Disrupted
A memoir of life inside the tech bubble by a writer and co-producer for "Silicon Valley" describes how, after losing his magazine writing job, he took a position with a tech company rife with cultish millennials, absent bosses, and venture-capital amenities.
Stats for nerds
13recommend
38mentions
28people
2016–2023years
50% recommend42% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For what? I think everyone that programs should read Tracy Kiddars Soul of a New Machine, Ries&Trout The 22 immutable laws of marketing,
My #3 is way lower, which follows one of the 22 laws, but probably Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons.
Those are three enjoyable books that are pretty easy to read and have pretty valuable lessons in them that can take quite a long time to truly appreciate.
The task of a programmer is to create efficient and elegant machines based on thoughts by using imagination. Human creations by human hands, programming is a social product. Algorithms and data structures are actually the more shallow lesson. Creating something that finds place in the world is the true challenge.
- I recommend reading “Disrupted” by Dan Lyons and Broken by Design by Mike Monteiro.
Will help you preserve your sanity.
- Please read Dan Lyons’ book Disrupted about what life is like working for a cult-y startup and seeing the insanity while having to wait for your options to vest.
The chapter on the bozos is worth the cost of the book alone.
- I recommend “Disrupted” by Dan Lyons - about his time at Hubspot, about the unicorn phenomenon and the cultish culture of tech startups.
- I think you’ll appreciate Dan Lyons’ book Disrupted and the 2021 WeWork documentary.
- oh also, disrupted by dan lyons, although not as great, is good fun about the financialization and bullshit of modern tech life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disrupted:_My_Misadventure_in_...
For a 90s take on that theme, try this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_Led_by_Bill_Gates
It's worth quoting how microsoft responded to some groundbreaking technology from Go computing by Microsoft putting together a fabricated circus claiming they had matched the technology:
next up on that stack for me to read are Barbara Garson's The Electronic Sweatshop and Robert Cringley's Accidental Empires.Eller's group kluged up this demo for videotape that showed how edit in place would work. He launched Excel with a chart in it. Then he launched Word with the chart cut from the Excel program. The smaller Excel window was hiding in the background, and the Word window was bigger so the audience couldn't see Excel. Eller drew a gesture on the chart sitting in Word, which called Excel to the top. As long as Excel was in the right place, it came right up on top of where Word was, and it didn't look like anything had moved. It looked like Word had just popped up the Excel menus right into the middle of the Word documents so it could be edited. Eller made the changes in Excel and closed it. He hooked up a software instruction that told Excel to move to the background and disappear behind Word. Then it looked like he was working again in Word with the proper Excel document embedded in it. It looked great on the tape, but it was total bull, pure smoke and mirrors, the apotheosis of vaporware. There was no linking or embedding occurring. Eller was simply pulling one application to the front of the other one. At the company meeting, executive Mike Maples stepped up to the podium. "Okay, here's this other thing we're working on," Maples said. "Here I have my document, and I have my tablet here." He held the pen up and waved it. "Now I can go into my Word document here, and I can write." While Maples was talking, charts and images flashed on the screen, and everybody thought he was actually writing on the pen tablet as he spoke at the podium. In actuality, he was just waving his pencil over blank paper while the videotape ran.
