January 7, 2011

How Does Scott Adams Do It?

Dilbert.com

It’s hard to understand how he does it. Scott Adams hasn’t worked as an engineer since when? The 70s? The early 80s? And yet even after all this time, he is still able to write cartoons that are pitch-perfect.

The only real explanation I can think of is that tech industry bullshit is so conservative and formulaic that even if you happened to master its syntax thirty years ago, you can plug in new buzzwords today and sound completely up-to-date.

That just raises the question — does all industry bullshit work like this? Is fashion industry bullshit today the same as fashion industry bullshit from the 70s? Or do different industries have wildly different bullshit mutation rates?

As an aside, is it just me or does Dilbert really match the color scheme of the site really well? I should start embedding these things more often.

Comments

  1. IIRC, up until at least 2000, he was still at the company that prompted Dilbert. Huh, nope Wiki corrects my understanding. 1995 was the cutoff.

    But yes, managers and bureaucracy and technical workplace irony are pretty much the same, the terms change, but you could replace meetings I observed in the nineties with the ones today. Just replace cloud with web, and the hysteria is pretty much the same.

    Posted by Dru on Jan. 11, 2011 at 12:08 PM [#]

  2. 30 years? I bet Caesar’s engineers would fully understand Dilbert.

    Posted by Sam on May. 28, 2011 at 11:54 AM [#]

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