Comment by fantasizr
2 days ago
younger folks may not realize how many of his strips were cut out of the newspaper and taped to fridges, cubicles, and office breakrooms.
2 days ago
younger folks may not realize how many of his strips were cut out of the newspaper and taped to fridges, cubicles, and office breakrooms.
In the 90's, I worked for a small consulting company with large corporate clients.
We joked that we could assess the health of a company's culture by whether Dilbert cartoons were tapped up in cubicles. Companies without them tended to have not much in the way of a sense of humor, or irony, or self-awareness.
The worst job I ever had was working for a manager who literally had a "no Dilbert cartoons in the workplace" policy. Other cartoons, fine, go crazy. But no Dilbert.
That place wasn't just kinda like Initech in Office Space, it pretty much WAS Initech in Office Space, only way less funny and interesting.
I worked for a Pointy-Haired Boss who used to pass out Dilbert strips he himself found funny and relevant to that person. Sadly, he could not recognize the PHB in himself.
Yeah I think that Joel Spolsky wrote some blog post about Dilbert cartoons on walls being a red flag. However, surely no cartoons is surely more often down to stiff policy which in it self is a way worse red flag. (Black flag? At least on the beach)
I suspect there was a healthy medium: none meant cultural issues, while too many meant the entire company was dysfunctional to an extreme.
As a young engineer, I was once visited at my work desk by my CEO and the HR team because of all the Dilberts I had up on my cubicle wall. They felt they were harming morale. The engineers around me loved them, but they made fun of management, the real issue. I was surprised it merited the attention. I won a short battle over the issue and was allowed to keep them up. I still have a photo of that cubicle with them up.
Once, before the web existed, I emailed Scott and joked that perhaps he was someone at my company, looking over my shoulder. The comics were often absurd but also so accurate. He replied something friendly, I forget what.
As was Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. Oddly in my own corporate travels, the practice seemed to have stopped mid-90's. In the '00's and later, cubicle walls were mostly barren. After '08, cubicles had disappeared altogether and they just lined us up along long tables like cordwood.
That brings back memories. They were definitely popular. In the early 2000s, I worked at a small company and one coworker had a bunch of Dilbert strips all over one of her cubicle walls. It wasn't an insane amount, but her cube was on the way to the break room, so it was visible to everyone passing by. Apparently the owners of the company did not like that and had her take them down.
Back then it was possible for authors and artists to maintain a mystique about who they were. What you saw was what you got and that was it. Making social media a necessity for product marketing changed that forever.
I always thought that finding those strips in an office was a warning sign. If they identify with those characters, there was something profoundly wrong.
And yes, the norm was already pretty bad.