"The longer you work here, diverse it gets"
About this Quote
A mangled sentence that still lands like a punchline: "The longer you work here, diverse it gets". Scott Adams, a cartoonist who’s made a career out of corporate-office miscommunication, builds the effect on bad grammar that feels eerily authentic to workplace HR-speak. The line reads like something said in a meeting where everyone pretends to understand, because the alternative is acknowledging the absurdity out loud.
The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it gestures at a demographic reality: tenure changes who sticks around, who rises, who leaves. But the phrasing turns that reality into a kind of creeping, almost accidental phenomenon, as if diversity happens not through deliberate inclusion but through time, attrition, or organizational drift. That’s the subtext: the company isn’t committing to diversity; it’s narrating it as an emergent side effect, like dust accumulating or policies calcifying.
The humor is in the passive evasiveness. No agent, no accountability. "Diverse" becomes a verb-adjacent blob - a corporate metric turned into a mystical force. It also parodies how institutions try to congratulate themselves without naming hard specifics: hiring, pay equity, promotion pipelines, retention. The sentence’s brokenness is the point; it signals a culture that can’t speak plainly about race, gender, or power, so it hides behind awkward optimism.
Context matters because Adams’s brand is workplace cynicism: the office as a language factory that produces slogans instead of meaning. The quote works by dramatizing how companies can weaponize vagueness, making a complicated promise feel inevitable, frictionless, and therefore unearned.
The intent is double-edged. On the surface, it gestures at a demographic reality: tenure changes who sticks around, who rises, who leaves. But the phrasing turns that reality into a kind of creeping, almost accidental phenomenon, as if diversity happens not through deliberate inclusion but through time, attrition, or organizational drift. That’s the subtext: the company isn’t committing to diversity; it’s narrating it as an emergent side effect, like dust accumulating or policies calcifying.
The humor is in the passive evasiveness. No agent, no accountability. "Diverse" becomes a verb-adjacent blob - a corporate metric turned into a mystical force. It also parodies how institutions try to congratulate themselves without naming hard specifics: hiring, pay equity, promotion pipelines, retention. The sentence’s brokenness is the point; it signals a culture that can’t speak plainly about race, gender, or power, so it hides behind awkward optimism.
Context matters because Adams’s brand is workplace cynicism: the office as a language factory that produces slogans instead of meaning. The quote works by dramatizing how companies can weaponize vagueness, making a complicated promise feel inevitable, frictionless, and therefore unearned.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
|---|
More Quotes by Scott
Add to List
