Lab Rats by Dan Lyons and Seasonal Associate by Heike Geissler review – powerless at work

Employees are exploited and humiliated in the new precarious world of work. How to make a change?

A few years ago, Dan Lyons, a former technology journalist with Newsweek, endured an unhappy stint with a software startup called HubSpot. Initially dazzled by the company’s youthful vibe – all ping-pong tables and beanbags – he quickly became disillusioned. “Beneath their bubbly exteriors,” he recalls, “many people were anxious, frightened, unhappy, and massively stressed out.” He wrote a bestselling book about that experience, Disrupted: My Misadventures in the Start-Up Bubble (2016). In Lab Rats, Lyons warns that the oppressive working culture he witnessed in the tech industry is being rolled out to other businesses, including some in the public sector, thanks to the efforts of a coterie of high-end management consultants. These are a truly strange breed, combining ludicrous pomposity with an almost psychopathic earnestness. Lyons frequently refers to them as “mad” or “nutty”.

Many venture capital-funded tech startups operate a business model premised on high staff turnover, wherein, he writes: “Employees can (and should) be underpaid, overworked, exhausted and then discarded.” The aim is to maximise the value of the company in the short term, with a view to cashing out when it is sold at an IPO.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2T8fnX4

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