I borrowed this book because the subtitle mentioned “tech gurus” and I thought it was going to be another book on influencers. But I was wrong – Lab Rats is about what’s wrong with work (in the US and spreading throughout the world) and what can be done right.

In Lab Rats, Dan Lyon explores why work is so miserable for people, especially those in tech. Lyon has identified four reasons why work is especially terrible now:

1. Money – Jobs are not paying as well as they used to (but CEOs and investors are earning more)
2. Job Insecurity – Jobs aren’t for life… in fact, you should expect to be fired
3. Change – Constant change makes us stressed
4. Dehumanisation – We’re not just being replaced by robots/AI, we’re being evaluated and treated like one.

Put everything together and you get a workforce that’s financially stressed, constantly afraid of losing their job, constantly having to adapt and treated like they are nothing.

It’s worth mentioning that Lab Rats doesn’t cover a few things. First, it assumes the worker is disempowered – nothing is said of people who prefer to job hop but a lot is said of people who were fired or hated their jobs. Second, Lab Rats has an odd blind spot when it comes to diversity – only African-Americans and Hispanics seem to be counted towards increasing diversity. In fact, I checked and “Asian” only appears once in the whole book, and that was in a line that, after saying that Netflix doesn’t value diversity, mentioned that 24% of Netflix’s workforce is Asian. This was a bit weird given that the book castigates the homogenisation of the workplace in Silicon Valley (whose negative workplace culture the author argues is infecting other large companies). And of course, the book is extremely Silicon Valley-centric; other countries may be mentioned but they are not discussed.

I’m also a bit curious as to why people are still flocking to startups (as employees, not founders). After all, Lyon mentions Glassdoor reviews, and it seems like most major companies have big, known issues. So why are people still willing to work there? There are a few accounts of people who have suffered terribly in these work environments and I think that the book might be even more thoughtful if it looked at those who hated this work environment yet continued to place themselves in similar ones – what is driving them? Because as long as this continues, business executives have no real incentive to change anything if they don’t already have moral values that prioritise humanity and worker health.

After showing how work is getting worse, Lyon ends on a more hopeful note as he discusses how work could be better – pay people well, treat them nicely, and focus on profit rather than growth at all costs (i.e. ignore the VCs). Much of this won’t be new if you’ve been in any course that talks about business ethics or sustainability, and again Lyon tends to focus solely on his argument; greenwashing or ethical-washing isn’t dealt with in this section.

Overall, this was an interesting book. While I was shocked at how bad it got in some places, I have to admit that anyone with some knowledge of startups/VCs should have an inkling of what it’s like. After all, one of my MBA projects was to develop a pitch and my profs were all very candid that while they liked the heritage aspect of my idea (it was more of a connecting-to-your-cultural-roots type of idea), VCs were highly unlikely to invest in such ideas or social businesses in general because it would not give them the exponential growth they want. And if you’ve visited San Francisco, it’s pretty clear that it’s a very cut-throat world. So in a way, what the book said was new yet not-new to me. Still, I think anyone who’s unfamiliar with the tech/start-up world will find this eye-opening and horrifying.

P.s. it is very timely that I saw this article on food delivery riders in Singapore paying for spilt food out of their own pocket just after I finished reading this. While some mentioned a sense of duty, others talked about trying to avoid penalties such as being suspended from delivery jobs for being reported too many times. That’s a perfect example of the dehumanisation and precarious nature of the work that Lab Rats is talking about, which is why it’s a pity a lot of the focus was so narrow (though overall, I still liked the book!)