A review by pixie_d
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

3.0

2.5 stars. My sense of what rating I would give teetered wildly as I read this book. If you want to read it because you are old like me and think this narrative will be sympathetic, forget it. The writer is a highly successful white male, and his experience was used mostly for snark comedy value as he gets stuck in a crappy job at a crappy company and decides to treat it like an anthropology assignment he can then write a book about. Probably it will not seem relatable to any ageism, sexism, racism, etc. that you or those you know encounter in the workplace. Particularly at the beginning he comes across as an arrogant a-hole, at least as unsympathetic as his incompetent, fratty coworkers. Later, he does a good job of depicting their social bullying, although it goes no further than they managed to hurt his feelings (until the end, where some illegal alleged hacking makes him so paranoid he goes beyond journalistic objectivity and writes a revenge-y epilogue). So if you are looking for a heart-type connection (pun on an acronym in the book), you probably won't feel it. What he does well is to go back to his roots as a tech business reporter and explain the evil shenanigans that the venture capitalists and IPO-striving rotten start-up companies are perpetrating on the rest of us. It turns out that many key components of the horrible wealth redistribution that most of us have been suffering from, and horrible abuses in worker's rights (which pretty much don't exist anymore) originated with tech industry practices and manifestos. Ignore this at your own risk, and if you are lucky enough to have any investments, don't bet your retirement on any of these garbage companies. And if he's right about this current tech bubble, expect a crash much greater than the one in 2008.