Larry Charles has been involved with the development of some of the most successful sitcoms of 90s and 2000s such as Seinfeld, Curb your Enthusiasm and Entourage, I can say they all make my top 10 sitcom list, if we can call Entourage a Sitcom. He was also the executive producer of Dilbert which I highly regard as the best geeky tv show ever made, on top of the likes of Silicon Valley and TBBT. Larry Charles and Scott Adams (Rest In Peace) did an awesome job, I have to give it to them.
When I first watched Dilbert, I mostly saw it as a funny show about engineers, pointy-haired bosses, and the general stupidity of corporate life. The jokes were exaggerated, of course. That’s what made them funny.
But if you’ve ever worked in corporate America or really anywhere with even a little bit of corporate structure, you eventually realize that Dilbert wasn’t exaggerating nearly as much as you thought.
There are lots of shows about geeks out there. TBBT Is probably one of the famous ones. It’s about nerds, geeks, scientists, engineers and people who spend an unreasonable amount of time talking about the Start Trek franchise.
I enjoyed it, (at least the first third of it), and I still do. But TBBT is about the people who happen to be nerds.
Silicon Valley is different. It’s about a show about the people who happen to work at tech and it gets most of the things right. The absurdity of Startups, Investors, Founders and the strange ecosystem around them.
But Dilbert was about something else entirely. It was about being a technical person inside a corporate. It’s a different kind of hell entirely.
You can be a web dev, designer or any kind of specialist and still find yourself reporting to someone who has no idea what you actually do.
You can build something that works flawlessly and still find yourself in a position that you need to pivot because someone has “a better idea”. I lived it.
And usually there’s a manager explaining that we need to “think outside the box”. Dilbert was briliant because it understood that the biggest problems in tech isn’t always technology. Sometimes it’s the person who is responsible for making a decision but doesn’t have enough knowledge to make it. Sometimes it’s the person who has enough knowledge but isn’t allowed to make the decision. And sometimes, somehow, it’s all of them at the same time.
The best Dilbert jokes aren’t funny because they’re absurd. They’re funny because they’re only slightly more absurd than reality.
I’ve worked in places where the person actually doing the work (talking about myself) didn’t have the slightest influence on how the work should be done. When I left there, a massive technical debt was in place. I’ve seen projects getting more complicated because the management decisions is adding technical debts on top of the codebase every day.
You start watching Dilbert when you’re young and think, “Haha, imagine if a company actually worked like this.”
Then you get older and you get a few jobs every now and then. You work with enough organizations and suddenly you’re watching an episode and thinking: “Wait. I know this guy.”
That’s probably why I think Dilbert deserves to be mentioned alongside Silicon Valley and The Big Bang Theory whenever we talk about geeky television.
The three shows are funny for completely different reasons.The Big Bang Theory celebrates geek culture. Silicon Valley satirizes the technology industry. Dilbert understands what it’s like to actually work in technology. And maybe that’s why it feels so timeless.
The technology changes. The programming languages change. The startups change. The buzzwords change.
But the pointy-haired boss remains. The meeting could have been an email. The project is still six months behind schedule. The requirements are still unclear. And someone, somewhere, is still asking why the engineer can’t just “make it work.”
Maybe that’s why Dilbert is the best geek TV show nobody talks about anymore.
It wasn’t really about computers.
It was about people who understood computers trying to survive organizations that didn’t.
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