Witty tale of Silicon escape

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

In a rut at 25, Anna Wiener wants her life to ‘‘pick up momentum’’. As a publishing assistant in New York, the ‘‘voyeuristic thrill of answering someone else’s phone’’ has waned, and she’s broken up with a philandering boyfriend.

She quits her job to work for an e-reading app, but when that doesn’t pan out, she heads to San Francisco in search of the new American dream.

At her job interview for a data analytics startup, an engineer asks: ‘‘How would you describe the internet to a medieval farmer?’’ while shoving his hand down the back of his trousers. (Young, pale males emerge poorly from this memoir.) She’s hired as ‘‘employee No 20 and the fourth woman’’.

Uncanny Valley, Wiener’s debut, is a fabulously frank account of striving in Silicon Valley as a people-pleasing feminist surrounded by ‘‘ambitious, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs’’. Welcome to the land of ‘‘baby tyrants’’, who are relentlessly determined to fix everything and make ‘‘f... you’’ money.

Wiener is low on the food chain: she can’t code and works in customer service. In a who-has-worstcolleagues competition, she would win. In the anything goes offices, men whizz around on RipStiks (a sort of skateboard) and scooters, juggle, and play guitar. Wiener’s CEO, a 25-year-old college dropout, exhorts his workers to be ‘‘DFTC’’ (down for the cause).

When she moves to work for a software company, one colleague identifies as ‘‘a tanuki, a Japanese racoon dog’’, another calls into video conferences while gripping an indoor climbing wall.

This is the early 2010s, before #MeToo, and sexism and sexual harassment are rife. At the data company, when Wiener complains about a colleague’s creepy behaviour, she’s told: ‘‘That’s just who he is.’’

Wiener’s portrait of San Francisco as a city of two different worlds is vivid. The ‘‘restaurants were full of natural fibres and acacia accents, unobtrusive flora and barre-body waitresses in linen shifts’’ and ‘‘the men dressed, typically, to traverse a glacier’’. Then there’s the housing crisis, the drug problems, and the black population leaving at a rapid rate.

The more detailed techie explanations – about metadata and the role of a ‘‘customer success manager’’, for example – are dry, but Wiener, now a contributing writer for The New Yorker ,is undoubtedly witty. She pierces the self-inflation of Silicon Valley deftly and, as she finally runs out of patience with the baby tyrants, you’re cheering on her escape from the madness.