“Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble” by Dan Lyons (Hachette Books, 258 pages, $27)

You are not the kind of guy — not at your age, and not with your résumé — who should be working at a place like this.

But here you are. It’s your first day at HubSpot, a Boston startup company, plump with $100 million in venture capital. You’ve been hired as a marketing fellow, whatever that means. You’ve been granted a small tranche of stock options.

This is 2013. You walk into HubSpot’s vast, open office space, gaze at the hundreds of dewy employees, and think: It’s like a Montessori frat house in here. There are foosball tables and video game consoles and beanbag chairs and Nerf guns. Dogs roam the hallways. Is that a wall of free candy? People wear orange, the company color, as if rooting for a college basketball team.

You are introduced to “a blur of Ashleys, Amandas, Brittanys and Courtneys.” You note, distressingly, that you are “literally twice the age of these people, in some cases more than twice their age.”

Led to your desk, you find that you are expected to sit on a big rubber ball on a rolling frame. (The ball is orange, of course.) You fear you will fall over and break your pelvis. You ask for an actual chair, with four legs. You begin to feel very, very old.

In fact, you are 52. You’ve got gray hair, unstylishly cut, and a backpack for your laptop. You’ve driven here in your Subaru Outback. You’ve recently been laid off, as you explain in your troubling but funny new memoir, “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble,” from your job as technology editor at Newsweek.

You, Dan Lyons, need this HubSpot gig. You’ve got young twins at home; your wife isn’t working; health insurance is extortionately expensive. The wolf isn’t at the door, but you can hear it panting out there in the woods.

Journalists are cynical types and you are known for being especially so. You were the formerly anonymous blogger behind “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs,” an Internet hit in the mid-00s, which mercilessly lampooned that wearer of black mock turtlenecks. And though you don’t know it yet, you will be hired to write for the impeccable HBO series “Silicon Valley.”

Deep in your heart, despite your cynicism, you want to believe in HubSpot, which makes marketing software. Maybe here you can reinvent yourself, as so many survivors of the crash of elite American journalism have been unable to do. Maybe you can don exemplary eyewear and become one of those tech motivational gurus, part Tony Robbins and part Malcolm Gladwell.

Alas, it is not to be. Before long, your co-workers commence to calling you Grandpa Buzz, and not really in a kind way. Before long you come to feel you’ve been indoctrinated into a sinister cult.

The first thing you notice about working at HubSpot is how cheerful and vapid everyone is. This is a company where the co-founder brings a teddy bear to meetings and sits it upright in a chair, as a stand-in for the customer.

There will be no mocking this teddy bear, or anything else at HubSpot. To do so, you write, “would be akin to a Scientologist making fun of L. Ron Hubbard’s cravat.” You learn to keep your smart mouth shut.

The general feebleness, you sense, bleeds into something that is actually menacing. There’s an Orwellian quality to how language is used at HubSpot. People aren’t fired here, for example. They “graduate.” So many people graduate and disappear, you write, that “it’s like living in Argentina during the 1970s.”

HubSpot sends out, and its software helps other companies send out, tons of spam. But here spam is called — wait for it — “lovable marketing content.” This kind of jargon infects the company at every level.

Employers have learned that millennials like to feel they’re on a mission, not merely at a job, so a mission is invented. You and other new hires are told: “We’re not just selling a product here. HubSpot is leading a revolution. A movement. HubSpot is changing the world.”

People like this rhetoric, you notice, “because it makes online sales and marketing seem like some kind of epic adventure rather than the drab, soul-destroying job that it actually is.”

For a long time, you’re not sure what you’re supposed to do at HubSpot. No one seems to be in charge. You write some blog posts. You work on a podcast no one listens to. People stay away from you, as if late-middle-age were airborne herpes.

One day, for a minor infraction of corporate etiquette, your desk is moved down into the company’s telemarketing center. It’s the kind of grubby boiler room you see in finance movies. You get a glimpse of HubSpot’s face without the painted-on smile, and you are appalled.

It’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” meets Dante’s “Inferno” down there. The room is packed with young men (“lax bros,” one observer calls them) hustling to make their numbers or get canned. Nothing lovable or revolutionary here, except maybe the free beer that’s provided.

Down in the boiler room, you begin to think dark thoughts about a generation of young American workers, conned into disposable jobs like those HubSpot provides. The social contract that once existed between companies and workers, you think, has been tossed out.

You find yourself saying, out loud, things like: “You guys are the first generation that’s willing to work for free candy. My generation would never have fallen for that. We wanted to get paid in actual money.”

You think even darker moral thoughts about the kind of racket so many startups like HubSpot are. This company doesn’t need to become profitable, or make anything that works very well. It just needs to get big fast, stage its initial public offering and pay out for investors. This HubSpot does. You come to think of its executives as “amoral hustlers.”

You decide to leave HubSpot for another job. You exact your revenge the old-fashioned way, by writing this coolly observant book.

You get to add a splendidly weird coda to your book, too. Before “Disrupted” goes to press, one of its central characters, HubSpot’s longtime chief marketing officer, is fired for trying to procure an advance manuscript of your book, presumably by hacking.

You couldn’t have written a tastier ending, even for HBO.