Lab rats
Examines how the ideas of Silicon Valley and its "new oligarchs" have changed work culture, making employees subject to constant change, dehumanizing technologies, and even health risks, and discusses how to restore the social contract between employers and employees.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
8mentions
5people
2018–2023years
50% recommend38% neutral13% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I’d like to recommend Dan Lyons’ Lab Rats which dissects American corporate culture and its negative influence on employees.
Dan Lyons wrote the fake Steve Jobs blog, Disrupted, and was one of the writers on Silicon Valley.
- You’ll love Lab Rats by Dan Lyons. Highly recommended.
- I highly highly recommend Lab Rats by Dan Lyons. Dissects the forces behind the current state of the workforce in the US.
Very well written and exposes the brutality and destruction resulting from focusing on short term profit at any cost.
- Maybe “So I decide to start hiring prioritizing these characteristics along with individual ability?”
As for capitalism and productivity I highly recommend Dan Lyons’ Lab Rats exposing the complete chaos that human management is in.
People dynamics are complex and well, dynamic. Changes and rules carry potential for difficult to predict outcomes.
Humans are not hens and capitalism has turned out to be extremely unproductive in many situations requiring collaboration — who would’ve thought that putting short term self interest above everything else is not the best of ideas.
- Lyons has also made a "career" out of hating on technology and SV in general. Besides writing for the TV show, he's also written several books about why technology and SV really, really suck and are to blame for practically everything wrong in the world (e.g. Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us). Oddly, he did actually try to work at a high-tech startup on the east coast, and when he was booted out for incompetence, he wrote a book about why startups are just such bullshit, man. I have personally spoken to him, by sheer coincidence and long before any of this came to pass, and he was very interested in working at a startup someday, although he was writing for Forbes at the time. In other words, if you want my take, dude has serious envy and has spent years trying to exorcise it by punishing everyone who has what he covets.
- > How come this statement is simply reversed nowadays AND people don't make an effort to change it.
They do.
https://www.kaporcapital.com/ https://socialenterpriseinstitute.co/ https://bcorporation.net/
In the "Lab rats"[1] Dan Lyons tried to give a perspective on the "new kind of capitalism" after he gave a perspective on the current state of the Silicon Valley capitalism. Links above are from his book.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lab-Rats-Silicon-Valley-Miserable/dp/...
