He has been a senior editor at Forbes, an editor at Newsweek, editor at ReadWrite, and has written for major media outlets such as the New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, and Newsweek. He is the author of a book of short stories, The Last Good Man (1993); a novel, Dog Days (1998); and a fictional biography, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody (2007). Under the pseudonym "Fake Steve Jobs," he also wrote The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, a popular blog that was a parody of Apple's CEO. He later published Disruption (2016) about his time at HubSpot, a Boston startup; and wrote the screenplay for "White Hat/Black Hat," the May 2015 episode of the hit HBO series Silicon Valley. He wrote it during a fourteen-week break when he was working for HubSpot, in 2014. Lyons is also a comedian and screenwriter. He has been called "the Mark Twain of Silicon Valley" and "the Jonathan Swift of our digital age." He is a cynical humorist who directs his wits to the business world, especially Silicon Valley. Over the past decade, he has given dozens of lectures on his version of new technologies and the modern workplace. Lyons is an advocate for greater diversity in the tech industry and an early critic of the gig economy for its abuse of workers. Their work helped draw attention to the brutal working conditions in Amazon's warehouses.