The Dilbert Principle
A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions
by Scott Adams · first published 1996
39% recommend61% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A funny, cynical look at corporate life and management, built on the idea that incompetent people get promoted. Readers say it taught them more about offices and bosses than business classes
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
In a world of TQM, reengineering, and empowered secretaries. Dilbert has become the poster boy of corporate America. Millions of office dwellers tack Scott Adams's comic strip to their walls when murdering the boss is not an acceptable option. After seventeen years of working in a cubicle and reading thousands of e-mail messages from readers who've been "downsized", "rightsized", "flattened", and put in charge of "quality teams", Scott Adams can no longer restrict himself to a single artistic medium. Now, in an unabashed attempt to cash in on the lucrative business book market, Scott brings us
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The First Circle (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) LOTR Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse) The Odyssey (Homer) The Dilbert Principle (Scott Adams) -- Alright, not literature! But come on, it's Dilbert :)
on “Ask YC: favorite books” ↗* The Bhagavad Gita http://amzn.com/1586380192 * On Managing Yourself http://amzn.com/1422157997 * The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams http://amzn.com/0887308589 * The Peter Principle by by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull http://amzn.com/0062092065 * How to Manage Your Boss by Christopher Hegarty http://amzn.com/034531817X…
on “Ask HN: What books fundamentally changed the way you think about the world?” ↗…obscurity to keep up operations quality, which is in turn a driver for your own demise. Game over. I'd like to suggest to you the following reading material: - Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber, 2018) - The Dilbert Principle (Scott Adams, 2000) - Future Shock (Alvin Toffler, 1970)
on “The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)” ↗…fake little products as they were qualitative, and making a game of disrespecting their own customers. Pure facade, been there... I've done it before, but I'll recommend to you Scott Adams' book, The Dilbert Principle for some light reading about forces like that at work.
on “Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups” ↗I didn't always agree with Scott Adams on everything he did and said, but "The Dilbert Principle" taught me more about living in a corporation and management than any other book on business and his dilbert comics were a source of endless wisdom and amusement, which I use often today. Farewell Scott,…
on “Scott Adams has passed away” ↗The first email I ever wrote was to Scott Adams. He actually replied! I was a child and had just read and enjoyed one of his older books, maybe the Dilbert Principle. I came from a religious household and I was surprised by something in the book that revealed him to be an atheist. I looked up his email, or maybe it was in the back of the book, and wrote him a quick…
on “Scott Adams has passed away” ↗…implantation, that's pretty hard to change. GP's comment seems to be more about the latter, and of Scott Adams being in that category. I agree with that in my case, too; both the Dilbert comics and The Dilbert Principle were formative for me both personally and professionally — which amplified the pain I felt when Adams started to “go off the deep end” and reveal himself to be less of a Dilbert and more of a PHB.
on “'Dilbert' creator Scott Adams dies at 68 after prostate cancer battle” ↗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…
on “Scott Alexander: The Dilbert Afterlife” ↗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,…
on “Scott Alexander: The Dilbert Afterlife” ↗…Victor E. Frankl (p:164) +; We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins (p:272); De Zeven Vinkjes by Joris Luyendijk (p:200); Waarom vuilnismannen meer verdienen dan bankiers by Rutger Bregman (p:104) Comedy: The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams (p:336) History: Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose (p:432); The Nuclear Jihadist by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins (p:413) +; The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre (p:384)…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023” ↗What I find much more intersting about this is that this is the centeral thesis of Scott Adam's "The Dilbert Principle" that was published 2 decades ago. I'll also put out there that it was probably one of the most informative business books I ever read.
on “The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand” ↗…liked reading Dilbert; I've found it to be an interesting and amusing perspective. More serious than most comics yet still humorous. But Scott Adam's writings apart from Dilbert are pretty awesome. The Dilbert Principle especially was a more interesting perspective on management than any management class I've taken.
on “Curiosity” ↗Read the Dilbert Principle. If you are in too much of a hurry here is the Wikipedia summary of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle The situation seems completely unfair but you need to move on, life has some sucky…
on “Ask HN: How to deal with incompetent people” ↗“Engineers, Scientists and other odd people” chapter in the book “The Dilbert Principle” is one of the funniest things I have ever read
on “Scott Adams has passed away” ↗Scott Adams, in the back of "The Dilbert Principle," describes the OA5 model of running a company: Out at 5. His main goal was an efficient organization that let everyone out at 5, which meant the product was delivered, which meant everyone did a fantastic…
on “Spare Me From “Product Guys”” ↗