| ▲ | martinpw 4 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. |
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| ▲ | cainxinth 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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... |
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| ▲ | yojo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ekropotin an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I actually think managers struggle much more than ICs, because they have to deal with quirks of their multiple reports + their boss’s. | |
| ▲ | yojo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event. Having been a manager: I bet your boss didn't want to be there any more than you did. They were forced to do corporate team-building and they recognized the absurdity of it all. So they tried to come up with something entertaining that they could claim was passably work-related. They were trying to do their best by you within the constraints of what was mandated by their job. This looks like a nice gesture. You are too occupied viewing your manager as "the other" to recognize when they were trying to bond and do something nice for the team within the constraints of their job. You're lucky. At corporate team-building retreats I never got to watch any fun movies. One had us listen to lectures by a manager whose primary experience was as a little league coach and who thought leading his team was the same thing. The other involved the manager giving us a psychology test of his own creation and trying to lecture us about what he thought our learning styles and weaknesses were based on all the different self-help books he read. | | |
| ▲ | yojo 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Totally valid that my boss probably didn’t want to be there either, but for context this was circa 2008 Google where “offsite” meant “go spend company money to do something fun.” Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared reality? | | |
| ▲ | groby_b 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Because your manager might have been dealing with something privately, and didn't feel like doing something fun, but had to because the Gods Of Corporate decreed it so. And so, an act of rebellion against a shared reality that forces you to have fun on schedule when it's time for the quarterly offsite. |
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| ▲ | marssaxman 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I swear I’m not an LLM, but maybe ...they learned it by watching us? |
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| ▲ | terminalshort an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis an hour ago | parent [-] | | I've been back and forth between manager and IC, too. It is different. I won't deny that. However, politics and corporate absurdist formalities aren't exclusive to management. A lot of the corporate politics and face-palm worthy office games I've dealt with came from ICs, either as my peers, reports, or as some other manager's reports. We just tend to give a pass to ICs when they do it because they're not viewed as having as much power in the office. |
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| ▲ | tonyedgecombe an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Middle management rarely has enough power to make any changes. They have to dish out whatever bullshit is handed down to them from above. |
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| ▲ | muyuu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | tsunamifury 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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? | | |
| ▲ | helterskelter 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | | |
| ▲ | booleandilemma 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | crazygringo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | da02 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Did you ever encounter a well managed (or well functioning) team(s)? If so, why do you think they performed so well? |
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| ▲ | tayo42 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | shadowgovt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | dfxm12 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It speaks to a general lack of self awareness people have about class/power structures. |
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| ▲ | 1over137 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| PHB? |
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| ▲ | analog8374 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | setsewerd an hour ago | parent [-] | | "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. |
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