Lab Rats E-Book

Dan Lyons

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 411

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Dan Lyons is the New York Times bestselling author of Disrupted. He is also a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and public speaker. He was a staff writer on the first two seasons of the Emmy-winning HBO series Silicon Valley. Previously, Lyons was technology editor at Newsweek and the creator of the groundbreaking viral blog “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” (aka “Fake Steve Jobs”). Lyons has written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Wired.

First published in hardback in the United States of America in 2018 by Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Dan Lyons, 2018, 2019

The moral right of Dan Lyons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 392 7

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 393 4

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78649 395 8

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Once again, with all my love, for my three best friends: Sasha, Sonya, and Paul.

CONTENTS

Welcome to Your New Job

Introduction: Make a Duck

PART I: MISERY IN THE MAZE

Chapter One: Unhappy in Paradise

Chapter Two: The New Oligarchs

Chapter Three: A Very Brief History of Management Science (and Why You Shouldn’t Trust It)

Chapter Four: Who’s Afraid of Silicon Valley?

PART II: FOUR FACTORS OF WORKPLACE DESPAIR

Chapter Five: Building the Workforce of the Future (or: Sorry, You’re Old and We’d Like You to Leave)

Chapter Six: Money: “Garbage at the Speed of Light”

Chapter Seven: Insecurity: “We’re a Team, not a Family”

Chapter Eight: Change: “What Happens if You Live Inside a Hurricane that Never Ends?”

Chapter Nine: Dehumanization: “Think of Yourself as a Machine Within a Machine”

PART III: THE NO-SHIT-SHERLOCK SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

Chapter Ten: The Battle for the Soul of Work

Chapter Eleven: Basecamp: Back to Basics

Chapter Twelve: Managed by Q: “Everybody Cleans”

Chapter Thirteen: Kapor Capital: Conscious Capitalists

Chapter Fourteen: The Social Enterprise Movement

Epilogue: Can Zebras Fix What Unicorns Have Broken?

Acknowledgments

Selected Bibliography

Index

Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation.

—Charles Mackay, Extraordinary PopularDelusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

WELCOME TO YOUR NEW JOB

First, you are lucky to be here. Also, we do not care about you. We offer no job security. This is not a career. You are serving a short-term tour of duty. We provide no training or career development. If possible, we will make you a contractor rather than an actual employee, so that we do not have to provide you with benefits or a pension plan. We will pay you as little as possible. We do not care about diversity: ethnic minorities need not apply. Your job will be stressful. You will work long hours under constant pressure and with no privacy. You will be monitored and surveilled. We will read your email and chat messages, and use data to measure your performance. We do not expect you to last very long. Our goal is to burn you out and churn you out. Your managers may not know what they are doing. They also may be abusive. If you are female, there is a good chance you will be sexually harassed. HR will not help you. If you file a complaint, you will probably get fired. If you get pregnant or turn forty, you also will be fired. You may be fired even though you are doing a good job. You may be fired for no reason at all. We do not offer a creche. We do have ping-pong. There are snacks and beer in the kitchen.

INTRODUCTION

MAKE A DUCK

On a Wednesday morning in June 2017, I find myself in Menlo Park, California, sharing a small table in a faux European coffee shop with a woman I’ll call Julia—and I’m making a duck out of Lego bricks.

Outside, it’s sunny and warm. A late-morning breeze ruffles the big bright-colored umbrellas above the tables in the plaza. Inside, young techies gaze up at the chalkboard menu above the counter and sit at tables clicking at laptops. Django Reinhardt’s guitar emanates from hidden speakers. Nobody pays any attention to the two gray-haired people sitting near the window with their plastic toys.

Julia and I have never met before. She’s a cheery, round-faced woman in her fifties with a disarming smile and an easy laugh. Julia arrived carrying a big canvas bag filled with Lego bricks, and they’re now scattered out on the table. As we’re making small talk, she plays with the pieces, idly snapping and unsnapping them. Soon, between sips of my caffè Americano and bites of a remarkably good almond croissant, I start tinkering with them too.

A few years earlier I briefly worked at a Silicon Valley-style startup in Boston, a disastrous experience I chronicled in my last book, before getting a job as a writer on the HBO comedy Silicon Valley.

Today, I have returned to the setting of that show—which, while a real place, is also a state of mind—not for fun, but for research. For the last two years, I have made it my mission to speak to as many people as I can to better understand the modern workplace and why work today seems to make so many people unhappy. My theory is that at least some of the unhappiness at work comes from being herded into silly workshops where people are fed a bunch of touchy-feely nonsense about self-improvement and transformation.

That’s how I’ve come to be on this coffee date. Julia makes a living running the weirdest kind of corporate workshops I’ve heard about so far. In Julia’s workshops, she asks people, office workers like I once was, to play with Lego. This is an actual thing now, and the people who teach this take it very seriously. The methodology is called Lego Serious Play, and Julia is one of thousands of people who have become certified to run LSP workshops. Huge companies, including Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and Google, have embraced it.

When I first heard about Lego workshops I thought someone was pulling my leg. I was talking to a corporate trainer—I’ll call him Edward—who said, “You know, you should talk to some of my friends who are certified in Lego.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I’m serious,” he said. He insisted that Lego training really helps people get better at their jobs. “It’s powerful,” Edward said. “The Lego bricks are a prop. They help get people to talk about how they feel about things, unfiltered. It’s like kids who have been abused, and they talk through a doll. People talk through their Lego.”

Oh dear God. I closed my eyes and pictured a bunch of poor Jims and Pams talking through their Lego, pouring their hearts out to a team of New Age quacks. This could be either the worst thing or the best thing I might ever see in my entire life. Maybe both.

Edward gave me a name and a number. Soon I was talking to one of the top Lego trainers in the world, a man who lives in Southern California. He put me in touch with Julia, who lives in Silicon Valley, a few miles from where I’m staying.

I’m a little disappointed, because I came here expecting, and actually half hoping, to meet a complete nut job or a shyster. Unfortunately, Julia appears to be neither. She’s very bright and really sincere. She has a master’s degree in engineering and spent two decades writing software inside some serious organizations. Moreover, I really like her. I don’t want to make fun of her. And yet—here we are, in a coffee shop, playing with Lego.

“It gets people talking,” Julia says. She tells me about the brain science that supposedly explains how Lego Serious Play works. There is, in fact, a body of scholarly looking research around LSP discussing things like the cerebral cortex and the limbic system. Julia says LSP is especially useful with software programmers, who tend to be introverts, because it creates a “safe space” where they can talk. Lego workshops also help Type-A top executives stop being such overbearing assholes, and can even be a catalyst for changing an entire organization, she claims. I can see why HR departments go nuts for this. HR people used to be glorified office managers, but now they get MBAs and are called Chief People Officers. They talk about being “strategic talent managers” who “drive corporate transformation” and are “building the workforce of the future.” They’re suckers for pop neuroscience, and though most wouldn’t know an amygdala from an anal wart, they will jump on anything that they think can rewire the brain circuitry of their employees. Lego Serious Play promises to do just that, and comes wrapped in just enough scientific-sounding literature to make it seem legitimate.

To me these sessions sound like a waking nightmare, like a cross between an away day and group therapy, with the added insult of toys. Julia swears it’s not like that. Sure, at first, some people are pretty skeptical, but they’re quickly won over.

In just the past few years LSP has become a booming industry. There are LSP consultancies and LSP conferences. People write LSP books, LSP white papers, and LSP articles on LSP websites. There’s even a Global Federation of LSP Master Trainers. The concept was created in the 1990s by two business professors in Switzerland who drew on research in psychology and educational theory. Over time people started adding in theories about brain science. By one estimate more than ten thousand people have become certified Lego facilitators, and more than one hundred thousand people have participated in Lego workshops.

Lego Serious Play has grown by attaching itself to another corporate training fad: Agile. Agile has become immensely popular in the corporate world and has evolved into something akin to a religion. It’s also now a huge industry unto itself, with conferences, consultancies, trainers, gurus, and literally thousands of books devoted to its teaching. A few years ago a lot of Agile trainers started getting certifications in Lego Serious Play, since the concepts behind Lego and Agile are considered complementary. That’s how Julia got into this. She began her career as a computer engineer, but about ten years ago she became a programming coach, someone who teaches coders how to code. To do that, Julia needed to get a certification in Agile. Later, she added Lego to her bag of tricks.

That bag also includes a certificate in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP was originally a form of New Age psychotherapy created in the 1970s by Gestalt-loving hippie shrinks at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Critics claim it is pseudoscience, but some people believe NLP can be used for mind control, like hypnosis. You load your language with keywords, study the subject’s eye movements, and use a technique called anchoring. Supposedly Tony Robbins uses NLP. A British celebrity magician/hypnotist named Derren Brown, star of Derren Brown: Mind Control, makes videos where he manipulates people just by talking to them.

In addition to her Agile, Lego, and NLP training, Julia tells me, “I’ve also studied hypnosis.” I’m ecstatic. When I was in high school I saw a stage hypnotist get four of my schoolmates up on stage, clucking like chickens. I’ve always wanted to be hypnotized, just so I could see what it feels like.

“Could you hypnotize me? Right now? Could you put me under, right here at this table?”

“Of course,” she says. “People go into trance states all the time. Every time you drive a car, you’re in a trance state.”

“Right,” I say, “but I mean the hypnosis where you put me under, like you count backward from three and snap your fingers, or wave a watch in front of my face—that kind of thing.”

Julia explains that she would not need to do anything that dramatic. She would just talk to me. “Think about how a mother talks to a child when he scrapes his knee and gets a boo-boo and he’s crying, and she’s trying to soothe him. The mother uses one of the most powerful hypnotic phrases there is. She gives him a hug, and she lowers her voice, and she says, ‘You’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.’ And he stops feeling the pain. The pain goes away.”

“So that’s hypnosis?” Julia nods. I try not to look too sad. We’re sitting at a small table, our faces close. “You’ll be okay,” she says again. “You’ll be okay.” Her voice is breathy, her cadence lulling. With each repetition she slightly changes her inflection. “You’ll be okay.” I look away, but she keeps going. Her voice gets softer. “You’ll be okay,” she says. “You’ll be okay.”

“Okay!” I say, a little too loud. I’m incredibly suggestible, and I’m afraid that after another thirty seconds of this she could have me up on the table, clucking. If we were not sitting in a crowded café—if we were alone, in private—I would probably just let her hypnotize me. Instead, I, well, chicken out. “I get it,” I tell her. I blink my eyes a few times, as if I could shake off whatever voodoo this woman has put on me.

Of course she might have already put me into a trance. How would I know? She probably started using her NLP mind control techniques on me as soon as we sat down and began making small talk.

That’s when Julia produces a little plastic bag and spills out six Lego bricks: two red, three yellow, and then another yellow one that has eyeballs on two sides.

“Make a duck,” she says. “You have thirty seconds.”

* * *

For a moment I sit there just looking at the six plastic blocks. The image that pops into my head is a squeaky yellow bathtub duck, like the chubby rubber duck that Ernie sings about on Sesame Street. Somehow I must combine these six rectangular Lego blocks into something that resembles a rubber duck. The head part is obvious. But what about the others? The two red pieces are flat slabs with six knobs. Does one sit on top of the duck’s head, like a hat? I hate things like this—Rubik’s Cubes, Sudoku puzzles. I hate them because I suck at them, and I never know the trick to solving the puzzle, so I just sit there flailing away. Or I just surrender and sit there staring at the cube, with the same look on my face that my cat has when he looks at the TV, wondering how those little birds got inside the box.

The clock is ticking. I start snapping and unsnapping. I feel frantic, while Julia sits there, calm as Buddha, with a bemused expression. Of course, she knows the answer. She has watched hundreds of people, maybe thousands of them, try to solve this. I wonder what percentage of people succeed. I wonder where I rate among all those people. I suspect I’m near the bottom.

This puzzle might be a kind of IQ test, and if so I’m about to land in a very low percentile. Or it could be a Rorschach test, a puzzle that reveals something about my personality. Oh, he’s one of those, I imagine Julia thinking. Companies could use the duck puzzle to evaluate workers and separate the wheat from the chaff. The good problem solvers get marked for promotion. The ninnies, like me, get put on the list for the next round of layoffs.

In a panic, I try a new configuration. This too does not work. I break up the bricks and start over. A child could do this, I tell myself. And yet I cannot.

Julia sighs, which I think is the signal that my thirty seconds are up. Quickly I snap together a four-piece duck, leaving two bricks on the table.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That’s all I could do.”

She picks up my duck and looks at it. In addition to using only four bricks, I’ve also put the head on sideways. Julia gently unsnaps the head and puts it on so that it’s facing the right way.

“I’m sorry,” I say again, stammering. “I think I got nervous. I know there must be a way to use all of the pieces, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t see it. Maybe if I had more time. I don’t know.”

“What makes you think you have to use all six bricks?” Julia says. “I never said how many bricks you had to use. All I said was make a duck.”

She gives me a little smile, as if to say, Gotcha!

It turns out that Make a Duck is the best-known exercise in the Lego Serious Play canon, and this is its lesson—that everyone makes a different duck. The duck is not a puzzle, or a brain-teaser, or an IQ test. The duck is a window into your soul. Why did I assume that I had to use all the pieces? Why did I think it was a puzzle, or an IQ test? Why was I so afraid about failing? I hate to admit this, but in less than a minute, with a half dozen plastic bricks, this woman has gutted me like a fish, and laid bare my neuroses.

But then something else occurs to me.

“Are you telling me I could just snap any two bricks together and call it a duck?”

“Sure,” she says.

“Or I could just hand you back a single brick and say, ‘Here you go, here’s my duck.’”

“Whatever you make, that’s your duck. That’s how you make a duck. And your duck is different from everyone else’s duck. Besides, these aren’t ducks, are they? They’re representations of a duck. They’re metaphors for a duck.”

I have to give Julia credit. She has an answer for everything. There’s no way to shake her faith in Lego. What’s more, she genuinely believes she is helping people. And maybe she is. A lot of people benefit from going to church, and I don’t begrudge them their beliefs.

Lego workshops are just one example of the nonsense that is creeping into the workplace. A lot of Agile trainers also do workshops with Play-Doh. In another game, called Six Thinking Hats, people put on different colored hats and role-play. In something called the Ball Point Game, teams compete to find the fastest way to pass tennis balls into a bucket, fire-brigade style. Do a search for “Ball Point Game” on YouTube and you can watch fully sentient adult human beings actually doing this at work.

Why now? Why has the workplace become a cross between a kindergarten and a Scientology assessment center? Why do our offices now have decor that looks like a Montessori preschool, with lots of bright, basic colors? Why does work now involve such infantilization?

I suspect it’s because companies are scared. We live in an age of chaos, a period when entire industries are collapsing. We’re headed into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and facing “transformation . . . unlike anything humankind has experienced before,” says Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum. Even the biggest, most powerful companies in the world are threatened with extinction. To survive, the Big Old Companies must evolve, and recode their DNA. That means replacing or transforming their people, which is why they’re digging into our brains and trying to rewire our circuits.

But what does all this psychological poking and prodding do to us? The problem isn’t just that these exercises are pointless and silly. For a lot of people this stuff can be really stressful. For older workers—say, people over fifty—these workshops compound the fear they already have about being pushed out of their jobs. But younger workers hate them, too. “It feels like you’ve joined a cult,” says a thirty-something software programmer whose department spent a day doing a Lego workshop. “The purpose seems to be to indoctrinate people to follow orders.”

You find yourself being gaslighted, immersed in the kind of shared psychosis and group delusion found in cults. You know these workshops are pointless, and that no one is going to be transformed by Lego. But to keep your job, you must play along. You must deliver a performance and convince management that you are flexible, adaptable, and open to change, the kind of engaged, dynamic worker who meets the needs of the new economy. Basically the company is conducting a large-scale experiment in organizational behavior. They’d like to test out some theories on you. So you all go into the box, and you are poked and prodded with various stimuli to see how you respond.

Your office has become a psychology laboratory, run by a bunch of quacks. You’re not a duck. You’re a lab rat.

This coffee date with Lego marked just a single stop on what would become my yearlong quest to figure out how work is changing, and, more important, why it is changing. The quest would take me to conferences in the United States and Europe, and to the headquarters of Steelcase, the office-furniture maker, where researchers are trying to figure out how to make offices that are more human-friendly. I’d talk to anthropologists and architects, psychologists and sociologists, management consultants, management coaches and management gurus, economists and engineers, doctors and diversity advocates, lawyers and venture capitalists, business professors and Agile coaches and Lego trainers, and one very frightened billionaire who fears that angry proles are going to launch a violent revolution against people like him.

Over the course of this journey I came 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.

In Part 2 of this book I explore four tech-related tendencies—what I call “The Four Factors”—that contribute to worker unhappiness. They are:

•   MONEY: We make a lot less today than we did a generation ago. The scale and scope of the robbery that has been carried out on workers in the West amount to trillions of dollars per year—and the heist has been helped along by technology. You’ll find the numbers in Chapter 6.

•   INSECURITY: We live in constant fear of losing our jobs. That’s because employers, especially in Silicon Valley, are adopting a “new compact” with workers. As I explain in Chapter 7, your job is no longer the start of a career, but just a short-term “tour of duty.”

•   CHANGE: New technologies, new methodologies, kooky new arrangements for where we work and how we work—we are overwhelmed by a workplace that never stays the same for very long. In Chapter 8, you’ll find research that shows that being exposed to persistent, low-grade change leads to depression and anxiety. The suffering is akin to what we experience after the death of a loved one or spending time in combat.

•   DEHUMANIZATION: Once upon a time we used technology, but today technology uses us. We’re hired by machines, managed by them, even fired by them. We’re monitored and measured, constantly surveilled. As I explain in Chapter 9, we are expected to become more like machines ourselves.

The good news is that in the course of my journey I also discovered people who are pushing back against these changes that are hurting workers and wreaking havoc on society. In Oakland, Chicago, New York, Boston, and elsewhere, entrepreneurs are forming companies that put the needs of employees first. These companies pay well, sometimes more than they have to. They provide good benefits, and promote work-life balance. Their goal is to provide good, sustainable jobs for as many people as possible. What a shock! You’ll find their stories in Part 3 of this book.

I wrote this book because I believe we have reached an important turning point, one where we must make an important decision. We need to decide what the future will look like. Do we want the world to be tech-centric, or human-centric? If we stick with the tech-centric path that Silicon Valley proposes, we will end up with more of what we have now—more misery, ever-worsening income inequality, and potentially catastrophic outcomes. Or we can turn back and embrace a new kind of capitalism. We can create a human-centric future, where employees are treated with dignity and respect, and workers get a fair share of the wealth that their labor is creating. Obviously I’m rooting for the latter.

Before we figure out how to get out of this mess, let’s examine how we got into it.

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 business—not 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 accoutrements—beanbag 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 “rock stars” and “ninjas” who were “changing the world” with our “superpowers.” We were told to “make one plus one equal three” and to devote ourselves, with almost religious zeal, to providing our customers with “delightion,” a made-up word that meant delighting customers by doing more than they expected. We weren’t 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 I’d 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 I’d been working before. Turnover was tremendous, especially in sales and telemarketing.

What’s 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 “high-performance culture” where only the best of the best could survive. Weirder still, when they fired someone they called it “graduation.” We would get an email saying how “awesome” it was that so-and-so was “graduating,” taking their “superpowers” on to a new adventure.

This really messed with people’s 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. I’d 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 “graduation.” By the time I left I felt almost relieved. I was, as they say in the startup world, “not a good culture fit.” 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 didn’t 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 “graduation,” 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 wasn’t 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 “aged out” 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 they’d 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 “self-directed.” They worked in flat organizations, with no hierarchy and no structure, which drove them nuts.

They worked for managers who were young, inexperienced, and undertrained—or 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 “culture,” and informed that their success hinged on their ability to fit in with the others, but that the others didn’t 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 “forced fun” 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, “You’re not excited enough.” 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 couldn’t stop reading the letters. Some described a kind of Stockholm syndrome, where they remained in abusive situations even though they knew they should leave. “I still have nightmares about the place, where I’m trying to prove I’m not an idiot—to idiots!” says a woman I’ll 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 (“arrogant and distant”) and my IQ (“appears to be very low”). My performance review contained this: “I can’t understand whether she doesn’t understand our culture or if she’s plain stupid.” I was told to improve my performance so that “people don’t have to write stuff like that.” 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 didn’t have the guts to quit. I just kept trying to make it work.

For some reason, Beatrix’s boss wouldn’t fire her. So they remained locked in a kind of psychological battle, with Beatrix trying to prove her worth and win her boss’s 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 world’s hippest companies. When they asked about work, she said it was fine and changed the subject. “It 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,” she says, referring to the traveling salesman in Kafka’s Metamorphosis who wakes up one day transformed into a giant cockroach.

Beatrix’s 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 person’s shirt.

“The person behind you would read the word on your shirt, and then expand on it,” Beatrix recalls. “So you’re 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.”

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 company’s 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: “I’m pretty sure I was the beta version of what happened with you,” he wrote.

A thirty-something marketing executive (whom I’ll 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 didn’t like him. In fact, nobody in the department liked him, she said. “Everybody who interviewed you thought you were arrogant and full of yourself,” she told him. “I thought the same thing.” She told Adrian they all had voted against hiring him, but the chief marketing officer had overruled them and hired Adrian anyway. “So just be aware that you’re starting out here in a very deep hole,” his manager told him. “You’re going to have to dig your way out of that hole and redeem yourself and win everybody over.” Adrian didn’t 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 didn’t 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. “All of my friends who work at tech companies are baseline unhappy,” Linda said. “Everyone has one foot out the door all the time.”

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, “because I was more stressed out than I’d ever been at any job, and it was affecting my family.” One of his equally stressed-out colleagues described the place as “PTSD-inducing.” 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 didn’t 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. They talked about “what they did to me there.” Instead of saying they quit or got fired, they talked about how they had “escaped.” They sounded like abuse survivors or people who have been rescued from cults.

Some had even fantasized, as I had during my time in startup land, that their companies weren’t companies at all, but rather were part of some long-term psychology experiment, a corporate version of the Milgram experiment at Yale or the Stanford prison experiment. The 1961 Milgram experiment studied obedience to authority figures. Psychologist Stanley Milgram ordered subjects to keep administering ever-stronger shocks to a “learner” on the other side of a wall, and many kept going, even when the learner shrieked, pleaded, and banged on the wall. In the 1971 Stanford prison experiment, twenty-four college students were put into a mock prison, with half role-playing as guards and half role-playing as prisoners, to see what happens when people are given power over others. Within six days the guards were inflicting such sickening psychological abuse on the prisoners that the experiment had to be cut short.

The idea that my place of employment might be a psychology experiment actually made sense to me. This would explain Fearless Friday, and the fact that nobody made fun of the guy with the teddy bear, and the way they pretended to feel good about “graduating” someone. Maybe some group of psychologists from MIT or Harvard wanted to study the limits of obedience and control. How much would people debase themselves, and how much dignity would they sacrifice, in order to continue receiving a paycheck? Would they make a duck out of Lego? Wear funny hats? Keep silent when a colleague gets fired for no reason? How high could you turn the dial? How much silliness and/or cruelty would employees tolerate before they complained or refused to participate? The unlikely juxtaposition of those two seemingly contradictory things—silliness and cruelty—has become a hallmark of the new-economy modern workplace.

That’s how I came to think of employees as lab rats. It turns out others had noticed the same thing. “Work is feeling more and more like a Skinner box” is how Gregory Berns, a neuropsychologist at Emory University, put it when he wrote a New York Times article about a study he had conducted about how fear impairs decision-making, which involved putting people into an MRI machine and zapping their feet with electric shocks. A Skinner box, invented in the 1930s by psychologist B. F. Skinner, is a cage in which rats learn that pulling certain levers gets them food and that flashing lights might signal they are about to get a shock through the floor.

A NEW KIND OF SUFFERING

When I wrote Disrupted I thought my experience had been unusual. But now here were all these people telling me they had experienced something similar. This was taking place not just at start-ups and not just in the tech industry, but in many industries and many countries around the world. Job satisfaction in Britain and Germany has been steadily eroding since the 1980s. In the United States, the percentage of workers who say they are satisfied with their jobs dropped from 61.1 percent in 1987 to 50.8 percent in 2016, according to the Conference Board, a research firm, which adds that it’s “very unlikely” that job satisfaction will ever return to 1980s levels. Worldwide, only 13 percent of workers feel “engaged”—meaning enthusiastic at work and committed to their companies—according to Gallup, which has tracked this since 2000. Things are better in the United States, where 32 percent of workers are engaged, but that still means that more than two-thirds of employees are just mailing it in. Worse, Gallup says roughly one in five workers is “actively disengaged,” which means they may even be toxic. They’re the ones who go around complaining to co-workers and even driving away customers.

In a 2014 survey by Monster, the job-seeking site, 61 percent of workers said work-related stress had made them physically sick, and nearly half said they had missed work because of it. Seven percent said they been hospitalized as a result of work-related stress. The anxiety, depression, and crazy-making that I had experienced at a start-up were becoming a new normal, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer, a business professor at Stanford. Citing his own research into worker unhappiness, Pfeffer declared that “What’s missing is a sense of humanity.” Companies might offer parties, snacks, and Ping-Pong, but are stripping away things lower on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, like job security. Companies “regularly permit if not encourage management practices that literally sicken and kill their employees,” Pfeffer claims in his 2017 book, Dying for a Paycheck. “Stress at work . . . just keeps getting worse for almost all jobs, resulting in an ever-higher physical and psychological toll.”

In writing my memoir, I realized I had stumbled onto a bigger story. I started reading studies about workplace stress and talking to academics in the field. In recent years these researchers have noted a sudden rise in workplace stress and have been trying to sound the alarm. Gary Rees, a professor at Portsmouth University in the UK, first became aware of the change at a conference in Paris, when he asked a CEO what problem most concerned him, and the CEO replied, “Suicide at work. Suicide caused by work.” Rees’s own research showed workers were facing so much stress that they were being pushed beyond their limits. “There are companies where suicide has now become an outcome of work,” Rees says. “Work has intensified. The expectations are higher. Companies don’t want to concern themselves with employee welfare. They just want to employ people who are resilient, and stress-averse, and who will just get on with it.”

In 2007, psychologists Mitchell Kusy and Elizabeth Holloway were stunned by what they found when they conducted a survey about workplace bullying and incivility. For one thing, they got a very high response rate (42 percent). But more significant was that many people, unprompted, added long notes about the abuse they had suffered. “We had seventy-two single-spaced pages,” Holloway recalls. “People don’t bother to do that unless they’re using it as a kind of catharsis. I’ve done research for thirty-eight years, and this was really remarkable.”

Equally remarkable was that 94 percent of respondents said they had worked with a toxic person. “That shocked us,” Kusy says. “We thought it would be maybe 50 percent. We were really surprised at how pervasive this is and by how little organizations knew about how to handle the problem. If something affects 94 percent of the population you would think there would be systems to deal with it. But there weren’t.” They wrote up their results in a book, Toxic Workplace! Managing Toxic Personalities and Their Systems of Power.