test of his own creation and trying to lecture us about what he thought our learning styles and weaknesses were based on all the different self-help books he read.

Totally valid that my boss probably didn’t want to be there either, but for context this was circa 2008 Google where “offsite” meant “go spend company money to do something fun.”

Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?

Because your manager might have been dealing with something privately, and didn't feel like doing something fun, but had to because the Gods Of Corporate decreed it so.

And so, an act of rebellion against a shared reality that forces you to have fun on schedule when it's time for the quarterly offsite.

I dunno watching office space with my team doesn't seem like the worst way to spend some time together. Maybe just reading too much into it?

Office Space has become a part of the corporate culture's shared language. You are out of the loop if you haven't seen it, and it wouldn't surprise me that a lot of people are introduced to it in a work-related environment (as I was).

> I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe

...they learned it by watching us?

To add some meta to your edit: I would swear you are not an LLM... or maybe an LLM trained on a lot of comments on HN.

Don't worry, your use of its not X, it's Y did not trigger the LLM pattern match for me. I think the main reason is that your two clauses are of very disparate lengths. LLMs use its X not Y as a rhetorical device that relies on brevity and punchiness, while your longer quote has the authentic ring of clumsy, human phrasing.

You have seen a human side of that manager. She acted like a human.

>And it’s totally appropriate for that message to resonate with my boss, but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

That just means they valued their actual sentiments more than keeping appearances. Doesn't sound weird: it sounds humane.

>Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality?

To point at the elephant in the room, as opposed to just go on with the program and have another forced fun session.

I mean, your questions amount to "why couldn't she just be a good cog and pretend like the rest of us?"

It's like being surprised a coworker is a human on the inside.

> Edit: just realized I used a “it’s not just this, it’s that” construction. I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe their prose is infecting my brain.

LLMs didn't come up with their quirks in a vacuum. Humans always influenced each other in their language use.

It used to be over sound waves mostly but they don't travel far, then came the printing press, later radio and TV. LLMs are just another language blender.

It seems to me that line managers straddle the line somewhat and above that is where it is a really different world. I have started a company and now back to being an IC so been on both sides of it. It's not totally different, but it is a lot.

I've been back and forth between manager and IC, too.

It is different. I won't deny that.

However, politics and corporate absurdist formalities aren't exclusive to management. A lot of the corporate politics and face-palm worthy office games I've dealt with came from ICs, either as my peers, reports, or as some other manager's reports.

We just tend to give a pass to ICs when they do it because they're not viewed as having as much power in the office.

Middle management rarely has enough power to make any changes. They have to dish out whatever bullshit is handed down to them from above.

Can confirm, as an EM this is very true. The best you can hope for is that we're transparent with you about the BS and don't BS you. That's what I try to do.

I don't have stats to back it up, but many people claim that Office Space made a lot of people resign their cubicle jobs and this was a sharp effect on its release.

Office Space was released in 1999, at the peak of the dot-com bubble. So, of course office jobs (particularly software jobs) would decrease when that bubble popped.

But it's not as a result of that movie.

The specific claim made was a spike in voluntary resignations, which should be distinguishable from any bubble popping effect.

I specifically avoided making the claim because you really cannot prove either way

I remember when it was released, I graduated that year, and I remember the reactions at the time

it would still be anecdotal and it's hard to know how many people did in fact resign as a result of the impact from this film, and if it's something that would make any difference in the grand scheme of things

Did you not realize we’ve built a system where everyone is both oppressor and oppressed. Did you not think she too had an idiot boss?

Shit rolls downhill...and most people just try to keep an eye on where the next turd comes from without bothering to watch where it goes after it's past them.

That's... So wise... Where is that from

from how to be a plumber --

  Shit flows downhill, payday is on Friday.

You forgot the most important rule of plumbing: Don’t bite your fingernails.

Not enough people realize this, unfortunately. If they did our system would be flatter than it currently is. You wouldn't have "peaks", so to speak.

Well, driving an Uber is pretty flat.

Perhaps she just had a good sense of humor? It's a great movie after all..

> my former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.

Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than being Peter Gibbons.

I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job like that.

Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.

> Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency.

I always thought Lumberg gets a somewhat un-derserved bad rap in that flick. He is characterized as the villain and of course is—from Peter’s perspective which is where the story is told. But within that universe and at a 10,000 foot POV was he? He seems to be the only one within the corporation that is actually functional, capable, motivated and excelling in his role. No doubt he is a dick, but that’s just part of his role and he’s good at it. He’s a cog, knows he’s a cog, but realizes the machine still needs to run. He recognizes that Peter has hit that competence/incompetence point. He also realizes the Bob’s are incompetent, but powerful. He really is the only one that seems to realize everything that is going on.

His communication deficit was too big to actually be a good manager, no?

(Well, maybe not. Maybe being soul-crushingly efficient is optimal if you know most people will fluctuate out soon anyway, so your lack of ability to actually build a rapport with them is not a material impediment to deliver results sustainably.)

I watched Office Space with a bunch of coworkers at a previous job. It's a funny movie that most people in startups view as a parody of big company office life. Our company didn't function like the movie.

You sound as though you worked for one of my managers, though he just gave everyone a copy of the DVD for Christmas one year. The thing is, he definitely got it, knew he was part of the system, and did his best to take care of the people working for him.

People can play a role and clearly see the role they play as well.

Plenty of managers see the absurdity in a lot of what they have to do, but it's mandated by the people above them.

Did you ever encounter a well managed (or well functioning) team(s)? If so, why do you think they performed so well?

I had a period where I was on a team like that. We didn't have a manager.

Though some of my worst work periods was when I didn't have a manager either lol.

I'm reminded of the story of Graphing Calculator:

"His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive."

- https://www.pacifict.com/story/

It’s almost as if the roles/titles aren’t the determining factor.

Great question. The best team I can name had these things going for them:

- Constrained scope (they were the UI team on an internal product; by the time they got their marching orders the whole thing was a very well understood problem domain)

- Excellent manager (he has infinite calm, deep empathy for the fact that real people are messy and complicated, and an incredible nose for time estimates). There was basically no amount of pressure up-chain could put on him that would shake his cool; he seems to be completely confident internally that the worst-case scenario is he goes and lands on his feet somewhere else.

As a result, his team was basically always happy and high-performing and he consistently missed up-chain expectations set by project managers above him who had to consistently report that UI wasn't going to be delivered on the timeline they set because they had taken his estimates and shaved three weeks off of them, only to discover that the estimates were dead-on and they were the liars. He was insulated from this by (a) keeping consistently good notes on his initial estimates, everything that bumped them, and the final deliverable dates and (b) having skip-level meetings where he could present all of this to his boss's boss clearly.

The manager has decision making power, a well paid senior team, and a clear goal. I have seen it work like a dream.

It speaks to a general lack of self awareness people have about class/power structures.

PHB?

Pointy Haired Boss :)

I think everybody, with few exceptions, is in the system involuntarily. And also you can't say that that you don't want to be in the system. You have to fake it very hard if you want to "win". You have to demonstrate "passion" and such.

My boss refused to allow people to call him boss, for example. He really hated the system.

"I'm a regular boss, I'm a cool boss. You can just call me Stan"

Probably not how you meant it but I chuckled.

Well, PHB is not about simply being a manager, but about being a certain type of manager, so he might very well be justified in his wall decoration.

It's PHBs all the way up.

Any truly popular art relies on finding an emotional hook that’s specific enough to identify with strongly but broad enough that most people can see themselves in it. Everyone’s felt their boss is an asshole and their underlings are idiots, so they identify with that emotion rather than the specifics of Dilbert being an engineer. Most of Dilbert’s complaints map pretty well to the conflict between any other kind of individual contributor role dealing with management.