He was the first to publish an open way to communicate with him in order to out the corporate crazies, and readers did in droves, explaining the inanity of their workplace and getting secret retribution for stuff they clearly couldn't complain about publicly.
A good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom.
Doing this seems to require identifying with your readers and their concerns. That could be disturbing to the author if the tide turns, or to the readers if they find out their role model was gaming them or otherwise unreal, but I imagine it is pretty heady stuff.
I hope he (and anyone facing cancer) has people with whom he can share honestly, and has access to the best health care available.
Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the author stating that when you're an author, people simply tell you stories and you don't need to come up with them anymore!
https://dynamicsgptipsandtraps.wordpress.com/wp-content/uplo...
"The clue meter is reading zero."
Everyone at Motorola recognized it immediately.
Isn’t that all comedy? It’s halting because it’s true. And sure, we may find striking truth through meditation. But it’s more likely to hit you in the real world.
The IDE process at Motorola asked every employee to answer “yes” or “no” to six questions;
1. Do you have a substantive, meaningful, job that contributes to the success of Motorola?
2. Do you know the job behaviours and have the knowledge base to be successful?
3. Has training been identified and made available to continuously upgrade your skills?
4. Do you have a career plan, is it exciting, achievable and being acted on?
5. Have you received candid, positive or negative feedback within the last 30 days, which has helped in improving your performance or achieving your career plan?
6. Is adequate sensitivity shown by the company towards your personal circumstances, gender and culture?
This was done online every quarter and followed by a one-to-one with your boss to discuss how you could improve things together. Every manager in your reporting line could see your results and your own boss would expect to see your action plan to improve your team’s scores over time.
What do you think of this? A draconian measure or a positive statement of a minimum standard of expectation for all employees?
At the time of IDE being implemented, I was struck by the choice of language;
• INDIVIDUAL
• DIGNITY
• ENTITLEMENT
It’s a declaration of what we are choosing to become as an organisation; what we want the experience of being a Motorolan (and yes, that is a thing) to be. It’s universal and unbounded by grade, function or language and culture. It’s a clear message to every manager of the minimum expectation of them in relation to the people they lead. It humbles the role of “manager” to be in service of their employees’ entitlement to dignity at work.
Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.
The implementation of IDE was often painful. Employees worried about the consequences of saying “no”. Managers worried what consequences would arise from negative scores. Everyone was anxious about the one to one conversations.
A classic bit of corporate bullshittery: Insist on giving employees questionnaires that supposedly enhance their "dignity" and help them feel more comfortable about working for you, but design it all in such a tone deaf way that it only, and very fucking obviously, will create more stress about how they should respond to please your bottom line.
I didn't understand it much as a kid, but later read an old copy of his book on how offices and office culture works (basically each chapter is Scott describing office did functionality with a liberal sprinkling of related Dilbert comics) and literally almost everything was 1:1 with the company I was at, only it was a good bit toned down of course. The beauty was that it was somehow generally applicable anywhere a company gets above a certain amount of employees. There was a lot of good information there such as how the company tries to get you to poop on yourself in your performance review in order to justify not giving you a raise or firing you (see - you yourself said that you needed improvement in working with others). There are many other insights as well that I found useful in my career. A lot of it is common sense, but it helped me come to terms with the irrationality of the corporate world. Every few years I reread it and find it more applicable than before.
He later wrote a book on why he thought Trump beat Hillary and it also had a ton of insights I didn't think about as I'm not a marketer. Anyone on Hilary's campaign team should read it. Of course it doesn't cover how Hilary was painted as some kind of evil queen from a fairy tale since the 90s. Scott kinda acts a bit nuts in this book though as he goes off on frequent tangents about being a trained hypnotist and how he recognized that Trump was doing the same thing. One of the many examples was that both of them went on SNL, but Trump attempted to act presidential, while Hilary was attempting to act more like the common person and it just didn't work and came off unprofessional. He also flew in a plane that looked like Air Force One and gave press conferences with a little fake Oval office desk.
Adams also came up with the term "confuseopoly" to describe companies that make it so hard to compare products and companies that you have to purchase on vibes. Economics textbooks use it now along with his blog example of trying to buy a truck. I see this dark pattern everywhere now.
I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish. I just attributed it to him running out of ideas for the comic and finding that grifting made him more money. I guess you really can see some of the shift in reading the more recent books, which is sad.
https://archive.jsonline.com/greensheet/there-oughta-be-a-la...
Scott just quoted a study saying black people didn't want to be around white people. Whether or not you agree with the above, it doesn't change the reality. Obscuring the history of the Arab slave trade, whites being enslaved, Africans selling Africans into slavery, and dozens of other historical deceptions, have backfired and permanently divided people.
I've come to believe that infohazards are real.
Consider alcoholism: some people never drink anyway, plenty of people can have one drink or a few drinks and then stop. But some people can't stop and destroy their lives. Consider gambling: similar distribution applies. Many people never gamble, many people have a little scratchcard or sport bet now and then, and some people get out of control and sink all the money they have into it.
Gambling is an idea that's a trap. Some people get like this with ideas on the internet. In fact there's an XKCD about it: "can't sleep, someone's wrong on the internet".
Usually there's a single atrocity or injustice that triggers it. Maybe it's real, maybe it's been subject to distorted reporting. But it becomes a monomania. You can't counter them with statistics or variations on "most people aren't like that".
People were commenting on it long before 2016ish.
It’s been a long time since the name Scott Adams was associated with wit, subtlety, reason or honesty. But the Dilbert creator, men’s rights blowhard and world’s greatest imaginary fan of his own “certified genius” proved recently that as gross as you may already think Scott Adams is, he’s prepared to get even grosser.
— Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Scott Adams’ defense of rape mentality”, Salon, June 20, 2011
EDIT: forgot to link the article, https://www.salon.com/2011/06/20/scott_adams_dilbert_rape_re...
The comic I remember was overwhelmingly about the banalities of working as a corporate engineering type. One of his peers was black, another was a woman, and they were not the butt of the joke. Pointy hair boss was.
AFAIK, the only non-White recurring Dilbert character was Asok the Intern, who was Indian.
A black character (who Adams himself described as the first black character in Dilbert) did appear in 2022, but, well...
https://www.reddit.com/r/onejoke/comments/ugunog/after_33_ye...
Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime. Your 2022 example only highlights the contrast.
The closest example I could think of from the 90s was a riff on whether you're supposed to open the door for women or not in these modern times, and it felt much more "confused everyman" rather than "aggrieved partisan".
The origin story being resentment over his perception his career was not advancing because of women and minorities isn't an inference from the fact that he is white, it's based on his own description of the reasons for his dissatisfaction with his career before becoming a full-time comic artist (and not descriptions which first emerged in the 2010s or later, though I think the his description of his final exit from Pacific Bell as "being fired for being white" was a later evolution, but his story of his perception that he was passed over for higher management at Crocker National Bank where he was already in management and, and passed over for any management opportunity at Pacific Bell, because of a preference for women and minorities came out much earlier.)
I'm not sure how to respond to a post like this. It feels superficially earnest, and yet absolutely dedicated, at its core, to talking about black people without having ever talked with us.
sigh
Point-by-point:
Whiteness is a manufactured identity. It's the Kwanzaa of ethnicities. It was constructed as part of a centuries-long colonial campaign that, yes, sought to subjugate non-European peoples and places. It only exists in opposition to blackness, and delineates that which exists for and in opposition to this colonial campaign.
If you live in a segregated area, it is likely that white residents have pressed historical socioeconomic advantages and influence to secure their own livelihoods in a way that tends to prevent the accumulation and leveraging of resources on the part of black residents.
Black people are generally not promoting (incredibly flawed) violent crime statistics.
It is not a conspiracy that Black Americans focus on the way that American institutions have not made their families and communities whole from various injustices - some within living memory, often explicitly predicated on race - which continue to have direct or easily-traced ramifications for their contemporary lives.
I cannot remember or find the quote - I think it was by James Baldwin o MLK - tha essentially said that racial strife has never been a thing for black people to "overcome", but a thing for white people to stop instigating or propagating. Truly, the division between white and black people ends when white Americans decide that's what they want. Whether or not black people want it (and I, frankly, don't trust the Dilbert guy as an authority on the matter, or even as someone who can dispassionately assess sources), black people don't have the institutional power to force it.
>Scott Adams has claimed that during his early corporate career, he was explicitly told by his managers that he would not be promoted because companies were prioritizing minorities. According to Adams, while working at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco, his boss told him that "Whites could not be promoted." He then moved to Pacific Bell, where he says his boss told him directly, "you can’t be promoted because you’re White and you’re male"
I'm not sure him having been discriminated against makes all his office humor suspect.
That's nice, and it might even be relevant in a discussion where someone said that his claim to have been discriminated against made all his office humor suspect, rather than that it was a key turning point in his own narrative of how he came to make it.
Or was it positive but just tone-deaf that they introduced random drug testing at the same time?
