Why doesn't Dilbet quit, move to another enterprise or embark on his own start-up?
Why do I have to watch him everyday, being humiliated, teased and frustrated?
Why doesn't he quit?
I pitty him!
For me, it was PG's essay that overwrote this idea, which I had been raised with -
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
In defense of the amazing people who raised me with the work/pay assumption, they lived most of their lives in the Soviet Union, where there weren't many options aside from working for money handed down from a higher power.
It's definitely not just in IT.
For the sake of argument, one could say that life/work separation is good, and that people who start startups are workaholics missing out on all of the interesting things in life.
When I quit, everyone asked where I'm going. When I said "I haven't worked it out yet" (as I was shaping a startup) people just couldn't process it... Half assumed I just didn't want to say.
For a lot of people I just said "I'm going travelling", because it was something they could process.
Dilbert (the comic strip) isn't really about any particular character. It's about patterns of relationships in all hierarchical human organizations. No escape is possible for Dilbert (the character) because his tribulations are all the result of emergent phenomena. The comic has distilled those conflicts down to their essence, so they're visible anywhere. Call it the Dilbert Pattern.
He's not ruthless and uncaring enough to be a leader. A well aimed rock from Dogbert knocked out his moral compass allowing him to ascend effortlessly to high level management.
"The basic notion of writing a soap opera is all so-and-so has to say is such-and-such and the story is over, but they don't ever say it because then you would have nothing to write about it. 'Why doesn't Beany go to his father and tell him he took the book?'
"Well, because then you've shot about a month's worth of scripts. The great secret was how to attenuate and retain interest. How did I? You approach the same set of circumstances from different directions. If you have a couple talking about divorcing one day, the next day, you have another couple talking about the first couple's divorce."
(From The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920-1961 by Jeff Kisseloff. One of my favorite books.)
From the crippled children?
No, that's the jar. I'm talking about the tray, the pennies for everybody.
I also wouldn't be surprised if, to paraphrase Tolstoy, broken startups tend to be all alike, while each pointy-haired boss in the depths of an enormous company hierarchy is broken in his own way. There's a lot of ripe dramatic possibilities in the artificial environment of a BigCo; that's why so many dramas (and even musicals!) have been set in offices.
But for all I know the "Dilbert-does-a-startup" storyline has actually happened several times. I wouldn't expect such a storyline to last much more than a week. There's only so much humor you can get out of a company that's plummeting toward the ground, trying to learn to fly by delegating an intern to flap his arms.
Predictability is a great comforter for many risk-averse types, a category to which the great majority of engineer-types I have known belong.
If you look at the work place as it exists in the US, or many other countries for that matter, there is a fairly defined and constant relationship between the company and the employee. There are those companies that try to break the mold and have a different relationship, but for the most part it's fairly constant across companies and industries.
As company size increases the number of people in management also tends to increase and the upper management tends to become more and more removed from the people who are actually working with the customers and writing the code or doing the real work. The people making the big decisions know less about the situation than the guy on the front lines hence the large number of problems that arise that are satirized in the Dilbert comics.
Second, many engineers, while incredibly bright, are not the types to know how to successfully run their own businesses. Dilbert has never been portrayed as business savvy. Nor has he been portrayed as the type who could sell his ideas well enough to partner with someone who is.
Third, comment one nailed it perfectly, the comic wouldn't be funny.
I wonder if that is part of Scott Adams intent - people pity him, yet he is not really worthy of pity (which most people wouldn't realise).
"It's never as bad as you think, and it's never as good as you think."