Greed in tech culture celebrates overwork, exhaustion, and stress and it’s spreading into work places everywhere, says a tech journalist and writer for HBO comedy Silicon Valley.
Dan Lyons is the author of a new book called Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us and joined Afternoons to discuss how it happened and how we can claim our lives back.
The Conjoined Triangles of Success, from HBO comedy Silicon Valley. Photo: HBO
He says open office plans, silly team bonding games, and the never-ending quest for innovation have ruined workplaces and companies need to ditch high paid management consultants and find a way to make profit and happy workers co-exist. He starts the book by talking about Lego.
“I was looking around for examples of the weirdest things that companies now do at work. We’re in this period of experimentation where I think companies are trying to figure out how to create a new kind of worker. The craziest thing I heard about was Lego workshops. At first, I actually I thought it was a hoax - but it’s very real.”
Lyons went in and got a one-on-one Lego workshop with a certified Lego Serious Play trainer.
“This is a huge movement that is all around the world. It’s used by giant companies like Google and Johnson & Johnson… they’re trying to figure out how you think, and you figure out how you think, and you learn about yourself and then you can be a better employee or something.”
But Lyons says he did end up learning something about himself in doing the Lego workshop. At one point he was asked to make a duck in 30 seconds out of six pieces of Lego.
“I sat there and fiddled with them. I’m terrible with things like rubix cubes and anything sort of visual and I just could not figure out how to use all six pieces. I came up with a four-piece duck that maybe had its head on sideways and I said, ‘look I’m sorry I just can’t figure out how to use all six’ and she said, ‘who said you had to use all of them?'
“In a way it was revelatory because I was afraid of failing. I thought, for sure, I’d be exposed as a fraud, that I’d be stupid, that it was an IQ test and I’d get a low score, so it did kind of reveal something to me about how I behave at work. That was the good part. The bad part was I thought I don’t know if I’d want to do this for a day with a group of other people and in front of all my co-workers."
He says it’s like a form of therapy but you’re sharing with the people you work for rather than a healthcare professional.
“If you’re an older worker like I would be, this exercise, this day, would not be a fun day, it would be a terrifying day thinking ‘I’m signing my death warrant here, they’re going to figure out I’m old and I don’t get it, I’m going to lose my job’. And also, I began to wonder, when did we decide that it was OK for our employer to peer into our brain.”
He says personality tests shouldn’t have any bearing on our ability to do a job and modern workplaces are becoming a cross between a frat house, a kindergarten and a Scientology Assessment Centre.
“We’re in this dawn of this ‘fourth industrial revolution’ and somehow companies have got the idea that everything they’ve done for the past 100 years, the way companies have organised themselves, all of it is obsolete, it doesn’t make sense anymore, the world has changed, and work has to change too.
“There is some truth to that, but the bad part is they don’t know what does work and, so, companies are engaged in these ongoing experiments essentially using us, human beings, employees, as the lab rats where they try one thing and they try another, and they try to make us ‘agile’ and ‘lean’ and ‘nimble’ and ‘adaptable’. There are a zillion of these new theories flying around and companies are adopting one or more of them and it’s exhausting for employees to be put through this.”
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Photo: AFP
The other, more cynical take on it, is that companies are dangling shiny stuff at employees like ping pong, free beer, and wellness workshops while they pick the pockets of their workers and remove healthcare benefits and retirement plans.
“They’re taking away things that really do matter while they’re distracting us with this goofiness over on the side that’s either annoying or fun. It’s like a magic trick, you distract over here while you steal from the pocket over here.”
He says the four things that have turned us into lab rats are money, change, insecurity, and dehumanisation.
Money has slowly evaporated for workers in the United States who earn, on average, far less than what they were making a generation ago. The change and insecurity are the ways work places are constantly evolving while job security is basically a thing of the past, making workers fearful and anxious. The dehumanisation, Lyons says, is perhaps the most interesting part.
Peter Thiel, one of the venture capitalists billionaires who's chosen New Zealand as a place to retreat. Photo: AFP
“When you go to work now it feels like you’re not using the technology, the technology is using you. The technology is actually what’s central to the company and you are just an adjunct to that, you just come in and plug into the machine and unplug at the end of the day and your success depends on how well you can do that, how good of a widget you are. It’s very dehumanising.”
To illustrate the idea of dehumanisation in the workforce, he points to the Amazon offices where workers refer to themselves as “Amabots” and are constantly monitored and measured by a ‘performance optimisation algorithm’. He says the goal at Amazon is to fit into the algorithm as well as you can.
Another example of change and dehumanisation is the move to open offices which studies and surveys have shown nobody likes and can have a negative health impact on workers.
“Companies know that, they know that people hate these things and they make up all this guff about why they’re doing like a ‘new agile style of working that relies on collaboration, so we need everybody packed into these little pens and you can collaborate.’ They know that’s a lie.”
Lyons says he interviewed a guy who made a career out of designing and selling open office plans to companies who told him it’s really about how many people you can fit per square foot, not fostering collaboration.
He says studies have shown that people who work in open offices have a low-grade chronic stress running through their brains the whole time they’re at work.
“In theory, it has very negative effects on people over time. It affects your psychological wellbeing, even your physical wellbeing and people feel powerless to stop it.
“You don’t have day-to-day control or agency over your life at work anymore, and that’s very depressing in the long term.”
Pitchforks and fortified bunkers
He says the elevation of technology gurus and CEOs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is a recent phenomenon and many of them tend to not have great people skills or empathy for others which makes them “very dangerous” examples to follow. Worse still are the people who fund them.
“There’s another level below that of people who are not really well-known but are actually incredibly powerful in Silicon Valley and those are venture capitalists who just invest in companies like Uber and Lyft and they build these so-called ‘unicorn companies’ and pump hundreds of millions of dollars into them, and they are ruthless. They really do not care about employees and, in fact, they see every dollar that’s given to employees as a dollar they won’t get in terms of their return, so they’re really driving this idea that workers should get as little as possible.
“For example, in the gig economy, companies like Uber and Lyft, are really not doing right by their drivers; they won’t make them employees, they won’t give them benefits, and that’s partly because the venture capitalists say ‘we won’t invest in your company unless you do that, unless you force all these people to be contract workers with no rights and low pay, then we won’t invest in you’.”
One of the people Lyons interviewed was Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist and early investor in Amazon who tried to encourage Bezos to pay his workers more.
In June, 2014 Hanauer wrote an op-ed for Politico magazine where he warned that pitchforks were coming for people like him if they did not act to address rising inequality.
“He’s an amazing guy. He’s the only one I found who is a billionaire who’s scared to death. He thinks this is leading to revolution, essentially civil war. This level of income inequality that Silicon Valley has created will end really badly for the Plutocrats, for the wealthy. He thinks it can only end in a totalitarian state or revolution. He thinks it’s going to get really, really bad.
“The irony is that it could also be really easily fixed if wealthy oligarchs would just spend some money to fix the problems they themselves have created.”
It has a startlingly relevance for New Zealand. If the industry falls apart and the pitchforks do come for them as Hanauer suggests, many of the Silicon Valley billionaires plan to retreat here.
“That’s their plan instead of spending a few billion dollars to fix these problems or address them fundamentally, to just build an escape in New Zealand. I guess they think that will be the one safe place on Earth.
“It’s crazy that they would rather escape and live in a fortified bunker than just fix the world.”
We are all tech companies now
Despite the glaring problems associated with Silicon Valley and its treatment of workers, the model is being emulated across almost every other sector. Even old companies that have been around for over 100 years talk about becoming “start-ups” and technology firms.
“They will actually set up labs in Silicon Valley where, I guess, they think the magic is in the water or the air.”
There’s also a less expensive version where company executives and workers are sent on Silicon Valley “safaris” where they drive around the area in a van visiting start-ups.
“They look at these young kids like they’re animals in a zoo and ask, ‘how do you have meetings? How do you do this?’ and then go back to the mothership of their own company and try to spread that start-up way of thinking.”
He says there are some technology companies that are doing well by their employees, but it’s not a disruptive initiative, it’s an old-fashioned one – and they start by making a profit.
“The big problem with the new economy and the Silicon Valley unicorn companies is that very few of them have actually turned a profit. They operate at a loss for 10-15 years and they lose millions and millions of dollars. They’re not building sustainable companies.
"The first rule of the new good guy is make a profit. That allows you to do the second thing which is take care of your employees, pay them well, invest in them, invest in their training and their ability to rise in the ranks. Don’t overwork them. Don’t burn them out."
