Anna is in her 20s and ambitious. She doesn't like her job in NYC so thinks maybe a tech one in SF would suit her better. She learns fast and yet doesn't get the recognition she wants or attention she feels she deserves. Misogyny is rampant in the tech industries. She wasn't counting on that. There are hirings, firings, scandels throughout the book, but since this is a nonfiction memoir and she never names the companies she works for or the people she works with, we don't get a full sense of what's going on. I found the writing sometimes evocative yet sometimes downright confusing.

Hype can be a good and bad thing for a book. For me, the hype ruined Uncanny Valley. Since maybe July of 2019, this book has been heralded as a send-up of Silicon Valley, a scathing and witty critique of everything wrong with tech culture, by Goodreads and The New York Times alike. I was expecting such when I picked it up, only to discover that it is a completely mediocre piece of nonfiction that recycles many opinions about tech that I've heard before.

The author, Anna Wiener, is a tech outsider. She's an assistant at a publishing company in New York, working hard for minimum wage, before deciding to leave the industry and work for an ebook startup - still literature-adjacent, but with more of a tech bent. When that job doesn't work out, she moves to San Francisco and joins a data analytics startup in a customer support role. After a few years there, she moves to work for Github. She realizes that she does not like the self-importance of tech, how everyone in the industry thinks they're changing the world when they're really ruining it. She critiques the subcultures and hobbies that abound here: spiritualism (think: yoga, astrology, reiki, sound baths, silent meditation retreats), crafts and working with your hands for fun, obsessive and mandatory team bonding in city-wide scavenger hunts and happy hours and ski trips, etc. She hates the sexism and lack of diversity that is so commonplace here. She hates talking to other people in tech, particularly brogrammers (despite kinda dating one, oops). She hates it all! But she doesn't leave the industry.

I felt that Wiener's book may have been more topical and relevant a few years ago. In fact, it ends right after the 2016 election, where the author is truly awakened out of her coastal elite bubble. Since then, we've seen countless send-ups of the industry, repeating the same ideas that everyone has of how overrated and self-obsessed tech is. I don't think that this book adds anything new to the growing zeitgeist of how terrible Silicon Valley is.

The writing style was also off-putting to me. Instead of referring to companies and people by their names, she dubs them with obvious epithets, repeats them a million times, and makes the reader do the work of putting two and two together. Facebook is "the social network everyone hates." Amazon is "the online superstore." Google is "the search engine giant." Microsoft is "the litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate" (or something like that). Her own employer, Github, is "the open-source startup." Even The Matrix is "a movie about a group of hackers who discover that life is a simulation." THE MATRIX. JUST SAY THE NAME OF THE MOVIE. I didn't form a connection with any of her coworker-characters because she didn't even give most of them names. Instead, she referred to them by job title: "the solutions manager," "the data analytics company CEO," "the technical co-founder," etc. All of this felt impersonal to me.

Wiener also does a lot of telling, not showing. Instead of giving us a compelling narrative about one of her work retreats, she presents a list of compound activities of general actions that happened on the trip: e.g. there was drinking, people played games, we ate at a diner. Not only is she generalizing these activities and implying that the apply to every company in this industry, but she's not making me feel engaged with the subject matter and story at hand. This technique might be effective for an article or essay (which I understand is how this book was originally presented), but it's not effective for a long-form work of nonfiction.

Overall, the hype killed this for me. If I hadn't expected something great, I might have liked this a little more (still not that much, I'll admit). Thank you to FSG for the ARC via Netgalley!

I was a big fan of Silicon Valley (the HBO show) and like memoirs so decided to try this out.

As the book opens, the author is working as assistant in NY publishing. She's overworked, underpaid and not getting promoted, so she decides to take a (non-tech) job at a Silicon Valley start-up.

I liked the writing and found the author's observations sharp and insightful. But the book felt long for something that's really just a LOT of observation. I kept wishing for more structure. It felt too long for what it was.

In the end, this is a book about being in your 20s, having a job you hate, living in a city (after reading this I could never live in San Francisco), feeling like there must be more to life. The portrait of the tech industry is also not great (a misogynstic industry that pretends it's improving our lives while being obsessed with a) collecting big data, b) getting us addicted to their technology and c) spying on us under the guise of improving their products. Yikes.)

A great premise and some engaging early chapters, but my interest started to peter out around the halfway point. I was hoping for a new or more unique look at the female perspective of working in Silicon Valley, but there wasn't a lot of unique insights here. In the end, it just fell a little flat for me.

Listened on audio. I was disappointed by this book unfortunately. It didn’t grab me as much as I was hoping, although I am interested to know which companies the writer worked for.

It does give an interesting look into the tech industry and startup programs.

This is the third audiobook I’ve listened to in the past few months that is focused on Silicon Valley. The first two concentrated on the development and life of specific companies, namely Yahoo and Google, whereas this book takes a look at the culture of technology start-ups. Having previously worked in publishing and at a literary agency in New York, Anna Wiener joined a four-person start-up who were developing an eBook reader app. She was to be the person who knew books amongst this small group of techies. This experience turned out to be short lived, however, as she was soon tempted out to San Francisco where she worked at a data analytics company for the next 18 months. Her third job in a technology start-up, also in the Bay Area, was at an open source software development company – essentially a company that develops software for software developers.

I’d observed from the Yahoo and Google books that a clear distinction exists between technical staff (typically computer engineers or coders) and non-technical staff (sales people, administrators and others in customer facing roles). In short, the technical staff are valued the most. Anna finds this out quite quickly and though it clearly rankles she also finds enough interest and reward to keep her working in this industry for a number of years. She walks us through her various roles, her interactions with people inside the companies and her mindset as she wrestled with elements of her work that clearly don’t sit easily with her.

One element here that I found frustrating is that Wiener seems to have an aversion to names: the people she comes across are simply labelled entrepreneur, technologist, CEO, venture capitalist etc. And the same goes for the companies she works for, uses or simply expresses an opinion upon, these being designated as the Seattle software conglomerate or the social media platform everybody hates. Is there a reason for this or is it simply a style choice? I’m not sure, but I didn’t like it. I did manage to work out some of the companies touched on (I think), with my list including Amazon, Google, Uber, eBay and Facebook. But of course I may be wrong.

The other key thing here – and I found it to be the main thrust of the book – is that in Wiener’s opinion Silicon Valley is run by men, and usually men she doesn’t like very much. She particularly dislikes the way that these men treat the women in their employ. The author, a self confessed feminist, does go some way to explaining how she formed this view and the examples she gives are reasonably persuasive. But for me what fights against this is her obvious antipathy toward the male species in general. Others may disagree but I found it to be a pervasive flavour throughout.

Overall I enjoyed the insight this book provided into how things work in a technology start-up. I also admired the author’s ability to string sentences together, often using obscure words and phrases. But Wiener herself came across as a royal pain in the arse. I know I'll be an outlier here but I'm afraid I found the whole thing to be way too annoying and for this reason I can only award it two stars.

I really enjoyed this book, it's funny and engaging and put into words a lot of things I was feeling about the tech industry although as a definite outsider. I liked her take as an insider but still an outsider and also find it interesting to contemplate what tech is doing to our society and world. There were parts that made me laugh out loud and also made me contemplate the power of Silicon Valley.

Anna Wiener's memoir follows her departure from the New York publishing circle and change of career where she takes up a position in a tech start-up in of Silicon Valley.

This suffered from unrealistic expectations on my part: I've seen the book billed as a number of things - comparable to Joan Didion, a brutal expose on the sexist bro culture of the tech start-up business - and while, yes, the writing is good, companions to Didion are going a bit far. I don't know much about start-ups and while I don't wish to devalue the not so great experience Wiener had I just didn't find her revelations all that mind-blowing or revelatory.

An easy breezy read (due to the solid writing) which I wouldn't discourage others from reading... I think I'm just burnt out on tech memoirs!

This is an eye opening and thought provoking memoir about silicon valley, start ups, and figuring out what it means to be yourself when you're not really sure who you are yet. While I found this book to be incredibly interesting and compelling reading, as well as enormously thought provoking to me, I did have a slight sharpness in my response to it that I didn't particularly enjoy. Wiener examines things between the culture she leaves behind and the one she ends up in while confronting her own expectations she holds to herself along with the ideals she wants to embody. At times I was frustrated with her efforts to be both immersed in the tech culture and above it all, but like I mentioned already, to have a book and an author make you confront real feelings and ideas is still a valuable reading experience. I think the writing was wonderful, she is clearly very talented and an interesting writer. I'm excited to se what else she does but might have appreciated more time in between the living and the writing for this memoir.

👍Pick it: If you need another reason to disable spyware, or better yet!, dismantle every device you own.
👎Skip it: If you still genuinely think of Zuck as post-breakup Jessie Eisenberg, and “TheFacebook” an innocent vehicle for his sorrow.

Uncanny Valley is a work of genre-stretching bounds: a Silicon Valley exposé, a cautionary tech-bro tale, a coming-of-age-in-the-startup-age memoir.

And while whistleblowing is all the rage, Wiener’s narrative is distinctly refreshing. She makes no attempt to escape complicit involvement in and infatuation for the (promise of the) Promise Land forged by the hands of 21-year-old billionaires.

She does not feign aloof nor claims to be early-bird woke to Silicon toxicity. Instead, her experience reads like a concession. She drank the nootropic-spiked Koolaid, minimized the malignant behaviors simmering within startup culture, scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, addicted like the rest of us, and made an easy, six-figure salary promoting the narrative.

Despite Wiener’s techno-skeptic position, Uncanny Valley will not read like your aunt’s snarky, uneducated, rant on 'the social network everyone hated'. She’s clever. She’s linguistically-versed. She’s an empathetic-forward analyst, attempting to find the heartbeat within the Valley’s shallowest characters.

Uncanny Valley is a blatant warning about the implications of our tech-hunger. But Wiener is asking readers to meditate on much weightier concepts than the consequences should they choose to swipe right, like:

Why does screen-free stillness actually feel ominous?
When did disconnect become sacrilegious?
Am I paying attention?
Is my identity my own?
Or have we all merely become data-generated humanoids, predictable algorithms feeding the Big Brother beast?

While I found the look into the workplace and its culture to be somewhat interesting, I just couldn't get into this memoir. It was a bit of a slough for me to read as I found the writing style and lack of nuance to be its downfall. "Uncanny Valley" reads more like a long form essay than any memoirs I've read in recent years. There doesn't seem to be anything distinctive or a draw.

Anna Wiener's workplace memoir explores her behind-the-scenes experiences at some Silicon Valley startups during the dot.com gold rush years. She witnesses disruption and innovation on many levels, and finds herself inhabiting an economic and cultural frontier that's contemporary, complex, and continuously evolving. Ms. Wiener does an excellent job describing cultural and economic development of the tech industry, along with rapid changes in the SF Bay Area. She juxtaposes history and geography with nuances of her personal career growth and vulnerabilities. This insider's view of the often-bizarre startup culture offers provocative themes for discussion: who controls tech, women in the workplace, cyber addiction, new tech vs. tradition, rags/riches disparity, idealism, ethics, power dynamics, gig economy, life purpose, ambition. Highly recommended for those interested in the high stakes world of IT and social media, delivered by a reliable and entertaining storyteller.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC of this book. A memoir about discovering who you are in your mid-20s, set in Silicon Valley. Initially, I expected this would be an expose of the early days of the start-up boom, and to an extent it is, but the overarching theme is what it's like to be in your mid-20s and still figuring out your place. The author spends a lot of time comparing herself to her (mostly male) peers, usually feeling as though she's falling short. Those who remember going through a similar soul-searching at that age (or those currently experiencing it) will likely relate, regardless of your career path. Anna writes with self-awareness and humor, and while I think she lets some male peers off too easily, I appreciated she tried to portray (most of) them as more than just cookie-cutter tech bros. Those looking for a hard-hitting examination of the challenges women in tech face should look elsewhere, as this is a more personal story that only scratches the surface of those issues.

It was interesting to read the experiences of someone who had very little interest in technology outside of everyday use, as she navigated the innards of start-up culture. I definitely got the impression the book was talking to people who similarly didn't have any interest in or familiarity with the sector beforehand, though, and as such, I didn't really read anything new to me. It would be a pretty good introduction to the bizarre cultural bubble of that particular chunk (both in space and time) of start-up culture, though.

Recommended for anyone interested in the tech sector's cultural influence, but who may not necessarily be sure where to begin.

Debut author Anna Wiener shares her engaging professional story of her move from a small Brooklyn, N.Y. literary agency to an exciting new tech start-up: “Uncanny Valley: A Memoir” highlights the big money, big deals, contracts of big business, the big talent and big egos of the male staff that dominated the Silicon Valley tech industry. Fifty men and six women worked at the (unnamed) tech start-up where Weiner was first employed.

While living in her North Brooklyn apartment --furnished with second hand furniture, a roommate she barely knew, Wiener’s position as an assistant editor at a NYC literary agency had run its course. There was no room for advancement except to marry rich, inherit money, wait for colleagues to transfer or die. Wiener’s $31,000 annual salary (no benefits) wasn’t enough to live on—even with no credit card or educational debt and no dependents. Wiener loved the free hardback books, and the rapidly shrinking book world as she knew it— still, she interviewed for a non-tech position for an e-book start up: she got the job. “Hello, San Francisco!”

The $65,000 annual salary with company dental and medical benefits was almost too good to be true. Wiener treats readers to amazing descriptions not only of the tech industry, but of San Francisco: the Castro and Mission districts (where she lived) the hippies, freaks, weirdos, leather daddies, the rambunctious homeless population, the paid company group ski trip and various company sponsored retreats.
Wiener’s new job was similar to providing customer support to a small team of (boy-men) software developers: “like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny”. Wiener soothed, cheered them up, affirmed, advocated for success and ordered them pizza. One colleague had a PhD in Biology and wanted to be known as the doctor. The 25 year old CEO was “ambitious and awkward”; she appreciated his “hard-won praise”, and he reminded her of her high school classmates at a Manhattan math science school.

Often the storyline was hard to follow. Wiener seldom named names and never identified start-ups or tech companies she wrote about. Rereading the story doesn’t help. Her boyfriend Ian, worked in robotics and very little was revealed about their relationship. I wondered if they had broken up a few times. Noah, a trusted co-worker, was fired from her team and was (likely) very successful in tech. Now “Patrick”, I think, may have been the man himself—though, we have no way of knowing. Still, Wiener is a marvelous storyteller, and I wouldn’t want to miss anything she might write in the future. ** With thanks and appreciation to Farrar, Straus, Giroux, via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.

Job listings are an excellent place to get sprayed with HR’s idea of fun and a 23-year-old’s idea of work-life balance.

I identified with so much of this book - not necessary the tech piece, as I've never worked in tech - but the boy's club mentality highlighted throughout the book and perks from upper-management who have no idea what employees really want had me actually laughing out loud. Turns out being a woman is pretty much the same bullshit across industries (which wasn't entirely expected, but was still disappointing).

The other piece I loved was the culture talk - we've all been on Slack dropping an emoji to show we're present, trying to use the most buzzwords, feeling alternatively invested and disgusted at ourselves and our place in the corporate monster.

I would've liked more ties to Anna's real life outside of work, or more of the overarching consequences of all the choices that she was semi-present for, but would recommend regardless!

This memoir is about working in the boys club that is Silicon Valley, but I feel like it was such a spot-on takedown of office culture in so many industries. The whole 'work hard, play hard' thing - work 80 hours a week, but you can drink beer at your desk! - has always been a peeve of mine. I loved how Weiner didn't mention any corporate entities, but you knew exactly who she was talking about. Brilliantly written and truly anger-inducing, I highly recommend it!

I was very interested to learn more about all of this!
One thing that frustrated me was everything was coded and I didn’t know which social media or which big company the author was talking about. I had my guesses but was never sure.
It spans from the last turn of the decade almost until the last presidential election.
The book does explain the tech terms nicely, and it was cool to see how algorithms for things like Instagram were developed. I did learn a lot.
It did also feel a little long, but painted a nice photo of behind the scenes of a startup in San Francisco!

When we first meet Anna Weiner in this memoir, she is an underpaid Brooklynite trying to eke out a decent living in publishing. She and her friends are trying to figure out if the shabby glamour of book publishing is worth the low wages, the long hours, and the very unclear career path forward. So when she has the opportunity to jump ship and move into the tech world, she jumps. She is skeptical about San Francisco and the tech world, but seduced by high salaries and the optimism of tech. For years, she works in offices where people wear hoodies and ride ripsticks. She sells consumer data to companies, she moderates discussion boards that grow increasingly sexist, antisemitic, and racist, she befriends billionaires. Part of the pleasure of this memoir is an inside look at truly bonkers work life (she doesn't name names presumably because of NDAs, but a lot of companies aren't that hard to figure out). The other part is much more chilling - how a fast-scaling, male-driven, hyper-competitive bubble industry has gotten so much power that it's become one of the most powerful organizing principles of life in this country. We're at a point where you can't really opt out of the internet, smartphones, monolithic tech companies. A really engaging read, but one that will have you very freaked out about our future.

Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley has one of the best book titles of the season. The title is a term from robotics that hit the mainstream with reviews of the unsettling animated Polar Express in 2004: it refers to an inflection point on the curve of emotional response to things that appear human. Highly abstracted images, like a cartoon, get positive responses, as do authentic humans. Representations that come close to being human but don’t quite make it land in the uncanny valley, and appear repellent.

In this case, the term’s a play on Silicon Valley and its startup culture, where Wiener spent several years working. The implication is that its denizens are almost human…but not quite. The term also, however, applies to the book’s proximity to memoir. It’s literally a memoir insofar as it recounts the author’s lived experiences, but never quite connects the dots between her personal journey and the environment it moves through.

It’s understandable, of course, that Wiener might want to hold herself at a distance even in the pages of her own book, since a recurring motif of her account is the commodification of personal information. One of the author’s tech jobs is at a company that helps other companies analyze their users’ behavior so as to best exploit it for profit. In perhaps the book’s most chilling moment, she reveals just how easy it was not just for those companies to peer into their users’ lives, but for employees of her own third-party company to do so.

“It was assumed,” she writes, “we would only look at our customers’ data sets out of necessity, and only when requested by customers themselves; that we would not, under any circumstances, look up individual profiles of our lovers and family members and coworkers in the databases belonging to dating apps and shopping services and fitness trackers and travel sites.” For an author who came from, and subsequently returned to, the New York writerly world, that kind of experience is bound to give a new meaning to “omniscient third-person.”

The result, though, is an account that feels coolly distanced from both its author and its subject. In a wistful passage, Wiener writes about the peers who declined to follow her remunerative path. “My friends’ world was sensuous, emotional, complex. It was theoretical and expressive. It could, at times, be chaotic. This was not the world that analytics software facilitated. It was a world I wasn’t sure I could still call mine.”

Yet, she remained in her adopted industry for years. She started dating a man who worked in robotics and was contractually forbidden from telling her how he spent his days; and befriended a CEO who interrupted one dinner to casually close a deal that turns him into “one of the world’s youngest billionaires.”

A deal for what company? You can figure it out if you really want to, but one of the book’s conceits is that it virtually never names any of the companies Wiener worked at, interacted with, or even patronized as a mere customer. The reasoning might have been to distance Wiener’s story from the name-dropping, logo-popping environment she describes (and there may have been legal incentives to do so), but the effect is to turn the book into a giant crossword puzzle with clues of varying difficulty.

You can probably name “the home-sharing platform” and “an on-demand ride-sharing startup” and “the search-engine giant” and “the microblogging platform,” and no extra points for identifying “a renowned private university in Palo Alto.” It might be a little more challenging to identify “a gaming company that made a viral farming simulator,” and you may or may not have had recent cause to wake up on a Sunday morning and slug “a viscous liquid jacked up with electrolytes — sold as a remedy for small children with diarrhea.”

Affectations aside, though, Uncanny Valley provides an insider’s view of the decade our utopian online aspirations came crashing down to earth. The book ends with that crash, as the 2016 election makes uncomfortably clear that platforms described as inspiringly transformative or, at worst, purely neutral ultimately facilitated the rise of untethered right-wing populists with the potential to cause almost unfathomable damage to human civilization.

No amount of venture capital can close Pandora’s box now, and Wiener acidly argues that it was always naive to think that it could. The world, she suggests, has fallen prey to the technically dazzling but morally empty machinations of businesses that couldn’t even root toxic masculinity from their own ranks, let alone solve the problems of society more broadly.

It’s a stark vision, and an important observation, but the book remains tough to parse because its author holds herself so persistently at a remove from the world she willingly inhabited for much of the 2010s. The details pile up, but the broader picture remains elusive — which is relevant because Wiener is our proxy in this uncomfortable environment. If we could understand why this world was able to hold her, we could better understand its hold on us.

When she does look inward, she arrives at a bracing insight. “My obsession with the spiritual, sentimental, and political possibilities of the entrepreneurial class,” she writes, “was an ineffectual attempt to alleviate my own guilt about participating in a globally extractive project, but more important, it was a projection: they would become the next power elite.

“I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world, and not just for people like themselves.”