The author leaves her job in publishing to take a job doing customer support at a data collection startup in San Francisco, and in this book discusses the sexism, optimism, and something of the oppression of her time at that company and later. It's a good book, but I didn't really find a lot of new insight in it. She seems kind of naive, when discussing the "data driven" company, about the uses to which the data being gathered was put, and maybe a bit coy. An odd touch is that she never mentions the names of most companies ("the hated social network," etc.). Very readable, and makes one glad not to be involved in that world. ( )

everyone read this noww ( )

3.5 stars ( )

Repetitive, Meandering and Bloated

Started off well, then it became repetitive and meandering. Insider phrases, boring dialogue and stories that even to a tech nut like myself, I found disinteresting. I was expecting so much more from this book, but it turned out to be more of a disappointment. We all kind of knew that the Millenials were narcissistic, egomaniacal, money hungry, spoiled brats. This book just tells us that we were right all along. Instead of a 300 page book, this could easily been cut back to a short series of New Yorker articles.. ( )

After working in tech for several years, this book was an interesting read. I do not work in the bay area but it's interesting to see the lasting cultural influence it has on the entire tech workforce. The book had a lot of good build up but kind of cut off at the end. I am interested in learning more about the rising interest rates and tightening of venture capital, the patagonia vest recession and how San Francisco has responded to that. It needs some sort of sequel. It's interesting how she places these men in technology in a mystical enlightened visionary box through her vivid descriptions. The truth, as a woman software developer myself, is some of these developers are delusional and make collaboration difficult. Their conversations are just them enjoying listening to themselves. I dread coding with these people. She came close to that in concluding that it's all just business and luck but seemed rushed. Very enjoyable read. ( )

(More of 2.5 stars)

It is a memoir about a person who works in the publishing industry of New York venturing into the tech scene. She tries her hand at a flailing tech startup in New York. She then moves to San Francisco, works for Mixpanel and Github. She seems to strike a chord and befriend Patrick Collison of Stripe. She opines a lot about the scene of SFO, Tyler Cowen, Julia Galef, and various people and shares her view.

The author seems to be a down-to-earth person and the book is written well. But she seems like a bickering person. Someone who is an outsider with some strong views and couldn’t come to digest the changes in Silicon Valley. I could not resonate with a lot of problems she was facing.

I had the same problem with a graphic novel based memoir, Good Talk. I could understand their point of view but I don’t resonate or agree with the writer’s judgment. I totally didn’t understand the point of why this book was celebrated so much. Is it because she is against the grain and criticizing Silicon Valley? Or is she an insider in the New York publishing coterie who knows how to market and distribute a book well? I persisted through the book to find out views that are something new but in vain.

She complains a lot about the garbage language that the tech startups in San Francisco use. She might have taken a snapshot of that and captured it in her book. But I think she misses the point of emergence. Language evolves, morphs, and grows. Personally, I might not like using the term “Let’s double click on that” or “Let’s pin that down for a moment” but what is wrong with it if people understand it.

When I was new to the startup scene, I was curious about the term “copy text” or “copywriter”. I was baffled at that term and used to ask what the fuck it was. But slowly learned what it is and I see that it’s a remnant of the publishing and advertising industry. I might have hated that term for a day or so.
In my son’s generation, the terms like “outro” are commonly used and people get it. We all are aware of introduction music or intro title. But people simply get that “outro” is related to the end of the video and move forward. They don’t ruminate about this term and classify it is a garbage language. Many people still are finicky about using the term “pre-pone” and emphasize using the term “advance” or “reschedule”. But the joke is on us, as people who “prepone”, the “outro” music is moving forward and do give a damn about me and likes. ( )

Brilliant insights, unique, clever descriptions of things too often taken for granted, all of this and a peek at the inside of the Silicone Valley and all that goes on in that cloistered world. I thoroughly enjoyed this read. ( )

Well written although, at times, a bit exhausting.

As one of the many women who were highly effected by the GitHub events mentioned towards the end of the book, the book completely downplays how incredibly life-destroying and disturbingly serious being attacked by the men of the tech industry was during that time and continues to be.

Her prospective barely scratches the surface of the true horror women can be subjected to in the tech industry. ( )

Wiener has an important perspective to share, but it is diminished by uneven writing. There is a fine line between navel gazing and good essay/memoir writing. This one, is unfortunately, is on the side of the former rather than the latter.

I can't help but think this was inadequately edited by someone with the same or similar background of the author: cisgender white middle class background and all of the biases that entails. Wiener is wishy washy at best and alternately performatively concerned or naive at worst. She is a writer, sure, but one who fails to understand that words are capable of multiple meanings and are also defined in relation to context. Whenever she has an opinion, she is smug rather than funny.

It's too bad because I had hopes for this book and the tale of the teenagers that run Silicon Valley - she makes very interesting and important points, and then tosses them aside rather than making links between them, exploring further.

An important and valuable perspective, but completely lost in a self-conscious delivery that is trying way too hard. ( )

Very well written, interesting, engaging and the audio version is well narrated. I can imagine it has been a bit frightening releasing this memoir. Stylistically some people complained about her use of aliases, but I liked it, and can see why legally it is probably prudent.

It is a bit of a coming of age story, and at the beginning, she is so optimistic, it made me question if I have wasted opportunity, haven't cashed in my B.S. in Computer Science for as much as I could have. But as her story progressed I felt more affirmed in the decisions I have made.

I had read Ellen Ullman's Life in Code last year, and it is interesting how somewhat parallel narratives look decades apart. ( )

In her mid-twenties Anna Wiener left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy.

She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street.

Part coming-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, this memoir is a first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. ( )

Somewhere in the last third of Uncanny Valley: “Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could only have been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries.” Is it a defense to say that Wiener’s book participates in this trend with some degree of self-awareness, if we happen to find it irritating or less insightful than it supposes it is? So do most of the works of contemporary literature.

The decision to anonymize every company named in the book and to render the history of tech-era San Francisco in vague detail might be another defense. I thought that this move, when combined with the short, pithy sentences and the willful naivete of a younger Wiener, also made UV feel like plenty of contemporary fiction, Rachel Cusk or Sally Rooney. Or like an NPR podcaster, with a curiosity about the world that’s a little too bright-eyed to feel real. (Wiener writes at one point that she likes “huge novels with minimal plot, or minimal novels with minimal plot.”) I don’t mind this adoption of a persona, other than the times it begins to feel too overtly like a slash-up of her past self designed to smooth the arc of a memoir or hammer in the abstract menace of a surveillance society. It’s as if one of the requirements of Wiener’s immaculate prose — the craft of the New Yorker writer who hits her targets with precision — is a featureless simplicity in its narrator-creator, allowing ideas, arguments, and parties in conversation to pit themselves neatly against one another.

I liked Wiener best when she was telling stories about her start-ups, or speculating irresponsibly about the humanity of the most powerful people in her world and, by extension, ours. She disavows this impulse at the end: “I was always looking for the emotional narrative, the psychological explanation, the personal history,” comes in a tone of cafard. “I was looking for stories; I should have seen a system.”

Several interesting perspectives: non-dev worker in the ~2010 tech-boom; women in tech; SF startups vs open-source spirit; startup CEOs vs everyone else; self-taught developers escaping poverty vs privileged white men; dot-comers displacing existing SF communities; all told in an fun to read voice. ( )

Anna Wiener’s memoir about her experiences in working for fledgling technology companies in Silicon Valley. She leaves a job in publishing in New York and moves to San Francisco for a job at a start-up in “big data” analytics. She also works for an open-source software development company. Weiner’s outlook changes significantly during her four years in Silicon Valley. She starts out somewhat naïve and optimistic but over time, she begins to see the downsides, which ultimately leads to a change in careers.

The focus of the book is the shift in viewpoint from the idea that technology is contributing to progress to that of using data for marketing, sales, and mining personal information. Along the way, Weiner describes the male-dominated culture and the mindset that employees should be willing to sacrifice their personal lives for business goals. She is forthcoming about her own weaknesses and employs plenty of self-deprecating humor. Highly recommended to women in the tech industry and those interested in the current trends in data analytics. ( )

A bizarre and surreal memoir about a frustrated woman in her mid twenties who makes the unlikely decision to leave her lack luster career in publishing to join a string of tech startups in Silicon Valley. Told in clever, almost lyrical prose, this is a tale of the strange alternate universe that tech companies operate in. The author has the bizarre experience of being the oldest person in her office at the geriatric age of 25. She's also among the only women in the office and must deal with the inherent misogyny of her coworkers.

She recounts, in a way that strikes a bit too close to home for me, the way her twenties just sort of melt away. As she moves through startup culture, she finds herself mildly brainwashed until she's waking up as she nears 30 wondering what she's doing with her life. She struggles with the meaninglessness of her work, her out of control internet addiction, and the dreary sense of history repeating itself.

This memoir is fascinating and a rare look into the dysfunctional world of technology start ups. ( )

Wiener fleshes out some of the details of a story that most people are familiar with only in its broad outlines: the social and cultural damage wrought by a tech sector that has tried--often not very hard--to mask its hunger for profit behind a veneer of social utility. Many of the elements here have in fact been described in detail elsewhere: the toxic culture of bro-grammers, the treatment of women in tech, the messianic delusions of boy-king founders, the pernicious effects of venture capital throwing millions of dollars into the laps of people in their teens and early twenties who in many cases dropped out of college. Wiener's strength is her ability to weave all this into a prose that crackles; I haven't felt like a book would furnish me with this many dinner party one-liners since reading Zeisler's "We Were Feminists Once." Like Zeisler, Wiener is not emptily snarky; at regular intervals the humor will pause and moments of genuinely moving insight into our current human moment emerge.

But the comparison with Zeisler occurred to me for another reason. One thing I want from a memoir is not simply to learn about the world or events that the memoir describes, but about the author. And this book leaves you with a lot to ponder about Wiener. The most problematic aspect for me was her claim to be a feminist. I have no doubt that in her own mind she considered herself to be so at the time. But it appears to be the kind of feminism that I see all the time in many of the students I teach: a vague individualized notion of inherent rights. Wiener is in fact a perfect illustration of what Zeisler describes as the emergence of consumer feminism that sells a notion of individual empowerment rather than collective action. When it comes to acting like a feminist, rather than just believing she is one, Wiener's actions are consistently at odds with her beliefs. As a reader, you can play a game where you count the number of times she uses some variant of the phrase "I waited for them to notice me; they never did" or list the instances where she otherwise passively waits for things to happen to her. Despite, by her own account, being subject to repeated victimization as a woman and seeing other women endure the same, there is little in the way of trying to build a collective response.

Also fascinating is the degree to which Wiener's narrative highlights some of the larger cultural ills of which the startup culture is just one facet. Chief among these is a truly extraordinary level of wasteful consumerism. Another fun game with this book is to count the number of times Wiener reports buying a service, device, or item of clothing that by her own account she never ends up using. One of her chief concerns is with the degree to which so much of our social media tech has become addictive mainly because it was deliberately designed to be so (the analytics firm she worked for rolled out a package that they called--with the complete lack of irony in which Silicon Valley specializes--Addiction). You would think, then, that she might have had cause to reflect on the extraordinary reliance on alcohol and cigarettes that fuels both the work and social scenes she inhabits.

Lastly, while she is legitimately and thoughtfully critical of the entitlement bubbles in which so many tech workers are encased, she doesn't seem particularly aware of the dynamics of the broader culture of which she is a part. She is a bicoastal denizen and the lives of she and her friends in New York and San Francisco have a lot in common: regular recreational drug use (Ecstasy, Acid, etc), artisanal this-that-and-the-other, chi-chi restaurants, services for entirely made-up problems, obscure bands, performance art, etc. I want to be very clear, that I don't myself have a problem with any of these things. But it only takes a little imagination to realize that there are large swathes of the country where someone would learn that, say, a guy has a job as a "cuddle therapist" providing emotional solace for older men, and think WTAF? One of the unintentional side-effects of this book, then (unless, I guess, you are a twenty-something living in the New York and San Fran fantasy worlds) is to help us see some of what divides us at the moment. The daily life that she describes, even the "healthy" version, is one that is so far removed from the reality of much of the US population as to be taking place on a different planet.

These may seem like criticisms, but they aren't really; hence the high star rating! It is Wiener's openness and honesty in describing her life that makes these issues visible. My only regret is that she herself doesn't seem to notice them and reflect on them which would have made for an even better book. While I think this book will remain valuable as an anthropological account of startup culture, I suspect its real value going forward will be its portrayal of a certain type of smart, compartmentalized, analytical but not terribly reflective twenty-something product of late US capitalism. ( )

Wiener's narrative style is very engaging and humorous, and her wry observations about Silicon Valley start-up culture are spot on. As a memoir though, I felt the book lacked introspection. What the author doesn't seem to realize is that practically everyone in Silicon Valley is: A) a transplant from someplace else, B) feels like they don't belong, and C) rolls their eyes at the culture here.

The book is mostly observations of *what* she experienced -- told with exactly the preconceived notions and subtle condescension common in the literary world about tech -- but very little about *why* she contributed to a culture she disdains. As she complains about her $90K salary at age 26, lack of promotion within a year of employment, her misogynistic company that she decided to join despite a public discrimination lawsuit, etc., it's hard to be sympathetic. Though she finally acknowledges on p. 251 her "own class privilege" and "everything I took for granted," that hardly seems the point of the book.

What really makes Silicon Valley "Uncanny" is that it has fostered several negative corporate dynamics and broader societal repercussions, despite being located in one of the most progressive cities in the world and populated by well-educated, well-intentioned, and generally progressive people. More self-reflection about how we all, perhaps inadvertently, contribute to that culture would have been welcome in this book. ( )

Gosh I really enjoyed this book! I liked the writing style and elements that others didn't enjoy. I liked the fact that her sociology undergrad degree really seemed to shine through in the way she approached her thinking about tech and Silicon Valley. Wiener is clearly an excellent writer. The way she can craft a sentence is just technically and artistically very impressive and I would love to read some more of her writing for the New Yorker.

I was slightly nervous going into this even though I know I am very interested in the topic. I rarely read memoirs and when I have read books about Silicon Valley they usually focus on specific companies or the economic system that built them and were not as much about one persons individual work experience. Because the writing was so phenomenal, I fell write into it. I think there are some parts of Wiener's writing style that some people may find annoying like that fact that she does not name the companies but just describes them and leaves the reader to try to figure it out.

I think if you're a person like me who is somewhat obsessed with the machinations of Silicon Valley I think you'll enjoy getting to read from the perspective of someone who worked in that environment and has some critiques of how the whole system works. I would definitely recommend this book.
( )

In the future, when people ask me what it was like working in Silicon Valley, and why I left, I'll be able to point them to this book, which contains a some of the answers. My own time overlaps with the time covered in the book, and I found myself nodding in agreement many times. ( )

Insights into the wealthy bubble next door and how tech has changed the valley/San Francisco and us. Universal human flaw on page after page: being attracted by the temporal idols of wealth and power. And Werner's personal flaw of choosing not to know, seeking an undefined "something more" and not finding it. The solution? Exit the bubble looking back, as did Lot's wife in the book of Genesis. Redemption in writing a memoir or tragedy in becoming a pillar of salt? ( )

I really enjoyed this book. It’s written extremely well and filled with countless erudite, cutting observations about work and life in the Bay Area. Seriously, there are hundreds of them.

That being said it loses a bit of steam 3-4ths of the way through (ironic, given an anecdote about the author getting angry at a CEO tweeting books were too long). I think once the author sees through the hype of the Valley, and tries to more purposefully find meaning in her work, the book meanders a bit.

Initially, I thought the choice to omit proper nouns in favor of brief descriptors was neat, if a bit gimmicky. As it goes on though, I realized how smart it was. It really disengages any prior opinion you have about the entity in question (even when you know what she’s referring to) and come at it from her opinion.

I think when all is said and done about the current generation of Bay Area culture, this is the book most people will read to get insight about it. It deserves the honor. ( )

Interesting insider account of working in a data analysis firm that supported Silicon Valley's obsession with surveillance and metrics and the rise and fall of glamor associated with Silicon Valley culture. Not as deeply informative as a book like Alice Marwick's Status Update but a lighter lift for those who aren't looking for scholarly depth.

Well-done ... enjoyable & really funny; it would have been better, ibelieve, if she had more character development. Overall, recommended ( )

Plot:



Anna Wiener is in her mid-twenties; stuck, broke, and looking for a career with purpose. At the same time, the tech industry is exploding with opportunity, and like many other millenials around her, Wiener drops her job in publishing and pursues the promises in Silicon Valley.



She lands a role in a big-data start-up, and enters the world of entrepreneurs seeking glory and success.



Uncanny Valley is a glimpse into the reckless start-up atmosphere, through the eyes of a 'woman in tech'.

“I felt rising frustration and resentment. I was frustrated because I felt stuck, and I was resentful because I was stuck in an industry that was chipping away at so many things I cared about.”Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

Review:



I was quite keen to read this one, tech in the professional sense is still quite the mystery to me. I never understood it or had an interest in it, but now I am quite curious.



As the author held a role in the customer service side, there wasn't a lot of information about that side of things, but there was a lot of about the industry, the egos, and hierarchy that grew in this bubble of time.



While I did find this interesting, and found the book to be well written, it really didnt grab me. I really enjoy memoirs that l walk away from contemplating a new idea or strong emotion with, and I didn't that from this one, unfortunately.



Still, it was enjoyable to read about a world I have never been privy too- particularly through the eyes of a millennial woman.















I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on Uncanny Valley. Have you read this? Tell me what you thought! 



Feel free to comment below or on my 'bookstagram' at @ReadWithWine .
This review was originally posted on ReadWithWine ( )

As usual with autobiographies, there's one possible review for the book (well written, interesting, fairly insightful in a limited way, highly entertaining), and another for the author's life (depressing, limited in scope, questionable decisions, odd axes to grind constantly) -- 5 and 3, respectively, here.

But as a book, it definitely does a good job showing how east coast liberal arts transplants in customer support feel about Silicon Valley and tech generally.

The weird thing where the author refers to entities using mostly-obvious and unambiguous descriptions, rather than proper nouns, is simultaneously kind of funny and somewhat grating.

This would be a pretty ineffective book to describe "what working in Silicon Valley is actually like" to someone who actually cared about the answer to that question, but as entertainment, great. ( )