It's cool to read a book from the female perspective after there's so many from men in the field. A great nonfiction read.

So many of us are intrigued by the world within Silicon Valley -- I'm sure that's why we continue getting books, movies, and TV shows created around the stories that exist there -- and this was a fascinating look at the reality of the tech industry and what happens there, for better or for worse. It's a subject matter that has the potential to be dry, but this was so well-written I found myself hardly able to put it down.

I enjoyed getting to know the Silicon Valley culture through Anna's eyes, getting an insiders point of view on the Tech world. This book was well written and I could understand her feelings easily as I read through.

An interesting concept that unfortunately did not make for an interesting read.

I found myself constantly waiting for the climax of the book, for the story that made her story worth reading ... while every story deserves to be told, not all stories need to be made into an almost 300 page book.

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener is a great read! A real engrossing page-turner and worth the time of a read!!

Uncanny Valley is a memoir about working in a startup in Silicon Valley as somewhat of an outsider. I enjoyed getting a behind the scenes peak into a very different industry from my own. Her writing is good, but the lack of proper nouns can become frustrating as she always refers to places such as Facebook as ¨the social media company everyone hates¨ which gets old. If you want to learn about startup and silicon valley culture, this is a good book to read.

Having worked at a Big Tech Company during one of its most tumultuous and high-profile years, I opened Uncanny Valley with great trepidation, bracing myself for the Pandora's box of feelings that I feared it might unlock. This memoir is masterfully executed; it felt not only like Anna's, but my own.

A really well written account of a field that affects us all, whether we want it or not. Poignant and engaging.

A page-turning memoir of contemporary Silicon Valley

This memoir received a lot of buzz prior to release. In some ways, this was inevitable — Silicon Valley remains a perennial fascination for so very many people. However, one thing that was coming out of the early buzz was that this is a rather different kind of Silicon Valley memoir/book. I started reading it pretty much as soon as I got a review copy, and I’m happy to report that the hype was justified: this is a superb book.

Uncanny Valley is a combination of personal journey and analysis of technology and the ways in which it — and those who create it and work around it — have changed society and the way we interact with the world and each other. Wiener covers most of the hot-button issues swirling around Silicon Valley — privacy, diversity, sexual harassment, and so forth — offering fair interpretations of what tech leaders have said and how they have reacted to accusations of failing: the level of defensiveness, the often insufficient changes in policy and practice, and so forth. The author places these responses in context, which does explain some of it, but she doesn’t give them a pass, as so many in business and the media do.

“Not everyone was excited by the public conversation. Some prominent founders and investors, habituated to fatuous coverage of playful workplaces and unfiltered, idealistic CEOs, did not appreciate this style of media attention. They blamed journalists who reported on sexual harassment for making the industry look bad; they claimed the media were jealous because the tech industry was eating their lunch. They complained that complaints about the boys’ club discouraged girls from pursuing STEM, as if this were all just a matter of marketing.”

It was particularly interesting to see the author’s perspective of technology evolve the longer she worked for the companies. When leaks occurred, for example, Wiener reexamined what it was that the data company she worked for actually did. Put simply, it was a tool that harvested massive amounts of data that could be used to track, target, and manipulate users — often without their consent and knowledge.

“The guidelines asked that users focus on stories that were interesting to hackers. I had always considered hacking an inherently political activity, insofar as I thought about hacking at all, but it seemed the identity had been co-opted and neutralized by the industry. Hacking apparently no longer meant circumventing the state or speaking truth to power; it just meant writing code. Maybe would-be hackers just became engineers at top tech corporations instead, where they had easier access to any information they wanted.”

It would be easy to think that this book is essentially a criticism of technology, and to an extent it is — although, plenty of the blame lies with the users and our willingness to allow these companies to take over so many aspects of our lives, at the cost of privacy and personal information. But Wiener is also clear about the ways in which certain tech companies (they are rarely, if ever named) have provided or created benefits to society. [Not going to lie, though: the critical portions of the book are more interesting to me.]

One of Wiener’s comments really stood out for me, as it is a more-eloquent expression of my own thoughts about new shifts and trends in fiction:

“Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself away from the computer, to read a magazine or a book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could only have been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so. Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.”

From the tech companies insistence that the solution to all of society’s and the world’s problems was the same (more tech), to the quite obvious fact that many of the new products and services come out of the Valley were essentially “inventing” things that already existed, or “disrupting” things that were working perfectly well… Wiener gives readers a pretty comprehensive tour of Silicon Valley culture, warts and all. However, it is not a book that is preaching to the audience, nor is it prescribing what we should think: the author lays out the facts, as she experienced, and offers questions and sharp observations.

Uncanny Valley has received a lot of praise since its publication, and I think it is totally justified. This is a brilliantly-written, intelligent and engaging memoir. Incisive, often amusing, and definitely recommended. One of my favourite books of the year so far. I’m really looking forward to reading more by Wiener, and will be first in line for her next book, whatever it might be.

An interesting insight into the world of Silicon Valley, seen through the eyes of a 20-something who moved from working in publishing in New York to San Francisco and the sexist world of tech start-ups. Her increasing disillusionment as she navigates her way through the complexities of an evolving and somewhat dysfunctional industry makes for interesting reading, though it at times dragged a little in my view. And for me, whilst I understand why, the fact that she does not name any of the companies, simply describing them, felt a little frustrating and prevented me from truly engaging with both her world and the book. Overall an interesting read that provided me a with a thought-provoking look into a world I only knew a little about.

When you are young, the glitz and glamour of new jobs is persuasive. Wiener's look at what it was like in the early days of the Silicon Valley tech boom is an eye-opener. Her observations are sometimes funny and certainly all on straight from the heart.

Having worked in a similar industry (tech) though far from Silicon valley, I was immediately interested to read on Anna's experience and her telling of it. Often, I found myself cringing at how real things could be and how normal it already seemed to me even if it was definitely an feature of tech,

Over-all, a good and easy read. Though at times the not naming of the companies but the repeated descriptions of them could be grating, I get why it was done and found myself looking for easter eggs about tech news that goes down in the same timeline.

Thanks to NetGalley for the copy.

3,5/5

I was fascinated by this book in the first half of it but then, the second half underwhelmed me as it was a lot of ideas and experiences that I have seen before. Still recommend though!

This book is about Anna Wiener's experience working in Silicon Valley startups. The first half talks more about the actual work that she did, working on costumer experience in those start-ups but also about the privacy aspect of things and how she started to question what these companies were doing, especially after reading an article mentioning that a lot of start-ups were sharing their information with the NSA. So interesting!

The second half focuses more on Wiener's experience working as a woman in a male-dominated field, from casual sexism to outright harassment and the hupe pay gap between men and women. Those are without a doubt important topics and I don't feel like they are talked about enough but it reminded me too much of the TV show Good Trouble so I didn't learn as many new things as I thought I would.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed the beginning of this book- but ended up putting it aside. It’s a memoir about startup culture in Silicon Valley and totally should have worked for me- but I found myself getting bored at around 100 pages. I think I figured Silicon Valley would equal rich people behaving badly, and while some parts were interesting I thought it ended up being repetitive. I think the author is a talented writer, though, and I'd be curious to read something fiction from her!

Usually love memoirs. This one not so much. No connection whatsoever. Was like reading the ingredients of food you despise.

Thanks to publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free,it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

This book was very interesting to me, like Anna I work for a start-up, albeit much smaller scale but I was curious to read about another viewpoint on the subject. Anna was informative and raw in her experience in her Silicon Valley startups.

If you are looking to learn more about the inside happenings of startups I highly recommend this book.

Thank you to NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux MCD, and author Anna Wiener for this copy!

A little monotonous but I enjoyed the read nonetheless. The title is the most genius thing I've ever heard in my life (maybe an overstatement, but I do love the title). The content, however, wasn't as revealing as I'd hoped - the stories are the author's own encounters with a Silicon Valley culture anyone who reads tech industry articles is already familiar with, and I didn't see why the content here warranted an entire book and couldn't be another of those articles. I'd hoped for the stories to be more shocking or insightful, but I wasn't disappointed so much that it stopped me from recommending the book to several friends who, on the whole, did report enjoying it. The most interesting part of this was the author's start in NY publishing and move to tech, and her navigation of that career change and the ways she compared and contrasted a legacy industry with the world of start-ups.

Keenly observed and astutely written, Uncanny Valley is a memoir about a woman's experience working for silicon valley startups where in the backdrop of technocapitalism, casual misogyny and racism are as omnipresent as poke bowls at a lunch buffet. Wiener's book discusses a lot of these issues in the silicon valley seldom monitored by any state sponsored regulatory bodies. Even as it tries to be expository, the book is not as edgy as the title makes you believe. Though Wiener is keenly aware of her (white) privilege, the book is not a take down on the workplace culture of silicon valley dictated by tech bros wearing their (toxic) masculinity in their sleeves. It's a mildly shocking yet enjoyable rumination of a nontechnical woman navigating the murky waters of tech startups. Still worth a read.

This was a fascinating glimpse into the tech world, written by an outsider-turned-insider. To hear how the author stumbled into and then navigated the start-up culture reads as though one of my buddies was embedded and is reporting back. As such, it's a trusted voice that reminds us of the ethical issues of big data that seem to fall to the background while we're downloading, sharing, and liking.

I was so excited to read this memoir, and was delighted when my library acquired a downloadable audiobook version narrated by the talented Suehyla El-Attar.

In her early twenties, Anna Wiener leaves her meager publishing assistant job in NYC for the lucrative and shiny promise of Silicon Valley. She speaks of the Valley's tech companies in code, never explicitly naming them but referencing key characteristics that many readers will be able to identify. Wiener describes the Silicon Valley "ecosystem" in a humorous, eye-roll sort of way, confirming many of the stereotypes we associate with tech bros and entrepreneurs.

About halfway through the book, Wiener started getting frustrated with her job, and I started getting frustrated with her. "Just leave!" I wanted to shout. But, I, too, have drank the Kool-Aid that toxic workplaces feed to thirsty millennials, so who am I to judge? Anyway, I recommend this (audio)book to readers in the millennial range who have grown up in the age of Am*z*n, G**gle, and Tw*tt*r, and have experienced the consequences these companies wreak on our psyches (and wallets).