Uncanny Valley

I am probably not the right person to review a memoir about a mid-20s woman who decided that a career in New York book publishing wasn't exciting enough, so she dropped everything and headed to Silicon Valley to work as a customer support rep for an up and coming software start up. Even worse, it specialize in "data analytics" - all the data you wished they didn't have on your. Then she moved on to a big open source company that was just getting bigger.

While there, she ran into all the usual types - bro programmers who didn't believe a woman could know or contribute anything in the tech world, driven male CEOs who felt like just because they happened to sell out at the right time and got tons of money meant they know everything about everything. And customers and modern hippies and long time natives dealing with the gentrification of San Francisco.

I am hugely ambivalent about this autobiography. She combines both deep and banal insights, often in the same paragraph. She often comes across as condescending, which is weird for someone who admits she doesn't know really what she wants either. I mean there is the usual litany of just outrageous sexism, but she also seems to miss the driven passion of lots of tech people who just love the tech. She talks of them like an exotic specimen, but sometimes it just sounds to me like someone who doesn't have that focused drive and can't understand it.

But as a white male who has been a software programmer for more years than you can imagine, I certainly can't comment on the attitudes she must have faced. I'd like to think I haven't allowed it when I hear it, as I have had plenty of highly respected women developers. But it is obviously a sick problem my industry is rife with and I have no idea how to make it go away, besides just hire more women. She has quite a bit about how hard it is to break the chain, as people who aren't like the interviewers always seem to fall short. Maybe some day...

But it is a quick, interesting read of the sky rocketing Silicon Valley scene of the years from like 2000 thru the 2016 election. She is a bit coy about naming names, calling the companies "the search engine giant" or the "highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate" or the "social media company everyone loves to hate", which got tiring after awhile, to be honest. But it is an excellent record of the time and I recommend it highly.