How Silicon Valley made work miserable for the rest of us

Silicon Valley now aims to remake the notion of the corporation itself by inventing radical new ideas about how to build and manage companies. Unfortunately, many of their ideas are terrible.

The following is an edited excerpt from Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons. The excerpt was provided by Hachette Publishing. You can buy a copy here.

I (have come) to believe that much blame for worker unhappiness falls on Silicon Valley. For one thing, that’s where most new office automation technologies are developed. But also, in addition to producing chips and software, Silicon Valley now aims to remake the notion of the corporation itself by inventing radical new ideas about how to build and manage companies. Unfortunately, many of their ideas are terrible.

The old Valley is gone

My first encounter with the old version of Silicon Valley came in the late 1980s, when I visited a software company in Santa Cruz where bearded, long-haired engineers wore shorts and tie-dyed shirts and spent evenings lounging in a huge redwood hot tub, drinking wine and smoking pot. “California companies” was the name used to describe this laid-back hippie-hacker approach to work. But the days of hanging out in the hot tub are long gone.

The new generation of tech companies have become pressure cookers. Uber employees have complained about long hours, abusive managers, and sexual harassment. One Uber engineer committed suicide after only five months on the job; his widow blamed the stress of work.

Amazon employees have recounted going days without sleep trying to hit impossible deadlines. One “Amabot” (as Amazon office workers call themselves) who had been put on a “performance improvement plan” (a first step toward getting fired) sent a note to his colleagues and then leapt off the building in a suicide attempt. Tech work has changed because the people have changed.

During the second Internet boom, which began a few years after the dot-com crash in 2001, Silicon Valley has attracted a new kind of person. Instead of geeky engineers, the industry draws hustlers, young guys who hope to get rich quick and who in a previous generation might have gone to work as bond traders on Wall Street. Previously, the kings of tech were the wizards who invented new products and built companies, like William Hewlett and David Packard, or Bill Gates at Microsoft, and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple.

But now, the power brokers include venture capitalists – like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital and Founders Fund, and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Ventures. They don’t actually run tech companies. They’re just investors. Nevertheless, their profession is depicted as glamorous, and they rank among the biggest celebrities in Silicon Valley. Wired once lionized Andreessen on its cover, calling him “The Man Who Makes the Future.” Young guys moving west after college no longer hope to become the next Steve Jobs; they want to be the next Marc Andreessen. The Valley has become a casino, with VCs and angel investors blindly pumping money into every slot machine, hoping to hit a jackpot. (The difference is that the punter who gets lucky on a slot machine doesn’t walk away convinced he’s a genius.)

Instead of writing about tech, the industry’s bloggers now write about venture deals, and who raised how much at what valuation. The Valley has become obsessed with money, and there is a lot of it around. In 2017, venture capitalists pumped $84 billion into startups in the United States – that’s 10 times as much as in 1995, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Where could all that money go? Are there now 10 times as many ideas worth funding? Of course not.

But the VCs have to do something with their billions, so they just keep stuffing money into startups, fattening them up like foie gras geese. In 2013, when Aileen Lee, a VC, coined the term “unicorn” to describe a privately held company valued at more than $1 billion, she chose the name because such companies were rare. By 2017, there were nearly 300 of them. Unicorns were all over the place – and wreaking havoc on the Bay Area.

Spreading outside the Valley

Some companies try to instill a little bit of Silicon Valley culture by building miniature startups inside their old-company walls, hiring millennials who fan out across the organization, wearing Converse sneakers and untucked shirts, running hackathons and teaching oldsters how to get “super pumped” and “mastermind some shit” in a “jam sesh,” as Uber founder Travis Kalanick once put it.

Also, many companies are latching on to faddish Silicon Valley management methodologies, like Agile and Lean Startup, because they are convinced that these tech-spawned ideas will make them as nimble as startups. Basically, they want a transfusion. They want that teenage-boy blood. They are old and slow and bloated, with weak hearts and clogged arteries.

Most of all, they’re scared. They’ve seen other big old companies get killed off by Silicon Valley, and they would rather not have this happen to them. They seem to believe that some magic elixir exists here, some recipe for innovation that floats in the air and can be absorbed if you drive around with your windows open, smelling the eucalyptus trees. They see people getting rich on things they don’t even understand. Blockchain? Ethereum? Initial coin offerings? So they fly out and have drinks at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where venture capitalists hang around, as do expensive “companions,” many with Eastern European accents. They eat lunch at the Battery, a members-only private club for social-climbing parvenus in San Francisco.

No money or worker rights