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

"A fascinating, thought-provoking, hilarious, and sometimes harrowing account of current work culture."---Gretchen Rubin, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Project

Why do so many people hate their jobs? Lab Rats is a groundbreaking, examination of how the half-baked ideas of Silicon Valley and its "new oligarchs" have changed the way we work, damaged our brains, and left us poorer and insecure.

After publishing Disrupted, his bestselling memoir of his disastrous experience working for a young tech company, Dan Lyons watched, astonished, as hundreds of readers wrote to him with their own harrowing stories of discrimination on the job, fear-mongering managers, and companies denigrating employees in pursuit of quick profit. The problems he had identified in the start-up world, Lyons realized, are infecting virtually every kind of job in America--at a time when companies are giving more lip service than ever about happy employees.

What happened to work? Who is responsible? And does any company have a model for doing it right? As Lyons ventured across America in pursuit of answers, he came to identify "Four Factors," a series of ideas that have broken the social contract that once existed between companies and their employees. These new, often dystopian notions about work have made millions subject to constant change, dehumanizing technologies, and even health risks. A few companies, however, get it right. With Lab Rats, Lyons makes a passionate plea for business leaders to understand this dangerous transformation and offers a way out--"an approach to work and business that puts people first, profitably serves customers, and makes the world a little bit better in the process" (Tom Peters, New York Times bestselling author of In Search of Excellence).

Dan Lyons is the New York Times bestselling author of Disrupted. He is also a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and public speaker. He was a staff writer on the first two seasons of the Emmy-winning HBO series Silicon Valley. Previously, Lyons was technology editor at Newsweek and the creator of the groundbreaking viral blog "The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs" (AKA "Fake Steve Jobs"). Lyons has written for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Wired. He lives in Winchester, MA.