Hacker News Reader

Comment by gopowerranger | Hacker News Reader

Part of your story reminds me of the customer of the computer company I worked for that would, every week, print out sales and financial reports that ran for hundreds of pages and about as thick as you mention. The girl who ran the reports told me that the only people who ever looked at the reports were the sales guys who would flip to page 20 and look at the bottom line sales number. It was then filed away in the warehouse, never to be seen again.

View on HN

Back then, I found it strange that people would cheerfully exchange stories such as yours, stick Dilbert strips all over their offices, swap dailywtf links, and just carry on. I was never able to compartmentalize enough to be happy while also admitting that I live in some Kafkaesque version of Office Space. I remember being told by my seniors that I'll grow up and grow a thicker skin, and that I will accept that this is just how things work.

Now, I'm happy to find out that that is not indeed how things HAVE to work, and I'm a lot happier and less conflicted. And now that we have many prominent examples of more functional and humane corporate and engineering cultures, I'm sad for all those people still toiling away in dilbert-land.

What are your best examples on non-Dilbert-land cultures? I want to go to there.

Startups aren't Dilbert land. They literally can't afford it. They have their own pathologies, of course, but they aren't Dilbert pathologies. (And due to scale, if you are motivated, they are often, but not always, more amenable to fixing.)

You can also look around for medium-sized places where software is the primary product; they can typically afford some Dilbertiness, but not too much, or they get eaten by somebody else. Depends on your tolerance, and on your ability to carve your own defensible niche out.

But either way, the key is certainly to start looking. No, working in Dilbert is not inevitable, but you'll have to take positive action if you are stuck there now.

What is the best way to overcome the conscious or unconscious bias against long-term inmates of Dilbert land?

I'm not sure what you're getting at. If you're implying that I casually leaped to the conclusion that it's a bad thing, I didn't; I was giving guidelines to someone who seemed to be implying (s)he wanted out. If you don't want out, more power to you; I'm not really a big "you have to be passionate about your job" sort myself. (It's nice, but it's a bonus in most cases rather than a necessity.)

I think I miscommunicated my point. I was speaking of bias against people who have been stuck in Dilbert Land for long periods of time and are trying to get out, but being ignored by companies outside Dilbert Land because they are inside it.

Ah, I see. My apologies for misreading. But, alas, I have no magic answers. Except for the fact, I suppose, that there are no magic answer in general, and you may have to do something a bit spectacular if you want out, to prove to those outside that you can function outside. This is where programmers have it easy; it's really easy to get involved in an open source community or something, compared to a lot of the other people who can get stuck in Dilbert-land.

As someone in the orbit of Berlin startup culture, I'd say the answer is simple - you have to overcome arrogance and ageism.

Let's be honest, those of us who have built careers on the "modern-web-stack running in AWS" tend to tilt in the bearded-hipster direction. I've interviewed people coming out of corporate behemoths, and they're typically older, have families, have a more conservative demeanor, and are a few years behind the HN curve, tech-wise. It takes some effort to cross that cultural gap and recognize the decades of engineering and inter-personal experience that some of these people have.

One thing that helped me was to move. That's obviously a big step. I was unmarried at the time, no kids, and knew I wanted something different, so I found a job in a new city and just packed up and moved.

If that's not in the cards, maybe you could look slightly farther afield in your geographical area than you would normally, or look farther afield in your technical area than you normally would.

It might also help to work on some either open source or other public-facing projects (assuming you can and they don't conflict with your current employment, etc.). Then you show that you have experience other than just what you might have from your day job.

Absolutely. In addition to startups, I've worked with quite a few small-to-medium sized agencies, and as you say, they tend to have a small but manageable amount of Dilbertiness.

As I see it, the crucial difference between Dilbert and non-Dilbert is responsiveness to unhappiness and the ability to learn from failure.

In Dilbert-land, an entire engineering department can grow to be silently miserable. Outside of Dilbert-land, many people would raise their voices and with enough protest, major change would happen. That's because management knows that bad morale is deadly, and can't afford to restaff after mass departures. And outside Dilbert-land, people tend to not see themselves as trapped, and really will, indeed, quit.

Also, medium-sized agencies simply cannot afford to have more than 10% of their projects utterly fail - their cash-flow is too limited, and they live on their reputation and good relationships with clients. Unlike the Dilberts, they simply can't walk straight into failure over and over.

The mid/late 90s were this weird time when people were printing things out like crazy. It was after the first cheap inkjet and laser printers came out. I must have printed out hundreds of Yahoo maps directions and other things at the time. I remember possessing lots of big three-ring binders filled with various manuals for programming libraries. At the time, printing was almost free, and email and web were still somewhat lacking in user friendliness for reading docs in the modem and pre-PDF ubiquity days. These two factors lead to this brief printing things out trend.

The printing thing stopped when online help got better and more ubiquitous. Now, I usually read docs on the web and only buy a book when I want to majorly invest in learning a new technology.

My story was for a dot-matrix printer. Took hours to print.

I remember in the late 90's I'd download the full set of javadocs to have them locally on my computer so I didn't have to wait to browse them over the network.

In fact I had burned them to a cd-rom so I could pass them out easily to co-workers...

Better than printing them out, but still unthinkable now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com