As an actuary, I’ve taken day trips between those cities. I once wrote a paper on the Acela, on the way home from a meeting where the need for that paper became obvious.
By “pre-stupid” I meant “before the author became a stupid RW troll”, but abbreviated that a little too thoroughly. Sorry if my meaning was lost.
Your overall point is of course correct. There are businesses large and small which are well-run. And there are islands of competence even within badly run orgs.
Like any editorial cartoon, Dilbert took the worst examples of the worst situations, then cranked them up to 11 for laffs. The fact it was as popular as it was for as long as it was despite a pretty limited repertoire suggests that it resonated with a lot of people in a lot of cube farms across the land.
I understood your point, but wanted to suggest that there’s always been something rotten about Dilbert.
A guy i respect pointed out, back when i enjoyed Dilbert, that “if this guy really believes corporations work like this, he has serious problems”. And, much as i laughed along, i started thinking about it from his perspective. I didn’t take down the strip about passwords, on which i had written all my work passwords. (I had posted it on the wall, next to my company computer. Why yes, i was bitter about the various password policies i had to deal with.)
But Adams always had profound disrespect for “others”. He never poked fun at himself. He always showed a preference for cruelty over kindness, which he portrayed as a form of stupidity. His decay into boring right wing trolling wasn’t really a change of trajectory, he just lost his sense of humor.
Good point. RW-ery and cynicism are deeply intertwined concepts. Years ago on vBulletin I had a Doper signature that talked about that. As best I can resurrect it:
Cynicism is the worst human trait. It assumes the worst about everyone and everything while excusing your own meanest most selfish impulses. It’s giant toxic ball of nasty.
You called them assholes.
No, I said I didn’t like “cold-calling and sending LinkedIn outreach messages like some asshole.” Like I feel like an asshole doing it.
As the recipient of a certain amount of cold calling (and cold emailing), not for management consulting, but for various other things, i don’t generally feel the caller is an asshole. I mean, sometimes they are. But if they are respectful of my time, and gracefully accept “no” as an answer, i don’t mind them. I’ve pursued job opportunities from recruiters who cold called me, and my husband hires a chimney sweep who we found because they cold called us.
Yeah but you’re my asshole. 
Have you met @Der_Trihs ? Cynicism isn’t limited to the right.
I think it’s hard not to be cynical working in Corporate America. The environment tends to breed that sort of cynicism. It’s caused by a sort of cognitive dissonance between what the company says and what it actually does and how they often treat employees like disposable cogs. Gaslighting. Goalpost moving with respect to raises and promotions. Holding people to metrics or standards they have no control over. Lack of any sort of training or growth.
The problem with cynicism is just as you said. It gives people the belief that it’s ok to perpetuate the same behaviors. If the company treats their employees disingenuously or dishonestly, why wouldn’t that be passed on to how the employees treat their clients.
Take management consulting for example (given that this is the topic of the tread). We’re all smart people so you have to assume on some level, at least some of us do legitimately want to provide some service to our clients helping them run their companies better. Or it’s all bullshit and is basically just a racket for Ivy League grads to monetize their network of relationships with CEOs and other executives.
Quite.
The assumption / belief that the world is always and everywhere dog eat dog and must remain so is deeply cynical. The question as an individual then becomes what to do about that belief. Lean into it or push back against it?
Or government bureaucracy. I know someone who has basically been told by multiple divisions we don’t care if people do their job as long as they don’t make waves with the snowflakes. Staying in your office doing nothing that affects a coworker is their ideal drone.
Not just “dog eat dog” but @Saint_Cad‘s description of of a bureaucratic “do nothing” job is just as bad IMHO.
I suppose what to do about it is the question.
My frustration is largely based off of my experience with a series of jobs that were actually pretty good places to work for a few years, but then went to shit for one reason or another.
I’m highly educated and by most accounts reasonably smart, articulate, and skilled with no obvious defects that should make me unemployable. But frequently office environments do feel like total shit-shows populated by morons and fuck ups that don’t know what they are doing and can’t get out of each other’s way. And as a project manager I tend to have a very transactional role responsible for actually making sure something is built/delivered or solving someone else’s problems, so it’s hard for me to just “linger” for years collecting a paycheck doing nothing.
My “engineering / data analyst” side tends to look at such problems more intellectually. Figure out what skills or education I need, look for where the opportunities are, figure out the process to get from A to Z, etc.
My “business / frat bro” side however recognizes that a lot of it is “who you know” backed by marketing bullshit. A lot of “networking” and figuring out whose balls to suck and showing membership in the right clubs so the people who sign checks don’t just look at you as “the help” or some “nerd” they begrudgingly pay to do a job they can’t admit they are too stupid to do themselves.
I guess a lot of people are in a similar quandary. Probably why there are so many people flooding LinkedIn with their new “career coach” or “resume consultant” business.
Huh? That’s a weirdly negative view of hired specialists. I hire electricians and plumbers and lawyers not because I’m “too dumb” to do the work, but because it’s specialized and requires training i don’t have and I’m not excited about learning that stuff. The electrician is so-so, but the plumber and the lawyer and intelligent professionals who take pride in their work.
And fwiw
That’s not been my experience working on offices. I mean, every job I’ve had has had some issues. But the vast majority of people I’ve interacted with have been competent and mostly did what they were there to do, and gave me the stuff i needed to do my job. We all knew that it was a team sport, and we needed to get results to our partners in a timely way and communicate about our needs so that we could collectively succeed. Most of my coworkers were also pleasant to work with. In retirement, i have a number of friends i still interact with from my working days.
I suspect there is a correlation between the degree of Dilbertness of any given company and how often management consultants are brought in to rearrange the deck chairs.
Places that seem to have their procedural and cultural shit together, a la @puzzlegal, have little need of management consultants. OTOH, the places where people like @msmith537 spend most of their years are rampantly dysfunctional places where office politics is the only real product.
No, we had management consultants come through from time to time. Mostly, they didn’t have much impact on me, but we had a fabulously expensive and completely unproductive “transformation” once that i wasted a week being trained at. Now that got in the way of all of us doing our jobs. There were a few small helpful things that came out of it. Standardizing the time of the week to keep open for interdepartmental meetings was mildly helpful, although it wasn’t uniformly followed. Reorganizing all our directories was an enormous waste of time. Changing the name of our weekly meetings from “weekly meeting” to “huddle” was neutral.
Most of us managed to get our jobs done despite the management consultants.
You’re very fortunate. Sometimes I work in places like that. Not always.
My view might be biased because as a consultant I am often brought in to either fix a problem or fill in temporarily in some role where my defining attribute is I happen to be “available”. Sure there are always issues and challenges, but I think the key difference is to what degree are they recognized as issues and challenges and addressed in a logical manner.
The first couple years at my last job were similar to the positive environment you described. Not perfect mind you, but competent. Cooperative. If I didn’t know something, I could go find the resources to fill in the gaps or even get training for people to get up to speed. Everyone was respected.
Like it’s nice. I didn’t dread going into work every day. Even if a client called while I was on vacation, it would be a reasonable discussion about something important enough to call me.
My experience by the time I left:
- People who can’t explain what they are working on or what they are even doing there
- Lack of teamwork
- Abusive or toxic managers
- Staff who are not qualified for their job
- Staff with attitude problems
- Employees who didn’t want to do ANY work
- Executives who seek to pass blame
- Lack of any sort of direction or guidance
- Business or sales people who treat technical resources dismissively (ergo as “nerds” or “hired help”, not worthy of their time or discussion)
- Lack of funding to finish projects
- Lack of communication (we bill out at a pretty high rate to not meet or respond to our emails for weeks).
- Holding people accountable for things outside of their control
- General nickel and diming.
I like to think I generally try to do a good job. But the fact of the matter is I’m not perfect and there’s always a learning curve with any new client, project, or team unless were’ being asked to do the same thing over and over again (which we usually aren’t). And also because of the nature of my role, I tend to look at these problems objectively - is this something I can do better? Is this a systematic problem I can advise the client on doing better (maybe make some more money doing it)? Is the client or manager intentionally or unintentionally trying to fuck me or my team to cover their own shortcomings? Some combination of all three?
Ah yes, but which is the cause and which is the effect?
Are these companies hiring consultants to because they’re dysfunctional or are they dysfunctional because they hire all these consultants?
The reality is a lot of the companies I work for are big Fortune 500 companies and they outsource a lot of stuff to a lot of different vendors (who outsource to vendors of their own).
I’m not sure I fully agree with that. But first, with respect to your earlier comment about well-managed companies, I agree that they exist, because I worked for two of them (or three, if you count my university career). One was a small tech company with only about 100 employees that simply couldn’t afford the waste of useless bureaucracy.
But the more interesting one was a large multinational whose president and original co-founder was a highly principled individual that everyone liked and respected. He published a sort of corporate philosophy – not some silly “mission statement”, but a set of principles that he felt should guide the company. Among the most important was that every employee should feel empowered to do whatever he needed to do to get the job done – go where he needed to go, talk to anyone at any level of the company, and so on. This genuine empowerment allowed me not only to do my job well, but to expand its scope into areas that interested me and that were also beneficial to the company. It was very satisfying.
That said, I would maintain that across most industries, crappy and badly managed companies tend to outnumber the good ones. I ran into many in my days as a technology consultant, including, for instance, companies with toxic workplace cultures, in-fighting between groups, or companies who bolstered incompetent IT employees by always bringing in outside consultants to do the “real” work, preventing them from developing and institutionalizing technical knowledge which they appeared not to value.
This is the kind of bullshit that Dilbert reflected so well in its classic older strips. I haven’t looked at Dilbert since Scott Adams went off his rocker. But Dilbert’s ordeals with the Pointy-Haired Boss and corporate management, the lazy and useless Wally, the overly aggressive Alice, are exaggerated versions of experiences that many of us can identify with. As @LSLGuy said, Dilbert resonated with so many cubicle-dwelling drones that it became very popular.
The idea that there’s “something rotten” about Dilbert seems to me to itself be a cynical take; the cartoons reflect an unpleasant world, but it’s a common reality. I would tell your friend that, keeping in mind that the cartoons are of course a highly exaggerated version of reality, yes, many corporations really do work like this, at least sometimes.
I don’t know what happened to Scott Adams or what triggered his descent into Trumpism, but I found it surprising and I don’t think it’s necessarily related to his cynical view of corporate bureaucracy.
It might be. Corporate America is enough to drive anyone mad IMHO. Particularly the way they make you feel like it’s YOUR fault if something goes wrong.
This comedian actually has some really good bits on Corporate America. He’s actually a Consultant for PwC in Boston. I was a Manager at PwC many years ago so I would be the sort of guy he would be complaining about, but the truth is I would have had Directors above me who had Partners above them pushing all this shit downhill.
Yeah, that really doesn’t resonate. It’s true that once, the day before a big meeting, my department head told us we all had to change our slides to use the new corporate theme, celebrating our deal with the Olympics or something. But that was 45 minutes of pain once, and even then, the point of the slides was the graphs and other information on them.
I suppose there must have been an employee somewhere whose job was to come up with the corporate theme for all decks. But it was a very large company, and one marketing guy thinking about deck colors isn’t that much overhead. And having a theme means no one else in the company ever needs to think about that stuff.