Hacker Cinema
Dilbert
1999 · TV series · 22 min episodes · 2 seasons
Created by Scott Adams, Larry Charles
Dilbert, a socially awkward but highly competent engineer, works in a dysfunctional workplace. The series satirizes corporate culture, featuring clueless managers, pointless meetings, bizarre company policies, and the daily frustrations of modern office life.
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37 comments on Hacker News
It is almost as if Dilbert was a documentary.
Prediction: Dilbert will be bought by Paramount, all the old books will stop being published, and not-funny Woke Dilbert will get a Barbie movie treatment, a new not funny comic strip syndicated in daily newspapers only boomers read, a set of long books about social justice that have no comics in them, bad jokes, boring rehashed social justice narratives and just a picture of Dilbert on the cover to sell it. It will be called something like : "Dilbert’s Official Apology, Expanded Edition"
Like the author I was fortunate enough to be exposed to Dilbert as a teenager, before I got caught up in the rush of the university-professional-yuppie-industrial-complex.
I found the Dilbert principle book in my parents downstairs cloakroom (wedged between magazines and other generic bathroom reading material).
At a superficial level I just read the comic strips in the book and laughed, I thought to myself - haha look at those poor corporate workers, that won't happen to me.
In a way it didn't happen to me vis-a-vis cubicles, suits and water cooler gossip, TPS reports etc.
However, in other ways it did happen to me, the frustrations of working with incompetent people, working in teams who brainwash themselves that they are making something useful or being productive, hilarious executive decisions made without any scientific or rational thought. (startup - https://youtu.be/iwan0xJ_irU)
I still like to add Dilbert comic strips to closing slides in presentations, my go to one is this, when we are discussing new technologies to use.
https://tenor.com/nJfQSXLP8am.gif
We are in the Dilbert universe, it just keeps changing
p.s. if anyone is looking for Saturday TV binge material, all of the Dilbert TV show is on Youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7dgUq5Qe4
RIP Scott Adams
I recently purchased his 2026 calendar for a family member who works in the consultancy world, they really enjoy it.
Starting my dev career in a big corporate telecom I used to attach Dilbert strips to the end of my presentations, sometimes people would laugh, others, normally execs didn't get the irony or commentary.
Then when I went to more modern and cool startups the same Dilbert comic strips still apply which I found hilarious.
A lot of our influences or heroes have faults and I hope we can all put them to rest and just remember Scott's great achievements with Dilbert and his many books on Management or Psychology.
I will just leave this scene from the Dilbert TV show, that describes the engineering curse:
"The Knack" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0
He has been proven to be an extremely unreliably narrator on multiple occasions and is prone to changing his story. I think he has always had such inclinations, but other folks kept him restrained and I’m not sure what happened there in the end.
I’m reminded that he is on the record as having initially said that he enjoyed working on the Dilbert TV show, but it was too much work and had the misfortune of being moved one of those “death” time slots. Then at some point he started baselessly claiming it was killed due to DEI.
Also, he has a very bizarre history of sockpuppeting that just raises more questions. He was called out by Metafilter for this and acted like he was playing some kind of 4D chess with them [1].
[1] https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos
I grew up with dilbert being referenced. I was on the early internet, so things were odd. It was full of nuts and wierdos.
Scott Adams stuck out to me because his cartoons were funny and sarcastic. His books felt like he was letting me in behind the scenes. He talked to me, the reader about dealing with large amounts (for the time) traffic to his website in a honest, funny and simple way.
His books also had a link to his website, which was pretty unique for a non-technical book at the time.
I also quite liked his TV show.
I stopped reading them regularly as I grew up. I would see the odd salient dilbert in slack or email.
during the trump primary, thats when I bumped into his other side. It was heart breaking to see someone who made what I thought was such observant cartoons shit out such bile.
In the same stream he also said he moved house to get away from black people and "I'm not saying start a war or anything like that ... I'm just saying get away."
He's also questioned Holocaust numbers, claimed the Dilbert tv show was cancelled because he is white, predicted that Republicans would be hunted down after Joe Biden won the election, and tried treating his cancer with ivermectin.
Aggressive cancer like that is a shitty way to go and I feel for him, but let's not pretend he's a reasonable, well-adjusted person.
(spoilers)
Dilbert S1E2
Dilbert is fired from his drab job, but rehired at Nirvanaco. The new company is a paradise of kind people, productive collaboration, and futuristic technology. Eventually, Dilbert discovers Nirvanaco has no marketing department. The company overeagerly creates a marketing dept, and the episode ends with the fiery demise of Nirvanaco.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0560464/
I used to love dilbert in the 90s. I had a couple books and the daily comic calendar. But around 2000 it kinda stoped being so funny so it drifted out of my life.
But then 6 months ago, this article came out and posted/flagged. This whole episode was kinda predicted.
“The normally innocuous workplace comic strip is arguably trying to get itself cancelled after three decades in syndication. But why?”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32317993
Dilbert is a documentary!
> What's most interesting is that the beginning of that movie, Neo's life is portrayed as being horrific drudgery.
Gen-X cynicism was a running theme in the 1990s — Office Space, the Dilbert comic strip and TV series, etc.
Dilbert does have a cartoon TV series that ran for 2 seasons.
https://youtu.be/J1KEPvuiQIs
I sort of have what I jokingly call the five season rule for TV series. Even if quality doesn't really trail off, I'm mostly done. I definitely lost interest in Doonesbury at one point even if Trudeau did evolve and age the characters. Dilbert? Pretty much forget about it even aside from Adams'... um interesting modern perspectives. I've been pointed to a few funny things now and then but it mostly still seems stuck in some 1990s PacBell time warp.
I feel like every recommendation engine has tanked in 2022 along with a matching upswing in ads.
Audible is aggressively recommending an audiobook I already bought and listened to, it's even in their "your year so far" list because I listened to it in January. Their 2-for-1, annual, special offer emails are coming 2-3 a week now.
My Facebook timeline is full of crappy "Suggested for you" entries. I doom scrolled last night and counted; I was "suggested" the Dilbert group 10 times. And ads ... so many ads. Ads and suggestions take up 66% of my feed; I get an ad, a suggestion and something from friends or family in equal proportions.
I watched ONE reality TV show on Netflix, The Final Table, and now the Banner show is "Crazy Delicious" and the Top Picks list is entirely reality TV shows on baking, cooking, chocolate sculpting. Where did the sci-fi go? Oh right, my continue watching bar ...
Twitter was CONSTANTLY suggesting/promoting NFT/coin/web3 scams, I've blocked every single one of them. Luckily that dried up very recently ... for some reason. Now my feed is full of promoted ISP ads ... for some reason. As with Facebook, my feed is swamped with ads now.
You can't automate meetings. Nor can you make PHBs become logical nor reasonable. Dilbert comic strip is actually a documentary.
Have you seen the Dilbert episode called "The Name".
https://dilbert.fandom.com/wiki/The_Name
As somebody with 3+ decades of experience at multiple kinds of orgs as a contractor and an employee I can say with confidence YES!
Especially when they know you are in a jam, such as recessions or family issues.
Dilbert is a comic strip and a documentary. I suggest students read more Dilbert so they are less shocked when they get a real job. Humans are very human. Vulcans would go nuts on Earth.
Just AI? IT is filled with BS and fads. Dilbert is a documentary, not just a comic strip.
Quoting the animated Dilbert TV show when Dilbert buys his mom a gift card: “you’ve exchanged your money for something like money, but less useful.”
This is literally an episode of Dilbert.
That's true of a lot of long-running shows. Even if they don't become worse in the sense that individual episodes are worse taken in isolation, they're often just repetitious and, as you say, stuck in time.
You see this elsewhere too. In comic strips, for example, Dilbert is mostly stuck in some 90s version of cubicle life at a big company like Pac Bell. Don't really reaad it any longer but even when nothing is wrong with a given strip I've probably seen some version of it 10 times before.
This makes me think of an episode of the short lived Dilbert animated series, where Dilbert engineers the perfect piece of art (a Blue Duckie).
It becomes highly popular and the rulers of the underground art world (I think it included a still living Michelangelo or DiVinci) kidnap him and tell him to cut it out.
7. 'Dilbert' is a documentary.
After about 26 years programming -- that is, since i was a little kid, this is what i wish i would knew, not only 4 years in, but also on my 1st year at doing actual paid work:
-1. That I should have jumped in straight into Lisp from day one.
0. That popular technology does not mean that said stuff is the best, great, good, or even acceptable. Example: PHP 4.
1. That the industry raves about a seriously, seriously crippled and flawed language (Java)
2. That "Design Patterns" are mostly workarounds for the problems introduced by flawed languages (again, Java and friends); not great ideas to be proselytized.
3. That Object-Oriented-Programming is not only done in the way of C++ or Java, but that there are much superior ways to do OOP. (i.e. Smalltalk, CLOS)
4. That if you want to solve complex problems in a productive way, you need a multi-paradigm language. Strict-OOP languages or Strictly-Functional languages will limit you, unless the problem is really suited to it.
5. That the "Blub paradox" is real. Programming languages are not equal.
6. Real world (i.e. commercial, production) software should always be done by experienced people, not by juniors.
7. A seasoned (say, 8+ experience) programmer can done things 8 times as fast as a junior (graduate) programmer. I've seen this firsthand.
8. Dilbert -as others have pointed out- is a documentary. 8.1 Corollary: Pointy-haired bosses are real.
9. The customers will always think everything has been done using Excel Macros.
10. The salesmen are very important to the health of the company, so don't make fun of them; rather, make friends with them and help them get aligned to what the technical team is able to do.
Predictably, a third of this discussion has now gotten derailed into bikeshedding about names, yet again.
If you haven't seen it, go watch the episode from the TV animated Dilbert show, "The Name" - http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1afila_dilbert-s01e01-the-name_fun
Which one is it?
Bear with me on this one ...
I loved the movie Pulp Fiction. In it, Jules and Vincent are stone cold killers. They do their job with cool nonchalance. But when something goes wrong they fall apart; they can't cope with changed circumstances. They're utterly helpless until Winston Wolfe rescues them. In summary, the domain over which they can be considered "experts" is very limited.
Another example is Charles Barkley, a great basketball player of the not-too-distant past. When someone questioned him about his off-court behavior, he said: "I'm not a role model... Just because I dunk a basketball doesn't mean I should raise your kids."
Same with Scott Adams. I like him as a cynical observer of the contemporary American workplace. As for who he thinks will win the election, I couldn't care less. And I surely don't won't let him influence who I vote for.
You can enjoy Dilbert without knowing anything about Scott Adams.
This is basically a recurring theme in Dilbert and also as an episode in the TV show. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0803252/
> And other people are better?
Other people are remarkably less prone to arrogantly declaring everyone else to be idiots, in my experience. Tech is a field full of people who fondly imagine Dilbert as a documentary about a hero.
Dilbert did it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0560459/
Precisely the argument from Dilbert's Y2K episode: http://www.tv.com/shows/dilbert/y2k-12015/
Reminds me of Albany NY in the Dilbert TV show
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GEIXVszdb4Y/UUqKPJes1qI/AAAAAAAAPX8/fH2aEq_2u5A/s1600/Fullscreen+capture+3212013+121148+AM.jpg
When I think of marketers, I think of the marketing assholes from the old Dilbert TV show, both of whom where men. I am in fact completely unfamiliar with this stereotype. Can someone enlighten me as to the origins and propagation of this character?
This condition was satirised quite well in the old Dilbert TV series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t76R-nKhGHE&feature=player_detailpage#t=914s
I imagine the episode of the Dilbert TV series where Dilbert had to design the new office.
"You can only hold the opinion that a particular movie concept is a good or bad idea if you don't understand what a movie is or what an idea is."
This is ridiculous. Does he honestly believe that a movie about me eating a bowl of shredded wheat in a dimly lit room has the same probability of succeeding as a movie about Batman? Why do some movies get made and others not if it is meaningless talk about the worth of an idea? Are studio executives using some random process to determine which movies get made? Do they have no idea what a movie or an idea is?
Clearly it is meaningful to talk about the quality of ideas, and right now there is nothing else to talk about with regard to a Dilbert movie.
He has a valid point that the quality of the idea is a marginal factor in the success of any endeavor, but he generalizes it to the point of absurdity when he claims you can't discuss the quality of an idea. This sort of careless generalization seems typical of his blog posts that make it to hn, but I suppose thats why he is drawing cartoons and not proving theorems.
I've seen one or two Dilbert episodes, and I typically relate it to how large companies are being run where-ever I go. I've been a boss, the last time more than five years ago, it is a frustrating experience when compared with the freedom I've got as an independent. The last time I was actually employed is ages ago and it never was in a 'cube farm', nor did I have to escape (in fact, I had a really nice boss, but he definitely was the exception).
Small businesses and large businesses are completely different beasts, but entrepreneurs are found in all businesses by definition.
Hulu has the entire episode: http://www.hulu.com/watch/25146/dilbert-the-knack
It's always good to see other people appreciating the critically underrated Dilbert series.