> 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.
> “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.
For those looking for a "successor theory" to the Dilbert Principle, I highly suggest Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle [0].
To use Dilbert terms: Adams would say that PHB is dumb and he is promoted into management as that's where he can do the least damage.
Rao would say that PHB is actually put there by upper management to be a combination of:
- fall guy/lightning rod to take blame for failed projects
- dumb subordinates are less likely to try to take your job (dumb doesn't mean unintelligent. Rather, Rao uses the term "clueless" to highlight smart people who are not political)
The Gervais Principle is much more accurate in my experience. One of the important reasons middle management has to be "clueless" to drink the kool-aid and take on more responsibility for minimal extra compensation. The checked out employees of the world know their work is meaningless, but the clueless ascribe to it some greater meaning which makes them trustworthy.
We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.
Then look at our leadership class. Look at the leaders of the most powerful countries. Look at the most powerful leaders in finance and business.
Look at that contrast. It’s very clear where the actually smart people are.
But those actually smart people keep putting leaders like that in power. It’s not a conspiracy. We do it. We need them for some reason.
I have two hypotheses.
One is familiar: they are sacrificial lightning rods. Sacrifice the king when things don’t go well.
The other is what I call the dopamine donor hypothesis. Compared to the speed and complexity of the modern world, most human beings are essentially catatonic. Our dopamine systems are not calibrated for this. So we sit there and do nothing by default, or we play and invent but lack the intrinsic motivation to do the hardest parts.
So we find these freaks: narcissists, delusional manic prophets, psychopaths. They’re deeply dysfunctional people but we use them. We use the fact that they have tireless non stop motivation. Dopamine always on. Go go go.
We place them in positions of authority and let them drive us, even to the point of abuse, as a hack to get around the fact that our central nervous systems don’t natively do this.
Then of course if things go wrong, it’s back to their other purpose: sacrificial scapegoats.
So in a sense we are both victims of these people and exploiters of them. It’s a dysfunctional relationship.
If we could find ways to tweak our systems like amphetamine but without the side effects, we could perhaps replace this system with a pill.
It would be more compassionate for the freaks too. They’re not happy people. If we stopped using them this way they might get help and be happier.
Governance creates markets -> markets creates innovation. These things have feedback loops into governance, but the tail ultimately does not wag the dog.
Engineers-- especially in the Bay where discussion of such is written off as mental illness and folks-- often dismiss politics and governance as nonsense subjects that lack rules and are run by the mob/emotions when in fact these have their own "physics" or operate like a (very complex and challenging to study) system just like everything else in the natural world.
This attitude is of course also something that has been designed and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.
> We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.
There are a lot of smart and skilled people involved in making a cutting edge chip fab. It's not one ubermensch in a basement inventing a new TSMC process by thinking really hard. There's technicians, scientists, researchers in multiple disciplines. All of those people have to be organized.
I don't know where you think the "smart" people are, but maybe meditate on the fact that "smartness" is not a single variable that dictates a person's value or success. Someone who is an expert at researching extreme UV patterning isn't going to necessarily run a great chip manufacturer.
You got it backwards. We (which we?) don't need them, they need us. They can't play the games they like without massive resource extraction. If someone continually catches the flu, it doesn't mean they need the flu.
We don’t just use these people we create them. Since ancient Egypt the priest class of every society is employed to apply ritual trauma to psychologically prepare princes for their vocation of restless leadership.
>For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.
I was caught off guard by how brutal this article was at points. I don't really follow Scott Alexander much, so I was pleasantly surprised by it. While I don't have the same relationship with Scott Adams... I can see parts of this in my relationship with Kanye.
Pretty easy to take pot shots at a dead guy who lacks the ability to punch back. Especially when the dead guy hosted a daily show and would have been thrilled to have him come on and debate! Why didnt Mr Codex get around to stating his opinion re: Adams for the past 10 years?
Seems like he's just quoting Adams himself. Adams was popular for his self-deprecating humor.
Adams used to tell people the secret to success was being in the top 25% at multiple things - he could draw and he could make corporate jokes, but he was not exceptional in either of those things. It's not really a pot shot, more of a tribute. He's still saying Adams was just below Leonardo da Vinci.
I actually watched the podcast in question. As I saw it he made a very reasonable and 100% non-racist comment (in the context of the discussion the soundbytes were later taken out of), which related more to the inflammatory, caustic nature of the media narrative on black-white relationships, and whether as a white person it is even fruitful to be engaging in that narrative, if the end outcome is that your engagement will be used out of context to cause even more strife and division by the people pushing this narrative. I.e. you will make more of a difference as a white person by trying to improve the "systems" around you, in a manner that benefits everyone, rather than by engaging in pointless arguments and debates with people who are blinded by a very deliberately promoted agenda.
I very much agree with that point, and have experienced it myself. Ironically, if nothing else, this whole affair and the rush to cancel him and call him racist and disgraced, ultimately proved his very point. Just look at how the links you shared choose to word their posthumous articles.
If you really want an accurate source, just go watch the (entire) podcast. No better source than this. Best case scenario you'll disagree with my take, but now your take is informed rather than misinformed.
And to set the record straight, Adams was the very opposite of racist in my view. He had very nuanced and pragmatic views, including how the best thing the country could do to help black communities should be investing in education across the board, instead of funding and pandering to apologists who inflame the masses but then drain the money from the education system, perpetuating ghetto-like communities.
I found Dilbert in 2013, when I was working in a dead end dev job in a small software company. Felt nice to see others seem to have the same issues.
I quit that job and started freelancing. Not only because of those comics, but at least they didn't give me any doubts about that endeavour.
What I learned: engineering skills give you power, but it's not the only thing you can be nerdy at.
You can be nerdy about anything.
It just happens to be that software engineering is something that people with much money are willing to pay for.
Just imagine you're history nerd. Not much options to profit quickly from that.
Same goes the other direction. If you happen to really like financial markets and math, you might find ways to make even more money with less work than an engineer.
> I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show.
I do wonder if Scott Alexander means this in the sense that he watched a few shows because Adams had died, or if there were the first episodes of Adams' shows he had watched. Dying does reveal some interesting things about a person - in Adams' case he was doing his live podcasts right up to about the end. I tuned in to one out of ghoulish interest and he seemed to be the sickest person I'd ever seen. He was clearly doing that show because he loved it.
If he had his time over, he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White because of the disastrous impact on the Dilbert empire, but I do think Alexander has fundamentally misread what Adams believed it meant to be successful. He wasn't that motivated by commercial success since at least the 2010s, although he had achieved it. He seemed a lot more interested in getting ideas out there and making a difference to people's lives.
Part of me knew a comment like this would show up. The trend itself is greater than Dilbert and not new, but it has certainly become more pronounced. What is interesting that while 'Dilbert empire' fell in the process for not accepting white inferiority, full blown resistance marketing market is taking ( or maybe has taken already ) shape fueled largely by highly polarized populace.
I am not looking forward to it, because it requires keeping abreast of currents I do not care for or even understand.
Great eulogy and art, What saddens me is the lack of a friends around him, seems like he got isolated in the politics of 2015 and then got radicalized.
> But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job - become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to love it.
At least in the technology sector, work has changed a lot in some regards since the days when Scott Adams was in the workforce.
No suits and ties needed, show up in a tee-shirt and denim jeans. Flexible work hours, and work-from-home. Top 2% salary. Free food. Clean, well-maintained, offices. No request for annual leave ever denied. Pick the work you like from the top of the backlog. No bosses sending interns to get them coffee or any nonsense like that. Go ahead, play some foosball or table tennis on the clock. Is two screens enough, you can have a third if it'd boost your productivity?
And senior leaders try to project the image of "Stanford CS PhD dropout" rather than "Wall Street Harvard MBA" - they're "just like us", look at that hoodie he's wearing.
The world of Dilbert, meanwhile, is trapped in amber. And the wry insights that fax machines are hard to use don't really land like they did in 1995.
Beautifully stated. A lot of the comics still apply, but certainly not directly to my job. I imagine government workers find it very relatable, however.
I’ve spent most of my career in the cushy Silicon Valley startup style work cultures you’ve described. Obviously I greatly prefer them… but the stodgy business casual+ 9-5 cube farms still exist, and in great numbers. I’ve worked in them out of necessity here and there, and they’re more common than one might believe reading HN. If the desperate recruiters in my metro are anything to judge by, it seems just about everything manufacturing and financial services firm is run by a Pointy Haired Boss or two.
There is still plenty of need for Dilbert strips in the workforce.
I was a long time Scott Adams fan with the Dilbert Principle being one of my favorite books.
What I found most interesting about him was around the time Trump was running for president the first time, Adams was one of the first people to point out that Trump was, to use Adams' terms, a "master persuader". No one else at the time seemed to be talking about this and it was fascinating to see a humorist have this take/insight.
Trump couldn't even persuade his own fans that Operation Warpspeed was a good thing.
So the hypothesis that he was just riding the crazy train seems to fit the facts better.
Mostly he's just paraphrasing stuff he heard on Fox. People who don't watch Fox say "that's some of the craziest shit I've ever heard" and the people who have been marinated in the crazy for a decade or more say "he's the only one telling it straight (about all these made up things I believe)"
The weird thing about Adams was that he believed Trump was Dogbert, not the pointy-haired boss.
If he'd stayed apolitical people would have kept clipping his strips and putting them up on cubical walls. Dogbert was not an appealing character. His sharper edge kept the sharp edges of Dilbert and the other engineers more out of one's attention. Then Adams revealed that he believed Dogbert was the one to emulate and tried to prove his theories (and he said black people were scary -- there was that) and he polarized himself. Much of his audience recoiled. He gained new, more ICE-esque followers, and then still more of his audience recoiled.
To his credit he pioneered the PR death spiral later made famous by Kanye and Rowlings. This was not the career capper he was looking for.
That isn't how I understood Dilbert. Dilbert is a normal guy and PHB is actually mentally retarded.
It's essentially gallows humor for a world where, for no apparent reason, blithering idiots often seem to be the only people who wield any decision making power.
Scott Adams had a take on that. The "Dilbert Principle" (his version of the Peter Principle) is that useless engineers that are promoted away from doing real work to keep them from messing it up.
I have a much darker hypothesis about it - when people are left to compete, they often resort to badmouthing those who they think could outcompete them.
Thus, the reputation of the most competent gets destroyed, while the village idiot remains as the only one left unscathed.
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.
> “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...
To use Dilbert terms: Adams would say that PHB is dumb and he is promoted into management as that's where he can do the least damage.
Rao would say that PHB is actually put there by upper management to be a combination of:
- fall guy/lightning rod to take blame for failed projects
- dumb subordinates are less likely to try to take your job (dumb doesn't mean unintelligent. Rather, Rao uses the term "clueless" to highlight smart people who are not political)
0 - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.
Then look at our leadership class. Look at the leaders of the most powerful countries. Look at the most powerful leaders in finance and business.
Look at that contrast. It’s very clear where the actually smart people are.
But those actually smart people keep putting leaders like that in power. It’s not a conspiracy. We do it. We need them for some reason.
I have two hypotheses.
One is familiar: they are sacrificial lightning rods. Sacrifice the king when things don’t go well.
The other is what I call the dopamine donor hypothesis. Compared to the speed and complexity of the modern world, most human beings are essentially catatonic. Our dopamine systems are not calibrated for this. So we sit there and do nothing by default, or we play and invent but lack the intrinsic motivation to do the hardest parts.
So we find these freaks: narcissists, delusional manic prophets, psychopaths. They’re deeply dysfunctional people but we use them. We use the fact that they have tireless non stop motivation. Dopamine always on. Go go go.
We place them in positions of authority and let them drive us, even to the point of abuse, as a hack to get around the fact that our central nervous systems don’t natively do this.
Then of course if things go wrong, it’s back to their other purpose: sacrificial scapegoats.
So in a sense we are both victims of these people and exploiters of them. It’s a dysfunctional relationship.
If we could find ways to tweak our systems like amphetamine but without the side effects, we could perhaps replace this system with a pill.
It would be more compassionate for the freaks too. They’re not happy people. If we stopped using them this way they might get help and be happier.
Governance creates markets -> markets creates innovation. These things have feedback loops into governance, but the tail ultimately does not wag the dog.
Engineers-- especially in the Bay where discussion of such is written off as mental illness and folks-- often dismiss politics and governance as nonsense subjects that lack rules and are run by the mob/emotions when in fact these have their own "physics" or operate like a (very complex and challenging to study) system just like everything else in the natural world.
This attitude is of course also something that has been designed and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.
There are a lot of smart and skilled people involved in making a cutting edge chip fab. It's not one ubermensch in a basement inventing a new TSMC process by thinking really hard. There's technicians, scientists, researchers in multiple disciplines. All of those people have to be organized.
I don't know where you think the "smart" people are, but maybe meditate on the fact that "smartness" is not a single variable that dictates a person's value or success. Someone who is an expert at researching extreme UV patterning isn't going to necessarily run a great chip manufacturer.
>For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.
A+, no notes
Adams used to tell people the secret to success was being in the top 25% at multiple things - he could draw and he could make corporate jokes, but he was not exceptional in either of those things. It's not really a pot shot, more of a tribute. He's still saying Adams was just below Leonardo da Vinci.
https://www.advocate.com/news/people/dilbert-creator-scott-a...
https://factually.co/fact-checks/society/was-scott-adams-rac...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/inside-disgraced-dilb...
"Consider the source".
I actually watched the podcast in question. As I saw it he made a very reasonable and 100% non-racist comment (in the context of the discussion the soundbytes were later taken out of), which related more to the inflammatory, caustic nature of the media narrative on black-white relationships, and whether as a white person it is even fruitful to be engaging in that narrative, if the end outcome is that your engagement will be used out of context to cause even more strife and division by the people pushing this narrative. I.e. you will make more of a difference as a white person by trying to improve the "systems" around you, in a manner that benefits everyone, rather than by engaging in pointless arguments and debates with people who are blinded by a very deliberately promoted agenda.
I very much agree with that point, and have experienced it myself. Ironically, if nothing else, this whole affair and the rush to cancel him and call him racist and disgraced, ultimately proved his very point. Just look at how the links you shared choose to word their posthumous articles.
If you really want an accurate source, just go watch the (entire) podcast. No better source than this. Best case scenario you'll disagree with my take, but now your take is informed rather than misinformed.
And to set the record straight, Adams was the very opposite of racist in my view. He had very nuanced and pragmatic views, including how the best thing the country could do to help black communities should be investing in education across the board, instead of funding and pandering to apologists who inflame the masses but then drain the money from the education system, perpetuating ghetto-like communities.
I quit that job and started freelancing. Not only because of those comics, but at least they didn't give me any doubts about that endeavour.
What I learned: engineering skills give you power, but it's not the only thing you can be nerdy at.
You can be nerdy about anything.
It just happens to be that software engineering is something that people with much money are willing to pay for.
Just imagine you're history nerd. Not much options to profit quickly from that.
Same goes the other direction. If you happen to really like financial markets and math, you might find ways to make even more money with less work than an engineer.
I do wonder if Scott Alexander means this in the sense that he watched a few shows because Adams had died, or if there were the first episodes of Adams' shows he had watched. Dying does reveal some interesting things about a person - in Adams' case he was doing his live podcasts right up to about the end. I tuned in to one out of ghoulish interest and he seemed to be the sickest person I'd ever seen. He was clearly doing that show because he loved it.
If he had his time over, he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White because of the disastrous impact on the Dilbert empire, but I do think Alexander has fundamentally misread what Adams believed it meant to be successful. He wasn't that motivated by commercial success since at least the 2010s, although he had achieved it. He seemed a lot more interested in getting ideas out there and making a difference to people's lives.
Part of me knew a comment like this would show up. The trend itself is greater than Dilbert and not new, but it has certainly become more pronounced. What is interesting that while 'Dilbert empire' fell in the process for not accepting white inferiority, full blown resistance marketing market is taking ( or maybe has taken already ) shape fueled largely by highly polarized populace.
I am not looking forward to it, because it requires keeping abreast of currents I do not care for or even understand.
Alternatively, he achieved enough commercial success and then was satisfied.
At least in the technology sector, work has changed a lot in some regards since the days when Scott Adams was in the workforce.
No suits and ties needed, show up in a tee-shirt and denim jeans. Flexible work hours, and work-from-home. Top 2% salary. Free food. Clean, well-maintained, offices. No request for annual leave ever denied. Pick the work you like from the top of the backlog. No bosses sending interns to get them coffee or any nonsense like that. Go ahead, play some foosball or table tennis on the clock. Is two screens enough, you can have a third if it'd boost your productivity?
And senior leaders try to project the image of "Stanford CS PhD dropout" rather than "Wall Street Harvard MBA" - they're "just like us", look at that hoodie he's wearing.
The world of Dilbert, meanwhile, is trapped in amber. And the wry insights that fax machines are hard to use don't really land like they did in 1995.
There is still plenty of need for Dilbert strips in the workforce.
What I found most interesting about him was around the time Trump was running for president the first time, Adams was one of the first people to point out that Trump was, to use Adams' terms, a "master persuader". No one else at the time seemed to be talking about this and it was fascinating to see a humorist have this take/insight.
So the hypothesis that he was just riding the crazy train seems to fit the facts better.
Mostly he's just paraphrasing stuff he heard on Fox. People who don't watch Fox say "that's some of the craziest shit I've ever heard" and the people who have been marinated in the crazy for a decade or more say "he's the only one telling it straight (about all these made up things I believe)"
If he'd stayed apolitical people would have kept clipping his strips and putting them up on cubical walls. Dogbert was not an appealing character. His sharper edge kept the sharp edges of Dilbert and the other engineers more out of one's attention. Then Adams revealed that he believed Dogbert was the one to emulate and tried to prove his theories (and he said black people were scary -- there was that) and he polarized himself. Much of his audience recoiled. He gained new, more ICE-esque followers, and then still more of his audience recoiled.
To his credit he pioneered the PR death spiral later made famous by Kanye and Rowlings. This was not the career capper he was looking for.
Scott Adams hates this one weird trick.
It's essentially gallows humor for a world where, for no apparent reason, blithering idiots often seem to be the only people who wield any decision making power.
Thus, the reputation of the most competent gets destroyed, while the village idiot remains as the only one left unscathed.
John Donne