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3.84 AVERAGE
3.84 AVERAGE
Fascinating look into the world of tech companies and some of the incredibly unethical practices that they use in hiring (and firing). Quite enjoyed this book.
Fantastic book. I wouldn't have guessed that I'd have trouble putting down a book about working for a marketing startup, but Dan's experiences were similar to my own, as an older person working with millennials. And the culture he describes is fascinating. A great read. I recommend it to anyone in marketing.
Very entertaining book, funny and tragic at the same time. An antropologic research with rather depressing outcomes, visible also in some ratings here.
Hilarious at times, but also a bit repetitive. Obviously Lyons had to stretch his material. His focus on ageism is an important and necessary message.
POWERFUL BOOMER ENERGY
Does Hubspot suck? Yeah, seems like it. But after reading this book, gotta say, the author sucks more.
I don't think the author ever thought about discrimination or hostile workplaces until he was personally affected by them. By his own account, he actively contributes to a hostile workplace. And despite being told time and time again that he's being a jerk, he walks away thinking everyone else is the problem.
This is basically his author picture:
For example...
He talks about wanting to strangle certain types of people at work, and when everyone else in the meeting isn't on board, he pouts about how journalists would jump in with ways to maim the annoying type of person. WTF.
He makes a huge point about how a lot of his coworkers are young women fresh out of college. Then has a conversation with a coworker around his age about how having a 19 year old au pair in his home was bad news, "even though nothing happened." A couple of the young women complain to management that this conversation makes them uncomfortable. The complaint is brought back to the author (rightfully so). And the author STOPS SPEAKING TO THEM. He doesn't understand why this would make them uncomfortable. So I'm going to spell it out for him:
Your coworkers are around the same age as the au pair. They work with you. The au pair was working for you. And despite her being there to work, you couldn't stop sexualizing her or even see her as a human being. Put your reading glasses on and connect the dots.
Does Hubspot suck? Yeah, seems like it. But after reading this book, gotta say, the author sucks more.
I don't think the author ever thought about discrimination or hostile workplaces until he was personally affected by them. By his own account, he actively contributes to a hostile workplace. And despite being told time and time again that he's being a jerk, he walks away thinking everyone else is the problem.
This is basically his author picture:
For example...
Spoiler
He talks about wanting to strangle certain types of people at work, and when everyone else in the meeting isn't on board, he pouts about how journalists would jump in with ways to maim the annoying type of person. WTF.
He makes a huge point about how a lot of his coworkers are young women fresh out of college. Then has a conversation with a coworker around his age about how having a 19 year old au pair in his home was bad news, "even though nothing happened." A couple of the young women complain to management that this conversation makes them uncomfortable. The complaint is brought back to the author (rightfully so). And the author STOPS SPEAKING TO THEM. He doesn't understand why this would make them uncomfortable. So I'm going to spell it out for him:
Your coworkers are around the same age as the au pair. They work with you. The au pair was working for you. And despite her being there to work, you couldn't stop sexualizing her or even see her as a human being. Put your reading glasses on and connect the dots.
Dan Lyons, ego bruised and career sidelined by an unexpected layoff from his job as a technology journalist for Newsweek, makes a pivot that seems like a sensible idea at the time: he joins the startup world and becomes a marketer for hot young marketing automation firm, HubSpot. This book is a memoir of that startup adventure. It stirred a ton of thoughts and conflicting reactions for me, began many conversations and taught me a bit of new stuff about startups and venture capital. It also made me cringe and grin with schadenfreude. Issues aside, though, it’s a worthwhile read with a lot to say.
Brisk, cynical and often bitingly funny - just as you might expect from the author behind FakeSteveJobs - the book starts as a bitterly comic fish out of water story about a fifty-something man trying to fit in at a company he doesn't understand: He seems constantly gobsmacked by the wacky energy of his Millennial coworkers, the lack of organization and structure to his days, the insistence of young people on using technology like smartphones and Google calendars to schedule even a five-minute chat, and of course things like beer at work, arts and crafts breaks on "Fearless Friday," the nap room and the foosball tables.
Every startup workplace cliche is addressed in a half-silly, half-wondering tone, and many observations come dripping with fuddy-duddy condescension. Not so funny is the authors apparent expectation that, even though he knows nothing about tech, sales or marketing, he should be treated like a visiting dignitary because of his experience and age. For example, he expresses shock and horror upon discovering that a much younger person will be his superior, even though he just met the guy and knows nothing about how capable he might be. For a book that aims to champion on oft-mistreated group - older workers - it seems ironic that its methods include baselessly insulting young people just for being young.
Hypocrisies like that add up fast. There's also a pervasive dismissive sexist undertone to nearly every description of interactions with female employees (every female seems to be chirpy, peppy, cheerleader-like, and of course, incompetent). This distractingly takes away from the social justice angle this book is going for on behalf of modern workers. Is Lyons oblivious to this? I'd like to think he is too smart for that, but I think he might just be that clueless, as a white dude who never faced any discrimination before his stint as the “old guy” in a young office.
About halfway through, Lyons cuts through the banter to drop some old school knowledge, and this is where things get really good. Making use of his considerable background as a serious journalist, he sketches a recap of the last tech bubble, and discusses something that’s new this time around - the ways in which the VC-fueled startup climate allows and encourages founders and investors to extract billions of dollars from the market while never actually creating profitable businesses. He’s right to point out the incentives for startup founders and successful investors to make maximum returns on their money by creating massive hype machines for products that barely even exist while investing little in their employees and using cult-like internal branding to manipulate young and inexperienced people hungry for meaningful work into working twice as hard for half as much. It’s pretty scary when you think about it.
As a career marketer currently working at a technology startup, I'm intimately familiar with Hubspot, digital marketing, inbound marketing methods and how software sales sausage is made. This book definitely resonates. (Also as a current resident of San Francisco, the description of Dreamforce almost made me pee my pants with laughter.) Frankly, it resonates for me both in the ways that Lyons clearly wants it to, and in other ways I'm sure he did not intend. I'm well-acquainted, for example, with the casual condescending dismissal that young female executives receive from older white dudes like him. I'm also familiar with the way us young female marketing and PR people get treated: like we are stupid and like our jobs are fluff. If we are enthusiastic and passionate, we're "peppy cheerleaders" and guess what happens if we are less enthusiastic? Gosh, then we're on the receiving end of men telling us to smile. Could it be that Lyons thinks ageism is the biggest workplace issue in tech simply because it's the only kind of discrimination he has ever personally faced. Sounds like the writers rooms in Hollywood (notoriously hostile places for female writers) are super comfortable for him.
Interestingly, Lyons seems insistent on shooting down anyone’s enthusiasm for their work, which seemed strange to me. Could be because I’m a brainwashed Millennial, but I just don’t believe that every young marketer, salesperson or startup employee is a deluded bozo who doesn't know what they're doing, nor are all mentions of meaning or passion at work simply bullshit. Look: Survey after survey identifies meaning, connection and mission as critical components to a satisfying job and career. Modern workers really do want to love their jobs, and want to engage passionately in goals larger than just making TPS reports.
If the current startup "revolution" (with all its silly foosball tables and happy hour beer pong and branded company t-shirts etc.) opens up authentic conversation about how to engage employees and create happier workplaces, I think that's a wonderful thing. The onus is on every employee to educate themselves, learn their legal rights, and direct their own career. I don't see how that's bad, or even very new and different. If we are to shed the bad parts of the old, paternalistic model of work (and let's face it, we already have, as Reed Hoffman discusses in detail in his own book about work, The Alliance), we need to take responsibility for our own careers. Lyons both celebrates and bemoans this. I can see how it might suck to suddenly need to change careers and make a surprise pivot at age 51 with a family to feed. But the honest truth is that many people have had to do that for a long time; the workplace wasn't some kind of Disneyland of job security 50 years ago, either. One premise of Disrupted is that tech companies today treat their employees in ways that would be "unthinkably" cruel and callous as recently as the 1990s, the last bubble. I'm just not convinced that's the case. Microsoft may have given generous medical benefits to workers and created thousands of millionaires. But weren’t they the exception, not the rule? Is Lyons yearning for a past that really only applied to a few?
The difference today, at least in the tech industry, is an increased level of transparency around the mechanics of work, and an elevated level of respect for an individual employees' ability to act as a free agent. Given the research I've seen in the last few years about the current hiring crisis - skilled workers are in incredibly high demand and large organizations are most worried about how to attract and retain top talent, not how best to fire them - it’s clear that free agency does benefit the most skilled workers. Unfortunately for many of us, it also benefits those who have lucked in to privileges like being young, male and white.
So how do we fix this? What do we do with the rest of them, those workers who aren't the youngest, the luckiest, the top of their class at Harvard? Lyons' point is that there are a lot of them, those regular people, and that they are the poor saps blindly drinking the Koolaid, pulling ridiculous hours for unnecessary "hackathons"...and they are the ones left holding the bag of empty stock options after investors cash out, leaving them with nothing.
Brisk, cynical and often bitingly funny - just as you might expect from the author behind FakeSteveJobs - the book starts as a bitterly comic fish out of water story about a fifty-something man trying to fit in at a company he doesn't understand: He seems constantly gobsmacked by the wacky energy of his Millennial coworkers, the lack of organization and structure to his days, the insistence of young people on using technology like smartphones and Google calendars to schedule even a five-minute chat, and of course things like beer at work, arts and crafts breaks on "Fearless Friday," the nap room and the foosball tables.
Every startup workplace cliche is addressed in a half-silly, half-wondering tone, and many observations come dripping with fuddy-duddy condescension. Not so funny is the authors apparent expectation that, even though he knows nothing about tech, sales or marketing, he should be treated like a visiting dignitary because of his experience and age. For example, he expresses shock and horror upon discovering that a much younger person will be his superior, even though he just met the guy and knows nothing about how capable he might be. For a book that aims to champion on oft-mistreated group - older workers - it seems ironic that its methods include baselessly insulting young people just for being young.
Hypocrisies like that add up fast. There's also a pervasive dismissive sexist undertone to nearly every description of interactions with female employees (every female seems to be chirpy, peppy, cheerleader-like, and of course, incompetent). This distractingly takes away from the social justice angle this book is going for on behalf of modern workers. Is Lyons oblivious to this? I'd like to think he is too smart for that, but I think he might just be that clueless, as a white dude who never faced any discrimination before his stint as the “old guy” in a young office.
About halfway through, Lyons cuts through the banter to drop some old school knowledge, and this is where things get really good. Making use of his considerable background as a serious journalist, he sketches a recap of the last tech bubble, and discusses something that’s new this time around - the ways in which the VC-fueled startup climate allows and encourages founders and investors to extract billions of dollars from the market while never actually creating profitable businesses. He’s right to point out the incentives for startup founders and successful investors to make maximum returns on their money by creating massive hype machines for products that barely even exist while investing little in their employees and using cult-like internal branding to manipulate young and inexperienced people hungry for meaningful work into working twice as hard for half as much. It’s pretty scary when you think about it.
As a career marketer currently working at a technology startup, I'm intimately familiar with Hubspot, digital marketing, inbound marketing methods and how software sales sausage is made. This book definitely resonates. (Also as a current resident of San Francisco, the description of Dreamforce almost made me pee my pants with laughter.) Frankly, it resonates for me both in the ways that Lyons clearly wants it to, and in other ways I'm sure he did not intend. I'm well-acquainted, for example, with the casual condescending dismissal that young female executives receive from older white dudes like him. I'm also familiar with the way us young female marketing and PR people get treated: like we are stupid and like our jobs are fluff. If we are enthusiastic and passionate, we're "peppy cheerleaders" and guess what happens if we are less enthusiastic? Gosh, then we're on the receiving end of men telling us to smile. Could it be that Lyons thinks ageism is the biggest workplace issue in tech simply because it's the only kind of discrimination he has ever personally faced. Sounds like the writers rooms in Hollywood (notoriously hostile places for female writers) are super comfortable for him.
Interestingly, Lyons seems insistent on shooting down anyone’s enthusiasm for their work, which seemed strange to me. Could be because I’m a brainwashed Millennial, but I just don’t believe that every young marketer, salesperson or startup employee is a deluded bozo who doesn't know what they're doing, nor are all mentions of meaning or passion at work simply bullshit. Look: Survey after survey identifies meaning, connection and mission as critical components to a satisfying job and career. Modern workers really do want to love their jobs, and want to engage passionately in goals larger than just making TPS reports.
If the current startup "revolution" (with all its silly foosball tables and happy hour beer pong and branded company t-shirts etc.) opens up authentic conversation about how to engage employees and create happier workplaces, I think that's a wonderful thing. The onus is on every employee to educate themselves, learn their legal rights, and direct their own career. I don't see how that's bad, or even very new and different. If we are to shed the bad parts of the old, paternalistic model of work (and let's face it, we already have, as Reed Hoffman discusses in detail in his own book about work, The Alliance), we need to take responsibility for our own careers. Lyons both celebrates and bemoans this. I can see how it might suck to suddenly need to change careers and make a surprise pivot at age 51 with a family to feed. But the honest truth is that many people have had to do that for a long time; the workplace wasn't some kind of Disneyland of job security 50 years ago, either. One premise of Disrupted is that tech companies today treat their employees in ways that would be "unthinkably" cruel and callous as recently as the 1990s, the last bubble. I'm just not convinced that's the case. Microsoft may have given generous medical benefits to workers and created thousands of millionaires. But weren’t they the exception, not the rule? Is Lyons yearning for a past that really only applied to a few?
The difference today, at least in the tech industry, is an increased level of transparency around the mechanics of work, and an elevated level of respect for an individual employees' ability to act as a free agent. Given the research I've seen in the last few years about the current hiring crisis - skilled workers are in incredibly high demand and large organizations are most worried about how to attract and retain top talent, not how best to fire them - it’s clear that free agency does benefit the most skilled workers. Unfortunately for many of us, it also benefits those who have lucked in to privileges like being young, male and white.
So how do we fix this? What do we do with the rest of them, those workers who aren't the youngest, the luckiest, the top of their class at Harvard? Lyons' point is that there are a lot of them, those regular people, and that they are the poor saps blindly drinking the Koolaid, pulling ridiculous hours for unnecessary "hackathons"...and they are the ones left holding the bag of empty stock options after investors cash out, leaving them with nothing.
Hilarious, enlightening and pretty terrifying at times.
Awful book, awful author, awful company. See most liked review of this book by Laura for all of my thoughts on this book.
A very enjoyable, slightly scary memoir of some the worst aspects of the Kool-Aid-soaked tech industry. The author, a mid-50s writer and journalist, went to work at a pre-IPO marketing-tech company, and got to experience ageism, dishonesty, self-defeating office politics, and rampant, pervasive incompetence. And they forgot to make him sign a non-disparagement agreement before he started.