January 19, 2026 

Scott Adams, the satirist-creator of Dilbert, died last week. I first encountered his strip as a child, far too young to appreciate its clairvoyance, but old enough to laugh at quips like: “According to the anonymous online employee survey, you don’t trust management. What’s up with that?” Only later, once I began my own career as an engineer, did the strip reveal itself as an unnervingly accurate parody of corporate life — by the time I finished my MBA, I was half-convinced Adams had been practicing some kind of sorcery.

As enduring as his comics were, I’ve always thought Adams’s instincts shone brightest in the animated series that brought his universe to life. Co-created with Larry Charles (of Seinfeld fame), Dilbert follows its titular engineer at Path-E-Tech (a comical name born of a series of mergers) alongside his coworkers: Wally, the patron saint of the professional slacker, and Alice, the lone female engineer and often the only adult in the room.

In animation, Adams’s central insight becomes even clearer. The office is portrayed as a closed ecosystem in which incompetence is rewarded, initiative is punished, and creativity is stifled. Adams distilled this reality into a single axiom: “Credit travels up. Blame travels down.”

Before he became a cultural institution, Adams worked as an engineer at Pacific Bell in the 1980s, and his affection for the profession is evident in the way Dilbert depicts engineers as a peculiar species.

“The Knack” remains the definitive joke about the vocation; I even recall a professor playing the scene in a lecture. Diagnosed with “the Knack” for his proclivity to take things apart and put them back together, young Dilbert’s mother asks, worriedly, “Will he lead a normal life?” The doctor answers, solemnly: “No. He will be an engineer.”

The Pointy-Haired Boss remains one of the great creations in American satire, not because, as the silhouette of his hair suggests, he is cartoonishly evil, but because he is banal, cheerful, and untethered from the consequences of his incompetence. His managerial philosophy is crystallized in a first-season scene where he assigns Dilbert responsibility for evading the company’s Y2K exposure: “You have my full support to fix the problem. Unless it involves any sort of resources, decisions, or effort from my part. Remember, money is no object. Unless, of course, you plan to spend it.”

The series expands its target beyond middle management into the broader empire of bureaucracy. The satire hits sales and marketing departments, but it also skewers corporate rituals that masquerade as virtue. In the episode “Charity,” for example, the Boss becomes chairman of a fundraiser solely because he needs another plaque to cover a fly stain on his wall. The writing is droll and markedly quotable: “I’m no saint, I just believe people should do their fair share; or, if those people are the boss, someone else should do it for them.”

What makes the series work, however, is that it doesn’t need a political agenda to be incisive — an avenue Adams only wandered into in his later years. Dilbert’s worldview is cynical but blunt: incompetent people are often promoted into management precisely because it removes them from productive work. It’s a notion Mike Judge articulated in Office Space (1999) with similar clarity. The underlying axiom is simple: good products and real successes tend to happen in spite of management rather than because of it.

Elsewhere, in “The Elbonian Trip,” the trio travels to the titular nation — a developing state comically described as a “three-and-three-quarter world country” — to tour their manufacturing plant. In a scene skewering the sanctimony and self-deception surrounding outsourced labor, they discover that the cheerful company pamphlet is a lie: the factory resembles a quasi-prison, riddled with abysmal conditions and ruled by an oppressive caste system. And in case you were under the impression that Scott Adams was some heartless Ayn Randian villain, Dilbert spends the episode plotting to form a private union for the workers and bargain for paid leave and workplace safety.

The show’s second season is where it truly found its footing. “The Merger” is one of the funniest pieces of corporate commentary Adams ever wrote, lampooning the ritualistic language and practice of mergers and acquisitions. Why managers pursue M&A when most deals fail to realize their promised “synergies” is a perennial business question. Flush with cash and eager to spend it, the Pointy-Haired Boss hires Dogbert as a consultant (as managers eager to burn liquidity often do). Dogbert then takes him to a vibrant CEO bar, a “meat market for mergers,” where patrons flirtatiously ask for one another’s ticker symbols and seductively whisper, “I am interested in merging with you.”

And then there are the show’s supporting characters, especially the garbageman — an enigmatic philosopher who appears at opportune moments carrying eons of wisdom. It’s one of Adams’s more subversive insights that the wisest figure in his imagined universe is neither the engineer nor any echelon of management, but a complete outsider. In a world obsessed with credentials and hierarchy, the most reliable person is the guy who isn’t trying to climb anything or best anyone.

Adams’s later years were, to put it mildly, consumed by politicization and controversy. But these are footnotes that need not define his best work. Dilbert, especially the animated series, remains a remarkably exact satire of modern institutional life — far more biting than most of what came after it — and a rite of passage for anyone about to set foot on the corporate ladder.

Originally published on The Washington Examiner