Uncanny Valley
Anna Wiener
The prescient, page-turning account of a journey in Silicon Valley: a defining memoir of our digital ageIn her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener—stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial--left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress. Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. more
281 pages, Hardcover
First published MCD
3.64
Rating
32980
Ratings
3940
Reviews
Anna Wiener
4 books 539 followers
Community reviews
HM. The first 25% was so strong but then it became a long decrescendo. I enjoyed this as an audiobook, I find memoirs work really well when someone is reading them to you and you feel like they're coming right from the authors mouth, but this definitely started to become repetitive and the message of "tech is sexist and I didn't fit in" got boring. I definitely learned some stuff and enjoyed moments but it fell a bit flat 3. more
Wiener is a very good writer, and I really liked the original essay that inspired the book. But this felt too much like a long-form essay extended into a book, with little narrative arc. I never felt that invested in the narrator (Weiner), or what would happen in the broader world she's inhabiting. Just when you think a subplot is developing it peters out, or is muted by a lack of elaboration (eg Pizzagate). The narration felt very distant, like someone who's chipping away at a core truth, but can't quite get at it. more
UPDATE 11. 24. 20 - how the HELL did this qualify to be one of NYT’s Best Books of the Year. I just quit reading their list after seeing it on there because REALLY. I mean, it wasn’t the worst book of the year but I MEAN. more
In her debut memoir, Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener recounts how, at age 25, she abandoned her drab job at a New York literary agency for a high-paying customer support role at a Silicon Valley start-up. In compulsively readable prose the writer describes how the excitement she first felt toward working in the tech industry soon soured, after repeated encounters with her white male peers’ sexism, racism, and disregard for user privacy. As she recounts her story she adroitly links her disillusionment to the nation’s growing disgust with the amorality and arrogance of Big Tech and Big Data. The work’s swift and easy to digest, but there’s not much reportage or analysis here and Wiener’s critique of Silicon Valley’s culture of privilege is solid but offers little that’s new. more
This book is badged as an inside look into the world of tech bro’s by a woman who was there. However, the books main insights, that the men who work in Silicon Valley are mainly white, middle-class and supremely confident men who think that every idea they have has value, are nothing you didn’t already know. I kept on reading, expecting that there would be a ‘gotcha’ moment, an insight into a well-known public occurrence, but it never came. It felt like it was written for people who don’t follow the online world at all. I’ve never worked in tech but there are so many articles about Silicon Valley culture that give you the same insights without subjecting you to excruciatingly detailed descriptions of awful sounding parties. more
I usually avoid reading about tech, but the excerpt on n plus one made me laugh out loud. Once I actually picked the book up, it was really hard to put down. The writing in this book is so good. It's funny, and it's incisive, and it really captures a specific time and place extremely well. Men in restaurants are "dressed, typically, to traverse a glacier. more
Swimming In the Kool-AidHere’s the skinny: your attempt to change the world will result in more global misery; your commitment to some idea/dream/vision will inevitably be subjugated to your need for the power necessary to realise it; your enthusiasm will gradually transform into obsession which will alienate the people who care about you the most. Ultimately you will be disappointed and probably blame others. You won’t be wrong to do so. Baby-boomers did not invent the notion of self-actualisation, but we made it popular. ‘Be all you can be. more
DNF - got bored and stopped about halfway through. The memoir is unfocused and uncompelling. There are many stories out there about sexism and naked ambition in Silicon Valley but, unfortunately, this one doesn't contribute anything to those dialogues. There's a lot of telling and not much showing. Wiener pops the word sexism in every now and then as if she forgot that it was supposed to be a proper topic of conversation in her memoir. more
Uncanny Valley is Anna Wiener’s story of working in tech, primarily in Silicon Valley. Anna is looking to leave her NY-based job in publishing, seeking more from a career. Millennials were flocking to the West coast, where the tech industry continued to grow — software, digital service providers, and social media platforms, all making a name for themselves and marking their presence. Anna decides to join them. In this book, she details her work experience at a few different companies: one book related, one focused on data analytics, and the other, open source software — both the day-to-day and events like offsite team retreats. more
Audiobook. read by Suehyla El-Attar [8 hours and 14 minutes]For Anna Wiener, working in the high tech industry from where she came from - a literary book background - was like learning a foreign language. For the old farts who have lived in the Bay Area and witnessed the Silicon Valley growth - the tech growth - the changes from fruit orchards to new startups - will be shaking their heads - smiling & laughing - cringing occasionally - while saying. ”oh, my gosh, YES”. THE SILICON VALLEY is sooo well presented through the eyes of *Anna*. more
These are the days of miracles and wonderthis is the long-distance callthe way the camera follows us in slow-mothe way we look to us allthe way we look to a distant constellationthat’s dying in a corner of the skythese are the days of miracles and wonderand don’t cry, baby, don’t cryI heard Paul Simon’s “Boy in the Bubble” in the car this morning and felt the way I always do when I hear it: That it could have been written yesterday. And because I’ve been thinking about Uncanny Valley lately, it made me think about that. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by startup culture. I think part of it is that I feel like it happened while my back was turned. While I was working for a small press that still sent authors hard copies of proofs, people on the other side of the country were remaking the world. more
uncanny valley was a weirdly intimate look into a bubble i know all too well. i congratulated myself for understanding wiener's references to both dead french theorists and viral vc tweets, remembered my own first encounters with cowen-style rationalists and custom slack reacts, then wondered whether it was self-indulgent to read a 200 page inside joke. but so what. i've grown to expect every tech piece i read to be either a how-to guide or an investigative take-down. at its core, uncanny valley is neither of the above. more
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. more
Mis-sold and over-hyped. More space in this book was given over to description of shoes, clothes and food than to actual issues of gender discrimination. Also, quite self-absorbed. Maybe she was not taken seriously in technical companies, because she had zero technical background, not because she happens to be a woman. I am sure there are many men out there who did not make it for this reason. more
I am truly vexed as to why this book is getting so many positive reviews from so many people I admire. The author projects herself as naive as to the power and harm of tech and capitalism. I don't buy this narrative of naivete. But even if one does, she never fully investigates her position. Instead, she projects a constant tone of blase guilt and self-loathing, while still working in tech and being compensated VERY well for her trouble. more
Too real. I drank at those bars. I ate those salads. I did the scavenger hunt that the team building place by the tunnel puts on. This book was uncomfortable for me to read. more
DNF. I tried and tried again but my interest in start ups and the excessive money they draw is just not there. For the most part this is garnering good reviews, but it's just not for me. more
As a young person myself, I am interested into anything tech. Though I'm not familiar with all the references she mentioned in the book - and how damn lot they were - I enjoyed this very much. more
Silicon Valley, a place in which Anna Wiener was overwhelmingly outnumbered by men in the technological sphere, is still as dominated by white males as it was decades ago. Minorities and female workers are present but not as often as you might believe. Wiener certainly has some mettle to overlook these issues and decide to add at least one more woman to the Silicon Valley workforce. She details some important topics and discusses just how prevalent sexism, unwanted sexual advances and sexual harassment were during her employment at a tech start-up. At its heart, it is a feminist coming of age tale and instead of telling the sugar-coated version of events she courageously tells it exactly how it was. more
This isn't exactly a memoir, at least not in a traditional way. And it isn't an exposé of Silicon Valley, since not much in here is very surprising. Wiener takes us in her experience but also holds us at arm's length. Her prose has a level of remove to it: she rarely refers to people or companies by name, she moves us through this brandless, nameless place as if we're seeing it all through a muddying lens that blurs it all. She rarely tells us her own feelings or experiences, you can forget it's a memoir much of the time. more
Grande delusione. L’autrice, laurea in sociologia, upper class, decide di lasciare NY dove lavora in una piccola casa editrice indipendente per lavorare nel magico mondo delle start up della costa est, e si trasferisce a San Francisco. Il perché lo faccia non è del tutto chiaro, ma del resto non è neppure chiaro perché lavori in una casa editrice, dal momento che non manifesta mai un particolare interesse per i libri, limitandosi a dire in un’occasione di aver letto Foucault e di credere nella forza della parola (allusione alla parresía foucaultiana. Boh). Sicuramente è spinta, e lo dice apertamente, dal desiderio di guadagnare di più: desiderio naturalmente legittimo, se non fosse che la Wiener propugna continuamente una equazione del tipo “valore personale = soldi”, “valore personale = successo”, “soldi/successo = amore e riconoscimento da parte della collettività”, che oltre ad essere irritante è anche discutibile. more
Anna Wiener left behind NYC and a job in publishing for a position at a Silicon Valley startup. With no experience in tech, her position in customer service / data analytics isn't valued by the industry. It's a boy's club supported by venture capitalists and dripping in extravagance. There are ski vacations, open bars at the office, and flexible schedules while demanding corporate fealty above the personal lives of employees. The lifestyle perks and salary lure Wiener in to the bubble but not without eventually understanding the culture created by the industry, which she isn't afraid to discuss in detail. more
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. more
Hype can be a good and bad thing for a book. For me, the hype ruined Uncanny Valley. Since maybe July of last year, 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, not very well written piece of nonfiction that recycles many opinions about tech that I've heard before. The author, Anna Wiener, is a tech outsider. more
mmmm bleh. i enjoyed the first half way more than the second half. i just really wanted the book to end differently, in a more confronting-complicity-in-tech kind of way but this really wasn’t that kind of book unfortunately. i thought i’d read this and feel a little better about some of the ppl in tech and the state of san francisco but i really fooled myself. lol anna is a good writer but i just wanted more complicated FEELINGS. more
In this her first book, Anna Wiener has nailed the world of tech culture from her vantage point of being an insider yet feeling like an outsider. She moves to San Francisco after being a Brooklynite for most of her 25 years and experiences the dislocation blues acutely like most people. For those of us on the outside, it's not really clear what her high paying job entails or what the startup produces. For that matter, what do any of the startups she eventually works for do to amass the enormous paydays and perks that their employees enjoy. What this reader got from this book was not a deeper understanding of those roles, but of what it meant for a book loving person finding herself working for an industry that is attempting to dismantle that industry, and what it means to be a woman in a mostly male-driven industry. more
I really enjoyed this, disturbing as it is. Every veiled reference in this book is immediately recognizable to someone working and living in tech SF during the 2nd dot com boom. For better or for worse. She nails the time and place. Wiener is scathing, precise; her writing is top notch as you'd expect from a New Yorker contributor. more
I agree with my friend and former coworker, Patrick Brown - too real. I was a startup CEO in San Francisco for over 10 years, and I ate at those restaurants, went to those bars, took my company for an outing at the same place by the Stockton tunnel. Weird to see a different lens on the places I know. And yet, I don't recognize the San Francisco she describes. In fact, I found myself rejecting it again and again, and almost put this book down. more
Try as I might I could not get into this book. I think the story itself was informative, and it could have been interesting had it been written in a different style. I really struggled with the lack of names. Instead of just calling her co-workers "John" or "Mary" or whatever name she felt like, the author referred to them by their job description, making it impossible for me to connect with any of them. This was a goodreads giveaway and I appreciate the opportunity to try reading something new and different, but it was not my cup of tea. more
Dazzling and brutal at the same time. If you're disillusioned with Silicon Valley, you'll want to read this book. If you're not, you won't want to read this book, but you should. more