I actually heard about this book before it came out and heard good things about it from a friend of mine who had read an ARC because she owns a bookstore. It sounded interesting, but not enough to get me to demand my library buy a copy so I could read it. Instead, Nerdette added it to their book club, so I ended up getting the audiobook so I could enjoy their discussion of it.
It was OK. I don’t think there was anything Earth shattering in this book to make me particularly glad I read it.
It’s a memoir by Anna Wiener, and I want to say she narrates the audiobook, but I honestly can’t remember. I’m not even sure the audiobook gave the name of the narrator, or if it just dove right into the story. In any case, the audiobook narrator was good, but forgettable, which is probably not a bad thing for a memoir.
Wiener is an English major who worked in the publishing industry in NYC in the early 2000s, right when Amazon was taking over. She saw the writing on the wall and decided to jump ship from traditional publishing and go work for a startup that was creating an app readers could access on their phones.
Wiener wasn’t a software designer and she didn’t know how to code. She was hired in a customer service position and ended up getting fired because she didn’t show enough initiative or desire to learn. She had never been taught to learn on the job, so it hadn’t occurred to her to try to explore things outside her defined role (which wasn’t very well defined to begin with). Boy, could I relate to that. It’s something I have since learned about career advancement, but it’s not a thing anyone tells you, least of all your college professors.
Instead of going back to publishing, Wiener decides to take the leap into the startup world and move out to Silicon Valley. She gets another job at another startup company, also in customer service. She works there for a while before going to work for GitHub, although she never calls it by name – she never calls any of these startups by name, even when it’s obvious what she’s talking about. She calls Facebook “the social media platform everyone hates, but no one can stop logging in to”. I think she calls GitHub the analytic startup or something like that.
In any case, Wiener’s portrayal of Silicon Valley paints a portrait of a new culture as it is emerging that is deeply weird. She manages to recognize its weirdness without being super condescending. After all, she was a part of this world for a few years and wanted to belong. She wore the company sweatshirt and used their lingo.
She talks about how insane it is to have men in their 20s suddenly become millionaires – billionaires even – and how that changes the way they think and behave. Suddenly they think they are inevitably the way of the future and that the rest of the world is going to become just like Silicon Valley – everyone will be working from home and using their lingo and working long hours to “destroy” the competition. She also talks about the fact that it’s a culture that uses a lot of militaristic terms for no apparent reason, other than the fact that it’s a very male-dominated culture and they have been raised using these kinds of terms and made to think they’re cool.
Wiener also devotes a fair amount of time to talking about the ingrained sexism and racism of Silicon Valley. As a white woman, she can’t speak much to the racism side, and she doesn’t try to, but she does speak at length about the sexism of the industry. Personally, she was hit on and groped by male colleagues and debated over whether to say anything because of course she didn’t want to make waves. She didn’t want to be “that girl” at the office. When she did say something, even just in private, her other male colleagues were quick to defend the perpetrator, using meaningless platitudes like, “He’s got a good heart”.
She gives the numbers of employees for some of these startups, including the ones for which she was working, and lists how many of those employees were women vs men – of course the men vastly outnumbered the women every time, and the disparity was even more striking when looking at software engineers and leadership roles. She even mentions that just before she went to work for GitHub, it had just had a scandal surrounding the fact that a former female employee of the startup (it was still a startup at the time) had leveled allegations of sexism against the company. Wiener admitted that should have been a red flag, but that she hoped the experience would prompt the company to do better.
Despite the many instances in which women tried to point out the obstacles with which they were faced, leaders in Silicon Valley persisted in blaming the victim. They told women if they just kept their heads down and did good work, the system would reward them, despite the fact that a pay disparity continued to reward men and too often leave women high and dry. They told women to negotiate for higher salaries, ignoring the fact that the women who tried got fired or had job offers withdrawn.
Wiener also talks about her reluctance to leave. She admits it’s not rewarding or intellectually stimulating, but it’s tough to leave a high-paying job with great health insurance. Ultimately, she ended up making yet another leap so she could write and publish this book.
The Nerdette panel asked the question of why now? Why write (and publish) this book now? Ultimately they decided (and I agree) that it’s recent enough to still be interesting, but it’s also been long enough that everyone knows everything that gets discussed in this book, from the sexism of the industry, to the WikiLeaks scandal, to the proliferation of hate speech online (and how many people are willing to ignore that kind of talk when it comes from white men), to the fact that websites use software to track everything we do online.
The last one was what really gave Wiener pause. She ended up having a kind of existential crisis over it, which at least contributed to her making the decision to leave the company and try her luck elsewhere.
My only real complaint about this book was that it didn’t seem to have chapters, or if there were any, there were only a very few, very long chapters. I would be waiting for a chapter break while I was listening so I could put it away and go do something else, only to find that there were no chapter breaks to speak of and I just had to try and guess at a good stopping point.