👎Book Review: Lab Rats by Dan Lyons.

How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

Audio-Book: (Amazon Link)

I enjoyed, and highly recommend, Dan Lyons’s previous book (Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble), so I was looking forward to this book. While it has some good points, I was disappointed. He writes well, and he provides well-researched data about how corporations (tech companies in particular) are using technology and fear of job loss to bend the labor market to their will and profits. He also looks at the more significant trends around job security and wealth inequalities.

But I find fault with the way Lyons classifies any new management technique as garbage. In the audio-book, his narration drips with sarcasm when he presents his stories about how Agile project management and other ideas are just scams. Granted, he may have experienced the extremes — some proponents of new management ideas do act like cult leaders. Rather than look at where these ideas work well, and where they should not be applied, Lyons uses anecdotal evidence to cast a shadow of gimmicky on these frameworks and implies that all teachers of these ideas are scam artists or charlatans.

I tell my students that “good project managers borrow, great project managers steal,” a line stolen and adapted from…