Silicon Valley, a place where office slides and over-sized Lego figures are as ubiquitous as water coolers. But who knows what it’s really like to work at one of these tech behemoths?
Antonio Garcia Martínez for one, whose CV includes Facebook product manager, Twitter advisor, start-up CEO and now the author of Chaos Monkeys, which details his time while in “The Valley”.
The accounts are scathing, as Martínez calls his time at Facebook and other start ups “cultish”.
These companies are temples to the founders’ egos. You don’t even have that level of self worship on Wall Street.
Forget the dog-eat-dog capitalism of Wall Street – these guys make Gordon Gekko look like Ghandi.
“One of the biggest fallacies of Silicon Valley is that it’s a meritocracy,” continued Martinez, speaking to Business Insider.
But, really, only the most deluded and douchiest people I met in Silicon Valley actually think it is.
Those people are the ones who justify their hundred-million-dollar payouts by believing that they worked a hundred-million times harder than the people working on the startup next door, instead of admitting that in a lot of ways making it big in Silicon Valley is a mix of happenstance, membership in a privileged cohort, or some concealed act of absolute skulduggery.
Martinez jokes further that Mark Zuckerberg could single-handedly throw an election by showing reminders to go vote in certain districts, but not others.
“Still, at least you get to sit on a bean bag while toppling governments. You don’t get that on Wall Street.”
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