Uncanny Valley

One sentence synopsis... A Silicon Valley outsider's astute observations about tech industry in all it's high-minded (and sometimes absurd) dreams and delusions. .

Read it if you like... ‘Silicon Valley' the show, Joan Didion, Jia Tolentino. If you have worked in the Bay Area you'll find yourself nodding and laughing at a lot of Wiener's descriptions. She's got a large dose of bitter ex-New Yorker in her, but taken with a grain of salt this memoir is a pretty specific, detailed representation of a specific time to be living in San Francisco. .

Further reading... the book is written so that all the company and character names are obscured. I found it entertaining to read up on what companies Wiener is actually writing about. My best guess is the book start up was Oyster and the developer loved acquisition was GitHub, but if anyone's read it and has another idea I'd love to know.

Having just made the switch from the publishing industry to the tech industry last year, this one hit home (granted, I am in a very different kind of tech – but still). Weiner takes the jargon and conventions of the tech industry (which I'm afraid I have adopted in my day-to-day), and holds it up to the light to show how empty that language is – and how empty emotionally, and maybe ethically, startup culture can be. Reading more like a really long essay in the New Yorker, this has less of the usual intimacies of a memoir, which makes that subtitle feel like a misnomer. Truly, this is a journalistic expose of the machismo driving the explosive development of Silicon Valley, and how that un-tempered, white-male energy has created what one should conclude are some pretty hefty ethical and societal problems. It is poginant, well-written, and troubling. I'd certainly recommend it, especially for anyone in tech.

I'm not surprised this book doesn't have a higher rating on here, because it presents a controversial view of the tech industry and if you disagree with that view then it's easy to find reasons to dislike the book. That being said, I thought this book was great. The writing is a little stylistic, but in a good way, and the author is clearly very smart. She clearly put a lot of thought into this book.

Excellent read. As a member of the “tech community” I, we, would do well to get MORE of this sort of first-hand look at this industry. For a book that feels like you can't put it down, it paradoxically makes you stop and think about how what she's writing about is so common in the day to day. Tech culture is weird. It's flawed. It could use a big shake-up. I hope things evolve in the next 10+ years.

I lived this book. The ONLY thing I didn't like about this was how little she advocated for support as a career. It seems like she was constantly shitting on herself or her team for being disposable...it's just not the case.

The thing I appreciated most was just how much this book emphasized the depth of the ecosystem. For instance, “the analytics software” or “the open source start up” which anyone who had worked in the business would know. That said, I knew that people who hadn't wouldn't. Made me recognize how insulated this whole thing is. Very good.

What at first feels like an exposé of Silicon Valley's slimy underbelly quickly becomes a much more nuanced story about the role of the individual in a world driven, not just by data, but by manufactured ideals of the Good Life.
The author's voice is stark and honest. She has more than her fair share of stories to tell, but maintains a very true sense of being a semi-entitled, fairly well read normal person with no direction, trying to “make it” and always feeling like she's failing, mostly because she's not sure what succeeding is supposed to look like for her.
Her stories about sexism are shocking, her inside knowledge of data harvesting and disturbing content are every bit as juicy as you want them to be, but even though that's what I was hoping to find in this story, it all plays second fiddle to her internal struggles regarding trying to find purpose, and understand all the hypocrisies in modern society. It really helped me look at the world, and want to ask some fresh questions, like “why are the brightest minds in our time all just trying to optimize ad-tech?”
You should read this book.

This book scratches that insider's-tell-all itch. So many of these tech bro tropes sadly still hold water even years later and Wiener spares no one, even if it's through a veil of vague shorthand. Both conscious and unconscious bias still runs rampant in the wake of the Bon Appétit debacle and so may others like it, since a number of tech managers have tech backgrounds but no management laurels. Wiener describes the tip of the ice berg while the rest is still bobbing along under the surface waiting to be scrutinized and changed for the better before it sinks us all.

A chronicle by a young woman, who comes from the analog world of publishing, and falls into a career in Silicon Valley, working for a series of technology startups. She observes and participates in the lifestyle, guided by the allure of money, the potential of digitization, of optimization for optimization's sake. Her new world is full of free snacks, self-importance, company sponsored ski-trips, and a echo-chamber of philosphies by thinkers that idolize startup billionaires. No one questions what all their data-harvesting will lead to, or how their industry transforms their neighborhoods. I thought this was quite brilliant. Obviously you need to come to it with a certain knowledge of the scene. Then you can chuckle at Wiener's hilarious digs and truths, cleverly hidden-in-sight references for people and companies, all part of a culture that seems to be a parody of itself. The commentary is wry and witty, the prose quite exquisite, lots of feminism, and there's a self-awareness in it, that only let's you off the hook if you read this for pure entertainment. I'd line this up with the writing of [a:Ellen Ullman 80270 Ellen Ullman https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1375987657p2/80270.jpg]. SF's earlier coding culture had a similar energy, and now probably comes off as the more grounded parent of startup-culture's self-propagating pipe dreams. Glossary “the ebook start-up” ... Oyster“the data-analytics start-up” ... ? “the open-source start-up” ... Github“the search-engine giant” ... Google “the microblogging platform” ... Twitter“the home-sharing platform” ... Airbnb“the social network everybody hated” ... Facebook“the online superstore” ... amazonPatrick ... Patrick Collison, CEO of payment processor Stripemore glossary can be found here