Uncanny Valley

Memoirs and autobiographies are often about score-settling. But that’s not the case with Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener’s insightful and revealing account of her years working for three tech startups in Silicon Valley. You might expect to know at least the names of the companies where she worked, giving focus to her exposé of the sexism and sometimes cruel management practices she witnessed, but no. Not one of the companies is identified by name. This is a Silicon Valley memoir that is all about one woman’s experience with “the raw male id of the industry, a Greek chorus of the perpetually online.”A Silicon Valley memoir without a score to settleIn fact, there are precious few proper nouns anywhere in Uncanny Valley. There are no brand names, and not a single company is identified by name. Oh, they’re easy to figure out:** “The social network everyone hated” (Facebook)** “An on-demand ride-sharing startup” (Uber)** “A computer-animation studio famous for its high-end children’s entertainment” (Pixar)** “The search-engine giant” (Google)** “The home-sharing platform” (Airbnb)** “A renowned private university in Palo Alto that was largely considered a feeder for the tech industry” (Stanford)** “The highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate” (Microsoft)These are perfectly obvious to anyone with even passing familiarity with the tech industry, and no doubt Wiener meant it that way. But the device does help to create a sense of distance between us as readers and the companies. However, by contrast, I was able to figure out the name of only one of the three companies where she worked: Github (which Microsoft purchased in 2018 for $7.5 billion).A Silicon Valley memoir that’s sometimes funny and always insightfulWiener’s pithy observations about the tech industry are sometimes funny and always insightful. At “a monthly salon for the data curious” sponsored by one of her employers,” she witnessed “a fireside chat between two venture capitalists. . . It was like watching two ATMs in conversation.” And she describes one of the companies where she worked as “a company of twentysomethings run by twentysomethings. The CEO had never had a full-time job; he had only ever held a summer internship.” Wiener devotes considerable space to describing such experiences. But, naturally, she pays special attention to the under-appreciated role of women in the industry. For example, “The CEO and solutions manager agreed we needed more women on Support [where Wiener worked], but they didn’t hire any.”“Immersion therapy for internalized misogyny”The experience of working in such a testosterone-driven environment took a toll on her and the few other women at her company. “Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men — I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up.”On a personal noteI have rarely felt so old as when I read in Uncanny Valley. Of course, I have grandchildren older than the author, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. But the music, the food, the drugs, the clothing, and the personal habits Wiener describes in writing about her own life and that of her Silicon Valley colleagues strike me as utterly . . . well, alien. In the end, I found myself thinking of this memoir as an exercise in anthropology, exploring the little-understood culture of the tech world and of a new generation I can only dimly comprehend.About the authorI found myself wondering how any Silicon Valley tech work could write so well. After all, aren’t they all supposed to be math geeks? Then I checked out Anna Wiener, only to discover that she’s a contributing writer at The New Yorker, which is sometimes considered to publish the best-written articles and stories in America. (So it seems to me, at least.) However, it’s clear from context that Wiener is no typical liberal arts grad miscast as a tech worker. She admits to an affinity for math and is a graduate of a math-and-science magnet high school in Manhattan. She is obviously ferociously bright: as she notes, she was hired by one company because they mysteriously asked her during her initial interview to take the LSAT, and she got a perfect score. A New York native, Wiener now lives in San Francisco and writes about startup culture and technology.

In her mid-twenties, Anna Wiener is in New York City, working a low paid job in the publishing industry. Everyone she knows is working the same kind of barely making it job as they check their safety net of parents wondering how long they could subsist as they 'paid their dues'. When she has the chance to change her life and move to California and work in the technology industry, she jumps at the chance.She works there for half a decade, cycling between several tech start-ups and more established technology companies. Anna doesn't have technical skills; she isn't a programmer or a data scientist or a security guru. She works in customer service, fielding calls for help, tracking down copyright infringements and checking company content boards for offensive and illegal content. She is incredibly well paid compared to her NYC days and the culture is very different. Employee structures are flat and perks abound. Remote work is allowed and encouraged.But there are drawbacks as well. A higher salary doesn't mean much when all the technology money has made the real estate market so expensive that it is the rare person who doesn't have to have roommates well past the age that most people are on their own. Perks don't mean much in work weeks that routinely are expected to be eighty to a hundred hours weekly. Women are marginalized as are the non-tech employees. The buzz word for compensation is meritocracy but it's strange how the merit all seems to reside in young, white males who look just like the founders of these young companies.Uncanny Valley is a term used in the technology industry. It refers to the fact that individuals respond more favorably to robots that appear human, but if the robot gets too human appearing, a revulsion sets in. It is a metaphor for the technology industry that appears fascinating and desirable from the outside but is anxiety producing and barren from an insiders' view. It is the casual data driven environment where every purchase and opinion is tracked and sold to companies so that they can better target their products and influence society. It is a cautionary tale that only an insider can tell. This book is recommended for readers of nonfiction and especially for those considering a career in technology.

I bought this book because I saw someone reading it on the tube and was intrigued by the title. I knew the term as referring to an android robot whose appearance falls in the “valley” between human and not human thus engendering feelings of revulsion and fear. I guess this definition could also apply to the entire world of tech startups and tech giants revealed in this brilliant book. The author negotiated a career in this space, fulfilling the essential role of customer service, on a lower rung than the coders and entrepreneurs, but requiring skills of communication and emotional intelligence as well as technical knowledge. The book explains the startup model where venture capitalists pour vast sums into projects which use information technology to disrupt traditional businesses and public services. The results of this we are using and being used by today, but uneasily, we (and the industry insiders in this memoir) become aware of values we may have lost sight of. The examples in this book of ripping up and starting again in the cloud “dog walking” and “cities”. As served up, with tough minded cod philosophy and motivational hype. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Fun read, but not news to anyone working connected with the industry - still lots of juicy tales to tell about the dysfunctional world of startups and the disconnects at personal and technical level, and gender politics galore. not as shocking as some of the Real Life revelations - for me, the go to book in this area was Thomas Pynchon (yes, that Thomas Pynchon)'s hilarious novel Bleeding Edge, that came out 7+ years ago, and covers the Silicon Alley madness, but with a grander, madder vision (almost Neal Stephenson territory) - its been real

Could have been a good story, all the elements are there.A non-tech person looking at the San Francisco startup world from the inside, someone who is articulate and not blinded by that world.And for some reason it reads like the chronicle of a bad breakup with a toxic partner, one of those where even after years you still cannot stop talking about them.There's a hint of relief at no longer being there and at the same time regret because you did not become a millionaire.Not what I wanted to read, a bitter disappointment

Five star review even with an ending that make zero sense; was it a conclusion? Was it an ellipsis for a sequel? None the less, it was a great look into a world Millenial parents have been kept out of and helps to illuminate a life we can’t comprehend. We understand drinking beer and going to shows but that becoming a millionaire while you do it is new.

The book was very easy to read and engaging. To me much of the jargon is familiar, and pretentious vapourware. The dream versus the actual reality is still work in progress and will resolve itself in unexpected ways.One assumes the work is partly autobiographical and is an individual’s view of current West Coast culture. As a child of the 60’s I see parallels with the prevailing ethos of that time. However, the backdrop of American dysfunctional politics will be the wild card in this tale.Worth a read to calibrate your attitude to the digital technology revolution.