Daily Inspiration Quote by Scott Adams

Engineers don’t just fix the world; in Scott Adams’s telling, they can’t stand it when the world stops breaking. The line lands because it flatters and needles at the same time: “Engineers like to solve problems” is a clean compliment, a little Hallmark for the STEM set. Then the turn: if reality won’t cooperate, they’ll manufacture complexity just to get the dopamine hit of resolution. It’s praise disguised as a warning label.

As a cartoonist, Adams is working in a familiar office-comedy register where competence becomes its own vice. The joke relies on a modern workplace truth: “problem-solving” is the highest-status form of labor, so the incentive is to keep problems in circulation. If you’re the person who fixes things, a smoothly running system threatens your relevance. Creating problems can mean overengineering, endless refactors, gold-plating, or optimizations no user asked for - the technical equivalent of rearranging furniture to prove you’re still employed.

The subtext is less about engineers as individuals than about a culture that rewards measurable struggle over quiet stability. We celebrate the heroic sprint, the late-night patch, the clever workaround. We rarely applaud the boring architecture that prevents the fire in the first place. Adams’s cynicism works because it mirrors how institutions turn admirable traits into perverse incentives: curiosity becomes nitpicking, rigor becomes rigidity, ambition becomes churn.

It’s also a gentle reminder that “smart” isn’t synonymous with “wise.” The impulse to solve is powerful; the harder skill is deciding which problems deserve to exist at all.