The tech industry is supposed to be one of the most coveted industries for young graduates. High salaries, exciting work, a fun filled life, nice perks, chance to grow fast, all these are things that make working in this industry attractive. But is there a downside to it all and what is it really like? What is the psychology of people who work in tech? In this article, we review a few recent books about the experience of working in the tech industry.
Lab Rats: why modern work makes people miserable, by Dan Lyons
Goodreads Link, Publisher site, Author website
The highly readable book by Dan Lyons goes into the nature and pace of work that is normal and expected in the tech industry today and tries to analyze why it makes people want to escape from it.
Lyons starts with some examples of how employees are often forced or ‘encouraged’ to take team workshops (example: Lego workshops) that claim to improve work productivity but in fact encourage conformity, a shared psychosis and group delusion (thinking the products would somehow change the world) in the name of cultural fit. He also surveys what is wrong with imposing methodologies such as Agile, Holacracy or Lean startup, with lots of new terminologies and processes but little value add.
Lyons further describes some common factors in the way the industry works that contribute to worker unhappiness, stress, low job satisfaction and health issues. These include the constant feeling of job insecurity or fear of being fired, the lowering of salaries (in absolute terms) than a generation ago, exposure to constant change at small and big levels (such as frequent reorgs) that leads to weariness, and finally the constant surveillance and monitoring of employees, enhanced with AI and related technologies, that leads to dehumanization. He mentions how the fear of losing large unvested stock options, if they are fired before the vesting time, keeps employees constantly on their toes and willing to overwork.
Finally, Lyons shows how many tech startups are fueled by a ruthless dog eat dog venture capital scenario, and reviews some silicon valley companies that are going against all these tendencies and seem to genuinely care for employees.
Live work work work die by Corey Pein
Goodreads link, Publisher site, Author Link
In this book, Pein describes his experience spending a few months in the startup world of San Francisco as a pretend tech reporter. The book ends up presenting a rather unattractive view of life in the startups, whether as founders or workers.
He describes how tech wannabe people are forced, thanks to astronomical rents, to live in cramped living spaces shared with many others. On the other hand, old timers in rented houses are forced out by greedy landlords eager to take advantage of the tech bubble.
Pein further reveals some of the the murky going on’s in a few startups. He surveys how the gig economy of tech works, fueled by startups such as Fiverr. He then goes on to some history of the silicon valley, how it all began and the humble origins and unsavory actions of some tech giants such as Uber.
Pein finally describes his experience of pitching a tongue in cheek startup idea for Y combinator, a system that funds and incubates selected startups which survive the tough competition and successfully pitch their idea. He also discusses the crazy views of a few startup founders that seem to condone things like racism, authoritarianism,and cyborg evangelism.
The burnout society and Psychopolitics: neoliberalism and new technologies of power by Byung Chul Han
Goodreads link for the Burnout Society, About author
These books, burnout society and psychopolitics, are written by a philosopher and probably belong more to a philosophy article. The reason I include them here is that they throw some light on the psychology of working in modern tech companies, how employees are encouraged by modern management practices, to internalize the control mechanism and demands of their work, no matter how unreasonable. Similar techniques as are used to increase consumption of manufactured products are also used to increase the productivity of employees in tech companies.
In the book Burnout Society, Byung Chul Han discusses how our modern society has become an achievement based society rather than a discipline based society as in the past centuries. In such a society, instead of employers having to discipline employees to work harder by using force, modern management theory gives employees the freedom to work as hard, or not, as they wish. However this very freedom ends up as a paradox, thanks to the primacy given in this society to achievement. The employees feel they have to achieve more to get higher status and so force themselves to work harder than they otherwise would. This situation, on the other hand, leads to an excessiveness of positivity (what he terms brain doping) and ends in exhaustion and depression culminating in burnout.
In Psychopolitics, Byung Chul Han first focuses on the all pervading surveillance and lack of privacy of consumers (and employees), thanks to big data and sophisticated tools. He finds the situation similar to a panopticon, a jail where all prisoners are monitored round the clock. Han then goes on to how the system of modern capitalism manipulates emotions (such as encouraging a constant feeling of anxiety) to increase consumption and uses sophisticated tools such as gamification to increase productivity. For employees, the same method of constant anxiety (threat of losing jobs for example) would be used to motivate them to increase the work productivity. So instead of having to have surveillance, this method is more powerful in that employees can internalize the values and work harder. He finally discusses how the ubiquity of big data or what he calls dataism takes away the pretence of free choice of the consumers.
A people’s history of silicon valley by Keith Spencer
Goodreads link, Publisher link, Author Website
This book sees the silicon valley tech industry as a whole rather than just focus on lives of tech employees. It goes into the geography and history of the silicon valley, how it used to have various industries in previous generations and tech industry is merely the latest industry to call it home. It discusses how the tech industry is truly global: while the iphone may be designed in California the parts are assembled in China and the raw materials like Cobalt come from Congo in Africa. And in these places too such as China and Africa, workers producing parts for the tech industry are heavily exploited. The wealth of the tech billionaires is built on the labor of these people too. So we should not look at silicon valley in isolation.
The book then reviews the history of the silicon valley. First were the Ohlone people who lived simple lives that were in harmony with nature, before the coming of the Spanish. The Spanish and the later American settlers killed a large number of Ohlone. Then California became a part of Mexico before joining the United States. The area was home to a thriving fruit industry that produced oranges, also other industries like wines developed here. After world war 2, the US government poured billions of dollars of defense money into the institutions and companies here via NASA and DARPA. Stanford university, for example, benefited from this government funding of research projects and gave rise to a number of tech startups, both hardware and software related, in the bay area.
After this, the book discusses the counterculture of the 1960s which gave rise to the tech hippies, people like Steve Jobs, who had visions of changing the world. The trend of designing tech offices with their bright colors and play areas and free coke comes from this idea that tech are somehow not like other industries, and is going to make the world a better place with their innovative products. These kinds of beliefs make the tech industry and its companies similar to cults in a way. Included in such beliefs is that the tech employees are special and there is no classism or racism in the industry, it is somehow above all this. Another common belief is a rosy view of the future, that somehow tech can solve all of humanity’s problems.
The book also goes into the transformation of the silicon valley from its days where misfits and geeks were at home, where hobby clubs like Homebrew designed the first personal computers, to the modern days where it is now very much a part of the mainstream culture. It describes the early Microsoft — IBM — Apple wars and their contrast with the GNU free software movement. It also goes into labor practices of the software companies, such as how the big tech companies collude to keep salaries low, how the Bay area locals got displaced by the technocrats due to rising rents, how women engineers were discriminated due to pay differentials and the machismo culture.
The book then discusses the origins of the web from DARPANET days to the dot com bubble which burst and many companies became bankrupt, to the rise of social media, especially Facebook. It mentions how Facebook tries to keep its users addicted to the platform using psychological tools, causing things like loneliness and depression in many users, sells consumer data to advertisers, how Facebook ads are sometimes used by powerful entities to spread disinformation and how it is leading to a decline in journalism as news companies are laying off reporters and going bust. It then speaks of the rise of the mobile phone and how apps like Uber have given rise to the gig economy. It calls the phenomenon of companies providing renting services rather than products as the rentier economy. Finally, it goes into companies like google helping form a type of surveillance state and the dangers to democracy by the ubiquity of tech.
The attention merchants: the epic struggle to get inside our heads by Tim Wu
Goodreads page, Publisher page, Author website
This book discusses how companies like Google and Facebook seek to monopolize low grade attention of users to target via online advertising, what are the negative societal consequences of this and how this attention industry is worth billions of dollars in yearly revenue.
World without mind by Franklin Foer
Goodreads page, Publisher Page, About author
In this book, Foer focuses on the big four tech companies and their practices. These big 4 hold a near monopoly in their respective domains: Google (knowledge), Facebook (social media), Amazon (commerce) and Apple (premium gadgets especially mobile phones). He discusses how monopoly in each area, free from regulatory controls and constraints, is the only logical end for silicon valley companies. Then he goes through each of the big companies in turn and discusses their aims and strategies to dominate the market, how they act as gatekeepers and controller of knowledge, issues related to political activism and assault on journalism and democracy by these companies, and other downsides of the dominance of each of these monopolies on the wider society. Overall they lead to a world without mind, where users, suppliers, consumers, and entire industries have to comply with the new norms established by these companies in order to survive. Finally, he discusses how to fight back against such monopolies and usher in a world where free thinking, creativity, data privacy and free choice can once again become the norm.
The People vs Tech by Jamie Bartlett
Goodreads page, Publisher page, About author
This book focuses on the impact of tech on politics and democracy. It discusses issues such as the erosion of free will thanks to targeted personalized ads (thanks to large scale collection of user data by the big tech companies, combined with market research and behaviorist theories) telling us what to watch, what to like and what to buy. It also discusses the tribalisation of politics thanks to social media companies, resulting in polarization and clustering of users into digital ‘tribes’, of people belonging to both left and right wing of politics, based on group identity rather than logic. It also discusses issues such as the erosion in capacity of citizens to make judgments on what is good for them due to the increased use of AI assistants, interference of tech on free elections (reference to the Cambridge Analytica scandal), increased inequality and gentrification of cities, monopolistic tendencies of the big tech companies, lack of accountability and so on. Finally it discusses crypto anarchy and rise of technologies such as bitcoin, as a kind of backlash against increased centralization and authoritarianism.
Disrupted: Ludicrous misadventures in the tech start up bubble by Dan Lyons
Goodreads page, Wikipedia page
In this book, Dan Lyons shares his experience of working in a startup company and its unsavory practices, especially related to the management and company culture.
Chaos monkeys: inside the silicon valley money machine by Antonio Garcia Martinez
In this book, Martinez speaks of his experience of working in a chaotic startup and the process of getting acquired by a big tech company. It is a very honest account of all aspects of the startup culture.
The Internet Con: How to sieze the means of computation by Cory Doctorow
Publisher page, Goodreads page, Author’s wikipedia page
In this book, the author tells a very important story about how the internet originally used to be free for anybody to access (from the time of Gopher and HTTP), and even companies like Microsoft (proprietary formats for Microsoft office) and IBM tried to make their products inaccessible for rival users by using proprietary formats, but failed. Microsoft, for example, was forced to standardize the office format and today we can open Word files in Linux with openoffice or with a Mac.
However, the current internet has become a walled garden, due to lax antitrust regulation in the US that allows big tech companies like Facebook, google, apple, X (twitter) and amazon to establish monopolies in their respective domains by making it difficult for users to switch to a rival service (such as google+ in case of facebook). If all my friends are on facebook and so are all my photos and memories, the likelihood of my switching to a rival becomes very low even if they dont treat me well. The founders of big tech are not particularly geniuses or visionaries, however much they would like us to believe that, but merely were in the right place at the right time which allowed them to buy out rivals (such as instagram and whatsapp) and establish monopolies making it impossible for users to switch and increasing their cost of swtiching.
As a solution, the author proposes to make the antitrust regulation stronger and enforce interoperability on these companies, by forcing them to make their formats sharable across each others’ services, so that users can easily port whatever they have shared on one service to a rival service, or easily post whatever they are selling on amazon to a different provider.
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris
Publisher page, goodreads page
This book tells of the history of Palo Alto and the Silicon valley since the earliest days till the modern times. It weaves a story from the 1850s to when the region was a part of Mexico, treatment of the native americans, to things like the Gold Rush and the rush for mining, the time when the Southern Pacific railroad was built mainly by Chinese immigrants, founding of Stanford university, the Space Age and NASA, establishment of Hewlett Packard, LSD and hippies, the hacker culture, and the various industries that were based in the area till it became the center of the so called Silicon valley. All in all, it is an extremely comprehensive overview of the history of Silicon valley and where its entrepreneurial spirit really came from.
Conclusion
In this article, we have summarized a few interesting books about Silicon valley and working in the tech industry.
