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Lab Rats
Guardian's Best Non-Fiction, 2019
Dan Lyons
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Lab Rats
Guardian's Best Non-Fiction, 2019
Dan Lyons
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About This Book
Guardian 's Best Non-Fiction, 2019
The Tablet 's Highlights of 2019 Personality tests. Team-building exercises. Forced Fun. Desktop surveillance. Open-plan offices. Acronyms. Diminishing job security. Hot desking. Pointless perks. Hackathons.If any of the above sound familiar, welcome to the modern economy. In this hilarious, but deadly serious book, bestselling author Dan Lyons looks at how the world of work has slowly morphed from one of unions and steady career progression to a dystopia made of bean bags and unpaid internships. And that's the 'good' jobs...With the same wit that made Disrupted an international bestseller, Lyons shows how the hypocrisy of Silicon Valley has now been exported globally to a job near you. Even low-grade employees are now expected to view their jobs with a cult-like fervour, despite diminishing prospects of promotion. From the gig economy to the new digital oligarchs, Lyons deliciously roasts the new work climate, while asking what can be done to recoup some sanity and dignity for the expanding class of middle-class serfs.
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PART I
MISERY IN THE MAZE
CHAPTER ONE
UNHAPPY IN PARADISE
The journey that led to me making ducks out of Lego began in 2013, when at age fifty-two I left the media businessânot entirely of my own accord. Specifically, I was laid off from Newsweek, the once storied magazine where I had been the technology editor. This happened without any warning. One Friday morning in June my editor called and told me I was done. That was it. I got no severance package. Getting fired sent me into a tailspin. The media business was collapsing. In my darkest moments I worried that I might never find another job. Then what would we do? My wife and I have twins; at the time they were seven years old.
In the months that followed, I decided to make a radical change. I would leave journalism and reinvent myself as a marketing person. I started applying for jobs at tech companies. Soon enough, a software start-up in Cambridge, called HubSpot, offered me a job. I went in with high hopes. The co-founders were a pair of MIT graduates. They had developed a software product that was selling really well. But they were also doing something else that was even more ambitious. They were going to tear up the playbook that corporations have used for the past century and rethink every aspect of how to run a company. The world had changed, and so should companies. These guys believed they could create a modern corporation that would meet the needs of the new economy.
Thus HubSpot became a kind of experiment in organizational behavior. Part of the experiment involved hiring mostly young kids right out of college and turning them loose, with very little instruction, so they could figure things out for themselves. The average employee was twenty-six years old. They were peppy and energetic, brimming with optimism and new ideas.
The offices boasted all the usual start-up accoutrementsâbeanbag chairs, Ping-Pong tables, a wall of candy dispensers, refrigerators stocked with beer. We could work whenever and wherever we wanted. One woman spent a year working from trains and hotel rooms as she followed Justin Timberlake as he toured the United States. We had unlimited vacation and first-rate health insurance, completely paid for by the company. One co-founder built a nap room. The other brought a teddy bear to meetings as a prop. We did wacky team-building exercises, like Fearless Friday, where my colleagues spent a day sprawled in a conference room, making paintings.
The organization had evolved into something like a cult. We were told that it was harder to get a job at HubSpot than to get into Harvard. The company had developed its own special language. We were told that we were ârock starsâ and âninjasâ who were âchanging the worldâ with our âsuperpowers.â We were told to âmake one plus one equal threeâ and to devote ourselves, with almost religious zeal, to providing our customers with âdelightion,â a made-up word that meant delighting customers by doing more than they expected. We werenât in the software business; we were in the delightion business.
Sure, it was silly, but who cared? The work was easy, the hours light. I liked the flexibility, the free snacks in the kitchen, the hammock in the nap room. Most of all I was relieved to be in a place where I would not have to worry about job security. The company was growing so fast they could barely keep up. They were constantly hiring new workers. For the past ten years Iâd been living with constant job insecurity. In the magazine business, the next layoff always loomed. At long last, I could relax. At HubSpot, my job would be secure. Or so I thought. Within a few months, I came to understand that this fast-growing start-up offered even less job security than any of the failing magazines where Iâd been working before. Turnover was tremendous, especially in sales and telemarketing.
Whatâs more, the company did not see high turnover as a problem. They were proud of it. They considered it a badge of honor. It demonstrated that the company had a âhigh-performance cultureâ where only the best of the best could survive. Weirder still, when they fired someone they called it âgraduation.â We would get an email saying how âawesomeâ it was that so-and-so was âgraduating,â taking their âsuperpowersâ on to a new adventure.
This really messed with peopleâs heads, because you never knew when it might happen to you. Beneath their bubbly exteriors many people were anxious, frightened, unhappy, and massively stressed out. Iâd never before had co-workers call me from their cars, sobbing in the parking garage, having panic attacks. Newsrooms have always been pretty miserable places, and they were even more so when business started collapsing, yet never in my journalism career had I seen co-workers in so much pain.
Soon enough I found myself on a trajectory toward âgraduation.â By the time I left I felt almost relieved. I was, as they say in the startup world, ânot a good culture fit.â In my final months, my boss had reassigned me to a menial, demeaning job and told me that even at this I was failing. He said I needed to redeem myself, that my coworkers didnât like me. I tried to think of the whole thing as a kind of game. Even so, the psychological stress was tremendous. I slid into anxiety and depression. Sometimes I could not sleep at all. I would lie awake all night, wondering how I had been transformed from a confident, secure, accomplished person into a shivering, quivering, self-loathing wreck. At other times I could do nothing but sleep. I would come home, eat dinner, and go straight to bed.
I hung in for nearly two years and left with my self-esteem in tatters, half-believing that my boss had been right about me, that I simply did not have what it takes to succeed in the new economy. I had gone into the job with high hopes, deceived by the perks and pampering into believing that these new companies were supportive, progressive organizations inventing a new human-centric approach to work. I came away believing the opposite, that modern workplaces were actually worse than the old companies they were replacing. They were digital sweatshops, akin to the brutal textile mills and garment factories from more than a century ago.
After my own âgraduation,â I decided to write a book about my experience. I wanted to explain how, after years of writing glowing magazine articles about the new economy, I had ventured into the new economy and found out that most of what I believed was wrong. Disrupted wasnât meant to be a book about corporate culture. I just hoped to write a funny memoir about a curmudgeonly fiftysomething journalist trying (and failing) to reinvent himself while working alongside a bunch of effervescent Millennials in the marketing department of a cult-like tech start-up.
But when the book came out, something extraordinary happened. My inbox begin to fill with email after email, hundreds of emotional letters from people who had read Disrupted and were desperate to share their stories. Many came from middle-aged people who had been âaged outâ of the workforce. But I also got a ton of mail from Millennials, the ones for whom this brave new world of work, with its bouncy castles and beer pong parties, supposedly had been created. These bright young people were as disillusioned with work as their older counterparts.
Day after day, I received letters from people who said theyâd laughed at some parts of Disrupted, but other parts had hit too close to home. Many came from people who worked in the tech industry, but I heard also from people who worked at design shops, mobile phone carriers, advertising agencies, biotech companies, and market research firms. The letters came from all over the world, even from places where Disrupted had not yet been published: India, England, France, Scandinavia, Ireland. A man in Iraq, writing to me while a battle was raging in Mosul, wrote to tell me that he, too, had endured a soul-destroying work experience and that reading my book had been therapeutic.
It was gratifying that so many people were passing my book around, telling their friends about it, and making the effort to track me down and write to me about their own experiences. But it was also depressing. Over time I heard versions of the following stories. People were hired for one job but arrived to find they were doing something else. They sold their home and moved to a new area for a new job, only to get fired a few weeks or months into the new gig. They were hired for a job in which it was unclear what they would be doing, and when they asked for guidance they were told that people who needed direction were not cut out for the modern workplace; they were supposed to be âself-directed.â They worked in flat organizations, with no hierarchy and no structure, which drove them nuts.
They worked for managers who were young, inexperienced, and undertrainedâor sometimes completely untrained. Their bosses told them that their jobs were not secure, that they were powerless, that they could be fired at any moment without any reason. They were subjected to personality assessments and herded into teambuilding exercises. They were exposed to brainwashing techniques, force-fed notions about âculture,â and informed that their success hinged on their ability to fit in with the others, but that the others didnât like them. They were told that they were failing, but not told how or why.
People were surveyed and surveilled, monitored and measured. They experienced bias and discrimination based on their age, race, or gender. They were sexually harassed. Some were shunned and ostracized by colleagues, or coerced into âforced funâ activities, like indoor skydiving, ballroom dancing, or trapeze training, and told they were supposed to be having fun. One young woman had been fired because, as her boss put it, âYouâre not excited enough.â They were exposed to so much psychological pressure that some became physically ill. Some quit. Others soldiered on, only to get fired anyway.
For weeks I couldnât stop reading the letters. Some described a kind of Stockholm syndrome, where they remained in abusive situations even though they knew they should leave. âI still have nightmares about the place, where Iâm trying to prove Iâm not an idiotâto idiots!â says a woman Iâll call Beatrix about her time at a prestigious San Francisco firm that epitomizes the hip new-economy company. Beatrix has an MBA and was in her late thirties when she joined the company, having spent a decade working for both start-ups and multinational corporations. Her previous jobs had gone well, but in her new position she could do nothing right. In a long email (which she has given me permission to use in this book) she poured out her heart to me:
I would be pulled into windowless conference rooms to have my boss share anonymous team member feedback, where people would discuss my looks (âarrogant and distantâ) and my IQ (âappears to be very lowâ). My performance review contained this: âI canât understand whether she doesnât understand our culture or if sheâs plain stupid.â I was told to improve my performance so that âpeople donât have to write stuff like that.â The worst part was when I started to think they were right. Maybe I really was as bad as they said I was. I was freaked out, stressed, crying, self-pitying. All the while, I didnât have the guts to quit. I just kept trying to make it work.
For some reason, Beatrixâs boss wouldnât fire her. So they remained locked in a kind of psychological battle, with Beatrix trying to prove her worth and win her bossâs approval, and her boss repeatedly telling her that she was falling short. She told no one about this, except her husband. As far as her friends knew, she had landed a cool job at one of the worldâs hippest companies. When they asked about work, she said it was fine and changed the subject. âIt was like an inverted reality. At home I had a loving husband and kids. In my personal life, at home and among my friends, people saw me as a good mother, a good wife, a successful person with a good job. At work I became Gregor Samsa,â she says, referring to the traveling salesman in Kafkaâs Metamorphosis who wakes up one day transformed into a giant cockroach.
Beatrixâs boss conducted eccentric exercises. One day he called everyone into a conference room and told them they were going to critique each other. He made them stand in a circle, sideways, so each one faced the back of the person to their left. They would write one word about the person in front of them and pin that word onto the back of that personâs shirt.
âThe person behind you would read the word on your shirt, and then expand on it,â Beatrix recalls. âSo youâre standing there and the person behind you is telling you all sorts of terrible things about you, and you have to just stand there, listening. And this happens in front of all of your co-workers.â
This seems amazing, but Beatrix stayed for nearly four years. Toward the end she was suffering panic attacks nearly every day. She still feels panicky if she has to drive near the companyâs headquarters in San Francisco, so much so that if she needs to go into the city she will plan a route that will let her avoid the neighborhood. She left in 2013, and has not worked since. She is in her forties, which she says makes her virtually unemployable in San Francisco.
A lot of the letters and stories I heard involved managers who played weird, manipulative mind games. Some people were sure they had brushed up against a sociopath. One woman told me she and her colleagues still tracked an ex-boss who had done incredible damage in a relatively short amount of time at their company nearly a decade before. For years they had watched him move from job to job. From people at each stop they would hear stories that he was still engaging in the same sadistic crazy-making and gaslighting and abuse. He was like a serial killer who keeps moving to new cities, seeking fresh victims. A man who lives two thousand miles away from me wrote to tell me that the same manager who had tormented me at HubSpot had tormented him a decade earlier, using the same tactics: âIâm pretty sure I was the beta version of what happened with you,â he wrote.
A thirty-something marketing executive (whom Iâll call Adrian) told me a story about showing up for his first day of work at a software start-up and being told by his new boss that she already didnât like him. In fact, nobody in the department liked him, she said. âEverybody who interviewed you thought you were arrogant and full of yourself,â she told him. âI thought the same thing.â She told Adrian they all had voted against hiring him, but the chief marketing officer had overruled them and hired Adrian anyway. âSo just be aware that youâre starting out here in a very deep hole,â his manager told him. âYouâre going to have to dig your way out of that hole and redeem yourself and win everybody over.â Adrian didnât know if she was telling the truth or just playing a mind game with him, trying to knock him back on his heels and motivate him to work harder. In the end it didnât matter. He only lasted nine months.
Martin and Linda, a well-educated twenty-something couple in New York, kept joining start-ups, lured in by perks and a culture that seemed fun, only to find out that, yet again, they were just being packed into digital sweatshops. They were harassed by managers and forced to put in long hours under tremendous stress, doing work that was ultimately pointless and for which they were poorly paid, with no chance of promotion or advancement. âAll of my friends who work at tech companies are baseline unhappy,â Linda said. âEveryone has one foot out the door all the time.â
A fifty-something guy told me about taking a job at a hip Millennial-packed PR agency and having to bail out after only four months, âbecause I was more stressed out than Iâd ever been at any job, and it was affecting my family.â One of his equally stressed-out colleagues described the place as âPTSD-inducing.â Both had worked in public relations for decades without any ill effects, and could not understand how the job had come to feel like shipping out to the frontlines of war.
Like me, these people didnât just feel that they had taken a rough job or had a bad boss. They felt they had stepped into some kind of alternate reality, where people did bad things to them for no reason. They described feeling helpless, powerless, confused, victimized. They described questioning their sanity or doubting their self-worth. Th...