Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

Our brains are wired to deal with stress that is intense but brief, like escaping from a predator or fleeing from a burning building. We’re not wired to handle chronic, ongoing stress, even if it is relatively mild.

We’ve lost our way” is how another manifesto author, Andrew Hunt, put it in a 2015 essay titled “The Failure of Agile.” Hunt tells me the word agile has become “meaningless at best,” having been hijacked by “scads of vocal agile zealots” who had no idea what they were talking about. Agile has split into various camps and methodologies, with names like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). The worst flavor, Hunt tells me, is Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, which he and some other original manifesto authors jokingly call Shitty Agile for Enterprise. “It’s a disaster,” Hunt tells me. “I have a few consultant friends who are making big bucks cleaning up failed SAFe implementations.” SAFe is the hellspawn brainchild of a company called Scaled Agile Inc., a bunch of mad scientists whose approach consists of a nightmare world of rules and charts and configurations. SAFe itself comes in multiple configurations, which you can find on the Scaled Agile website. Each one is an abomination of corporate complexity and Rube Goldberg-esque interdependencies.

a warning to young entrepreneurs: take money from a venture capitalist, and you’ll end up working for some smug, sarcastic, know-it-all prick like this guy, who will constantly tell you that you’re not working hard enough while he spends his days getting into arguments on Twitter.

...they sell dollar bills for seventy-five cents and take credit for how fast they’re growing.

You can’t build companies without them. But most venture capitalists seem to view employees as their adversaries.

Hoffman estimated that “fifty-plus percent” of Valley billionaires had built some kind of doomsday hideout.

Most start-ups are terribly managed, half-assed outfits run by buffoons and bozos and frat boys, and funded by amoral investors who are only hoping to flip the company into the public markets and make a quick buck. They have no operations expertise, no special insight into organizational behavior.

The problem is that a venture capitalist writing a book about how companies should treat employees is like Ted Bundy offering dating advice to young women.

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.

The company’s largest group is customer support, with sixteen people handling calls from customers. But everybody in the company has to work on the support desk. Typically they will put in one day every six weeks, “so everyone can hear directly from customers and understand the pain points, what frustrates or delights customers,” Fried says.

That’s partly because Fried and Hansson hate meetings. Fried believes collaboration often turns into “over-collaboration,” and that most of it is bullshit anyway. He says brainstorming “is wildly overrated. There are tech companies where you have this weird thing and people are just brainstorming all the time. We brainstorm once a year, and then we spend the rest of the year doing it.

We can’t just fix the workplace. We need to fix capitalism itself—and not just by making a few small tweaks at the edges. The whole system needs a major, fundamental reboot.

Young guys moving west after college no longer hope to become the next Steve Jobs, they want to become the next Mark Andreassen. The Valley has become a Casino where the VCS and Angel Investprs blindly bumping money into every slot machine hoping to hit the Jackpot. The difference is that the bunter who gets lucky on a slot machine doesn’t walk away convinced he is a Genius. Instead of writing about tech, the industry‘s bloggers now write about venture deals and who raised how much at what valuation. The Valley has become obsessed with money, and there is a lot of it around.

Countless studies show that these nightmarish hellholes called “open offices” destroy productivity and make people miserable. Yet companies keep inflicting them on us, coyly pretending that the goal is to “foster collaboration,” when really it is to squeeze pennies out of overhead by packing more people into fewer square feet of floor space.

Real wages (adjusted for inflation) have been flat or down for decades. Millennials earn 20 percent less than their parents did at the same stage of their lives, according to a 2017 study by Young Invincibles, an advocacy group.