How Silicon Valley Ruined Work Culture

Here's a spot-on article from Wired about how the work environment of Silicon Valley has spread to more traditional companies. I saw this happen at the TSX when they moved into a new office. Frankly, it drove me crazy. At least they had the sense to let us keep our own desks; if they'd gone to a "hotel" setup, I'd probably have quit.

Fewer people have been more vocal opponents of this 24/7 work culture than Dan Lyons, a former journalist who left the newsroom to work at startups in the mid-2000s. The experience was so jarring that he soon quit his tech job—and then parlayed it into a job writing for the television series Silicon Valley, which appears to be an absurdist parody to anyone outside of the tech world, and like a too-real portrait to many people inside of it. Lyons likes to poke fun at the absurdities of tech work culture, and his 2018 book Lab Rats chronicles all of the bizarre corporate workshops and cultural institutions that have come to define work in Silicon Valley: mandatory “Lego play,” an obsession with open offices, the reframing of firing as “graduation.”

Lyons believes these new-agey corporate practices, along with perks like free snacks or beer on tap, are simply a misdirection from something rotten at the core. He blames worker unhappiness not just on Silicon Valley’s work culture but also on its business model—one he calls “shareholder capitalism.” The modern tech company is obsessed with growth and profit, at the expense of its employees and to the benefit of its investors. Some lucky employees might have stock options, but most don’t, and even then it’s a small percentage of the money flowing back to investors. The perks, then, function like trick mirrors, “a way to distract employees and keep them from noticing that their pockets are being picked.” David Heinemeier Hanson, father of the programming language Ruby on Rails, has called this “trickle-down workaholism” the result of “trying to compress a lifetime’s worth of work into the abbreviated timeline of a venture fund.”

Worst of all, the tech world has managed to recast this workaholism for someone else’s profit as something desirable: “hustle culture.” It’s replaced the 9-to-5 with “the 996”—that is, 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. Take it from Elon Musk: Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.