In a 2017 profile of Judge, "New York Times Magazine" writer Willy Staley observed that the film has been compared to Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener", in which a lawyer's clerk, like Peter, shows up at the office one day but declines all work, telling his boss "I would prefer not to". Staley's own high school English teacher, he recalled, brought up "Office Space" in class to get students to appreciate how tedious Franz Kafka's work at an insurance company was. "It's such a brutal portrayal of workplace misery that its most useful points of comparison date back to when office culture was first unleashed on humanity."