Daily Inspiration Quote by Scott Adams

The joke lands because it weaponizes a familiar workplace stereotype: the engineer as compulsive tinkerer, unable to leave “good enough” alone. Scott Adams, writing from the Dilbert-era trench of corporate life, isn’t really talking about engineering so much as the friction between two value systems that collide in every meeting room. “Normal people” prize stability and risk avoidance; “engineers” prize possibility, optimization, and the seductive clarity of technical improvement. The punchline flips prudence into complacency and curiosity into pathology, letting both sides feel momentarily seen and slightly indicted.

The phrasing matters. “Normal people” is bait, a loaded category that instantly frames engineers as outsiders with their own logic, almost their own species. Then “features” shows up as the tell: not “solutions,” not “fixes,” but the product-world fetish object that can justify endless cycles of change. Adams is poking at feature creep, but he’s also satirizing management culture that rewards visible novelty over invisible reliability. If the incentive structure celebrates shipping something “new,” engineers will learn to interpret “not broken” as wasted potential.

Contextually, this is classic Dilbert: a comic universe where rational work is constantly hijacked by status games, misaligned metrics, and the urge to meddle. The subtext is less “engineers are annoying” than “organizations can’t tell the difference between improvement and motion.” The line survives because modern tech culture still treats restraint as a bug, not a feature.