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A review by mburnamfink
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener
2.0
A tech start up has three layers. There is The Money, there is the Talent, and there is Everybody Else.
Wiener was the Everybody Else at three startups, going from a stalled low wage job at a New York literary agent, to an ebook startup, then a data analytics firm, and then Github. Meanwhile, she wanders through the back half of her 20s, meets some odd people, and wonders if the internet is eating our brains. As a stylistic aside, the book studiously avoids proper nouns. I can get that maybe Wiener doesn't feel like getting sued by a former employer, but she doesn't take a Lyft home, she hails a ridesharing app. No, not that one. The one with cuter branding but the same exploitative labor practices. This affectation wears out its welcome.
Wiener's basic job was customer support, helping engineers at other companies get the most of the analytics software, and then content moderation at Github. But the job is just an excuse for observations on tech culture circa 2013. These are not particularly novel. Programmers generally are not malodorous antisocial freaks. Instead they tend to tanned fitness fanatics, curious life-hacking optimizers who carefully balance self-improvement exercises and career networking with psychedelic excursions. Wiener has an attitude of genteel snobbery towards these people. With their belief in technical fixes, heirloom 60s counterculture utopianism, and desire to make lots of money, they're simply less cool and less authentic than the Brooklyn hipsters she decamped from.
As a programmer myself, I don't have much glamour about the profession. There's a sorcerer's apprentice joy at getting a piece of code to run, at scaling it to do a tedious task much faster and more easily than a whole stadium of people could. But honestly, it's mostly plumbing, making sure the data flows correctly. And Wiener tries to learn to code over a weekend and decides its not for her.
The Money, the venture capitalists and FAANGs who are the apex predators of the startup ecosystem, are briefly touched on. Two founders appear, one Wiener's boss, an erratic manchild who leads a small reign of terror at his profitable workplace. Another is CEO she befriends after a twitter fight, someone named Patrick who ends the book a billionaire. Wiener chronicles the descent of two unique cultures into generic corporations as they grow and salespeople show up, along with people with actual managerial expertise.
There are obligatory gripes about San Francisco's inability to humanely care for its homeless population, the ways that an endless stream of content is eroding all other human forms, that pointedly contrarian ideologues may not actually be good at compromise and running things. And of course, there are not enough women in tech, and those that are suffer from harassment. But at the moment that formerly beloved startup Basecamp is imploding over a racist list of funny client names, I think we can demand better takes.
Even the descriptions of San Francisco excess are bland, 20 somethings doing shots in an over-designed bar while wearing company hoodies. I've heard some things ("we spent the whole retreat looking for the CEO, who was also our ketamine dealer"), and I'm wholly peripheral to the startup scene.
I'm waiting for a good critical book on the startup ethos, but this isn't it. Its a memoir with the lesson that if you work at being an outsider, you can be one.
Wiener was the Everybody Else at three startups, going from a stalled low wage job at a New York literary agent, to an ebook startup, then a data analytics firm, and then Github. Meanwhile, she wanders through the back half of her 20s, meets some odd people, and wonders if the internet is eating our brains. As a stylistic aside, the book studiously avoids proper nouns. I can get that maybe Wiener doesn't feel like getting sued by a former employer, but she doesn't take a Lyft home, she hails a ridesharing app. No, not that one. The one with cuter branding but the same exploitative labor practices. This affectation wears out its welcome.
Wiener's basic job was customer support, helping engineers at other companies get the most of the analytics software, and then content moderation at Github. But the job is just an excuse for observations on tech culture circa 2013. These are not particularly novel. Programmers generally are not malodorous antisocial freaks. Instead they tend to tanned fitness fanatics, curious life-hacking optimizers who carefully balance self-improvement exercises and career networking with psychedelic excursions. Wiener has an attitude of genteel snobbery towards these people. With their belief in technical fixes, heirloom 60s counterculture utopianism, and desire to make lots of money, they're simply less cool and less authentic than the Brooklyn hipsters she decamped from.
As a programmer myself, I don't have much glamour about the profession. There's a sorcerer's apprentice joy at getting a piece of code to run, at scaling it to do a tedious task much faster and more easily than a whole stadium of people could. But honestly, it's mostly plumbing, making sure the data flows correctly. And Wiener tries to learn to code over a weekend and decides its not for her.
The Money, the venture capitalists and FAANGs who are the apex predators of the startup ecosystem, are briefly touched on. Two founders appear, one Wiener's boss, an erratic manchild who leads a small reign of terror at his profitable workplace. Another is CEO she befriends after a twitter fight, someone named Patrick who ends the book a billionaire. Wiener chronicles the descent of two unique cultures into generic corporations as they grow and salespeople show up, along with people with actual managerial expertise.
There are obligatory gripes about San Francisco's inability to humanely care for its homeless population, the ways that an endless stream of content is eroding all other human forms, that pointedly contrarian ideologues may not actually be good at compromise and running things. And of course, there are not enough women in tech, and those that are suffer from harassment. But at the moment that formerly beloved startup Basecamp is imploding over a racist list of funny client names, I think we can demand better takes.
Even the descriptions of San Francisco excess are bland, 20 somethings doing shots in an over-designed bar while wearing company hoodies. I've heard some things ("we spent the whole retreat looking for the CEO, who was also our ketamine dealer"), and I'm wholly peripheral to the startup scene.
I'm waiting for a good critical book on the startup ethos, but this isn't it. Its a memoir with the lesson that if you work at being an outsider, you can be one.