Comment by martinpw
11 hours ago
> This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something
My former manager used to have Dilbert comic strips on his wall. It always puzzled me - was it self deprecating humor? At a certain point though it became clear that in his mind the PHB was one layer ABOVE him in the management chain and not anyone at his level. I suspect it may be a recursive pattern.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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Very true, Wally is my spirit animal.
https://archive.is/9JVkU
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Middle management rarely has enough power to make any changes. They have to dish out whatever bullshit is handed down to them from above.
> 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
Perhaps she just had a good sense of humor? It's a great movie after all..
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.
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.
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It's PHBs all the way up.
Did you ever encounter a well managed (or well functioning) team(s)? If so, why do you think they performed so well?
The manager has decision making power, a well paid senior team, and a clear goal. I have seen it work like a dream.
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.
PHB?
Pointy Haired Boss :)
It speaks to a general lack of self awareness people have about class/power structures.
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.