Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by hannahstohelit
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons
funny
medium-paced
2.5
I'm giving this 2.5 stars for being well written and also for being exactly what it says on the tin. That said, Dan Lyons does himself no favors in this book. (Please note- I'm writing this review with the assumption that everything that he mentions happening in it, including his reactions to things, happened as he said it did. I don't believe that's true for reasons I'll articulate below, but he says it's all true, so...)
You can argue that he knows this- he makes some half-assed attempts to show himself being somewhat out of touch having come from news organizations, which are apparently a different breed of workplace with a very different culture, as well as being older and not hip with the youth or whatever- not just from startups but from pretty much anywhere else. It's really ironic that he writes self-righteous chapters about how startups have a known culture of sexual harassment and partying while also calling his own workplace a "kindergarten" where they can't take his jokes about him wanting to kill people who annoy him or dude-conversations about teenage au pairs (let's just say I do not trust his description of that conversation). I'm so glad for him he ends up in a REAL GROWNUP workplace like... a HBO writers room where they're all allowed to make sex jokes all the time, encouraged to even, unlike the horrible startup where he has to actually act like a competent adult and not offend people?
The thing is, there are definitely some real oddities as he describes his workplace. He was indeed put into a strange and I'm sure personally challenging situation, and some stuff was genuinely weird (like "graduation"- genuinely nuts). At the same time, some of what he was decrying is not just what the current workplace is like, but what workplaces have been like for a long time. He describes some work scenes as "like Office Space," but Office Space wasn't about a startup, it was about a normal old-timey office full of disaffected employees. He handwaves about a past where companies were loyal to employees and employees were loyal back, while also seems shocked that a person can be unceremoniously fired- something that, post-2008, seems like an insane thing (and especially seems nuts coming after HE HIMSELF WAS UNCEREMONIOUSLY FIRED at the beginning of the book!). It's obviously awful from a human lens, but why on earth does he write about it as shocking? Pretty much everyone I know who was ever fired by having HR come to their desk or their key card deactivated was working in normal corporate America, not at a startup.
There are so many places where he doesn't seem to be able to differentiate the things that make his office objectively weird (whether as a startup or otherwise) or the things that make it... a corporate office. He asks friends for reality checks on whether something is normal, but they're always high-powered friends who probably haven't been in the corporate rank and file themselves in years. He arguably has the right to write a FB post blasting his CEO for his hundred thousand followers, but the fact that he's so convinced that everyone is overreacting is bizarre to anyone who has been in a corporate environment of literally any kind. He starts on a whole rant to younger colleagues about how they shouldn't like the candy wall and don't they wish they had more money instead? To believe him, they all stared back at him dumbly like they enjoyed being paid in candy and couldn't understand the appeal of cash- when in fact they made the sensible point that nobody was offering them more money in exchange for less candy, so...
I'd also add- while "Trotsky" definitely comes across as somewhat deranged, I have to say that by Lyons's own account, Trotsky read him like a large print book. The whiff of casual misogyny that permeates the book (even as Lyons spends pages talking about lack of diversity) is honestly overbearing, and the fact that Trotsky can get Lyons to believe pretty much anything as long as he blames one of the awful vapid mediocre women for it is actually masterful. Well done, dude (though less well done on the probably-illegal surveillance).
This book almost makes me mad that Lyons was able to fall upward into his dream, expletive-filled role in the Silicon Valley writers' room. He learned literally nothing from his brief, scary trip to the world that everyone else works in.
You can argue that he knows this- he makes some half-assed attempts to show himself being somewhat out of touch having come from news organizations, which are apparently a different breed of workplace with a very different culture, as well as being older and not hip with the youth or whatever- not just from startups but from pretty much anywhere else. It's really ironic that he writes self-righteous chapters about how startups have a known culture of sexual harassment and partying while also calling his own workplace a "kindergarten" where they can't take his jokes about him wanting to kill people who annoy him or dude-conversations about teenage au pairs (let's just say I do not trust his description of that conversation). I'm so glad for him he ends up in a REAL GROWNUP workplace like... a HBO writers room where they're all allowed to make sex jokes all the time, encouraged to even, unlike the horrible startup where he has to actually act like a competent adult and not offend people?
The thing is, there are definitely some real oddities as he describes his workplace. He was indeed put into a strange and I'm sure personally challenging situation, and some stuff was genuinely weird (like "graduation"- genuinely nuts). At the same time, some of what he was decrying is not just what the current workplace is like, but what workplaces have been like for a long time. He describes some work scenes as "like Office Space," but Office Space wasn't about a startup, it was about a normal old-timey office full of disaffected employees. He handwaves about a past where companies were loyal to employees and employees were loyal back, while also seems shocked that a person can be unceremoniously fired- something that, post-2008, seems like an insane thing (and especially seems nuts coming after HE HIMSELF WAS UNCEREMONIOUSLY FIRED at the beginning of the book!). It's obviously awful from a human lens, but why on earth does he write about it as shocking? Pretty much everyone I know who was ever fired by having HR come to their desk or their key card deactivated was working in normal corporate America, not at a startup.
There are so many places where he doesn't seem to be able to differentiate the things that make his office objectively weird (whether as a startup or otherwise) or the things that make it... a corporate office. He asks friends for reality checks on whether something is normal, but they're always high-powered friends who probably haven't been in the corporate rank and file themselves in years. He arguably has the right to write a FB post blasting his CEO for his hundred thousand followers, but the fact that he's so convinced that everyone is overreacting is bizarre to anyone who has been in a corporate environment of literally any kind. He starts on a whole rant to younger colleagues about how they shouldn't like the candy wall and don't they wish they had more money instead? To believe him, they all stared back at him dumbly like they enjoyed being paid in candy and couldn't understand the appeal of cash- when in fact they made the sensible point that nobody was offering them more money in exchange for less candy, so...
I'd also add- while "Trotsky" definitely comes across as somewhat deranged, I have to say that by Lyons's own account, Trotsky read him like a large print book. The whiff of casual misogyny that permeates the book (even as Lyons spends pages talking about lack of diversity) is honestly overbearing, and the fact that Trotsky can get Lyons to believe pretty much anything as long as he blames one of the awful vapid mediocre women for it is actually masterful. Well done, dude (though less well done on the probably-illegal surveillance).
This book almost makes me mad that Lyons was able to fall upward into his dream, expletive-filled role in the Silicon Valley writers' room. He learned literally nothing from his brief, scary trip to the world that everyone else works in.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny