A 52-year-old tech journalist went to work for a startup. It did not go well.

Dan Lyons accomplished a lot in his two-plus decades as a writer. He wrote two novels, he held jobs with publications like Newsweek and Forbes and he penned a popular blog for several years as “Fake Steve Jobs.”

Then he took a marketing gig with a software startup. It did not go well.

On Saturday, Fortune published an excerpt from Lyons’s soon-to-be-released book about his experience called “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble.”

In it, Lyons depicts his former employer — Cambridge, Mass.-based HubSpot — as a frat-house-meets-brainwash-shop, where business cliches such as “1+1=3” and “We’re changing the world” reigned supreme.

Dogs roam HubSpot’s hallways, because like the kindergarten decor, dogs have become de rigueur for tech startups. At noon, Zack tells me, a group of bros meets in the lobby on the second floor to do push-ups together. Upstairs there is a place where you can drop off your dry cleaning. Sometimes they bring in massage therapists. On the second floor there are shower rooms, which are intended for bike commuters and people who jog at lunchtime, but also have been used as sex cabins when the Friday happy hour gets out of hand. Later I will learn (from Penny, the receptionist, who is a fantastic source of gossip) that at one point things got so out of hand that management had to send out a memo. “It’s the people from sales,” Penny tells me. “They’re disgusting.”

Lyons left the job in late 2014 — he lasted a little more than a year — but the story didn’t end there. HubSpot later fired its chief marketing officer, claiming he had violated “the Company’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics in connection with attempts to procure a draft manuscript” of Lyons’s book. The FBI investigated but ultimately did not bring charges against any past or present HubSpot employees.

Here’s the link again to the excerpt, titled “My Year in Startup Hell.”

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via