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.