It's also semi-unnerving for what it portends regarding the possibility of deep rot in our political economy. Yes, we've seen treatments like this before. Yes, the author is probably missing the mark a bit (or missing it even more if you're an optimist or realist or whatever). But still.
I recently read a number of historical treatments of the late gilded age and the roaring twenties, as well as some notable treatments of 20th century American history that partially covered that era, or provided additional insight into it (e.g. "The Glory and The Dream").
There are two strong impressions of that era that jump out from the historical literature. They are something like: "where are the adults?" and "business activity at full-speed, moving nowhere at all".
"Throughout the memoir, there are moments when Wiener acquiesces to male characters’ demands only to correct her course with a renewed sense of agency. In a memorable scene, she goes out to a Japanese bar with her mostly male co-workers to celebrate their boss’s birthday, conceiving of herself as the “babysitter, fifth wheel, chaperone, little sister, ball and chain, and concubine”. She explains: “I was always trying to be someone’s girlfriend, sister or mother.”"
Maybe the writeup doesn't do book justice but it all sounds like boiler plate views journalists have on SV with no real insight. Mike Judge probably doesn't have to worry about any competition even after the series ended.
> Maybe the writeup doesn't do book justice but it all sounds like boiler plate views journalists have on SV with no real insight.
It's from someone with experience in the environment, so maybe it's just that the “boilerplate views” are common because they accurately reflect the situation, which would itself be a valuable (though uncomfortable to the same people that like to dismiss the perspective as “boilerplate views”) insight.
C'mon, Google is an ad platform. Everything Google does that isn't selling ads is a rounding error next to the ads.
At least newspapers and magazines have subscribers that pay directly for the content. In fact, since Google and Facebook have eaten their advertising lunch, legacy publishers are more dependent on subscription revenue: https://medium.com/the-graph/advertising-vs-subscription-a42...
Google is more of an ad platform than a traditional printed publication. For one thing, printed publications usually have another revenue stream. For another thing, Google runs adverts on other websites and develops advertising technology.
I don't make claims that SV is one way or another, nor do I dismiss anything, but the skeptical response to your proposal is that hers is just another data point, and our media systems only select for data points that support certain narratives. Perhaps this sounds conspiratorial, but it's not that far fetched if you consider how much the newsmedia and literary industries skew progressive and the fact that the narratives in question are progressive narratives--it's not a conspiracy but rather the predictable fruit of two utterly homogeneous industries.
I gave up on SV (the show) when the only female character I saw after several episodes was a hot assistant. I don’t care what her character arc turned out to be, that’s a bad look. Hopefully, a show based on a female former insider’s experience will offer something beyond that.
Why is it a bad look ? If you'd actually watch the show they have many female characters that are not hot assistants and they even touch on the subject directly later on. It's kind of hard for me to fathom how that particular aspect can make someone give up on a satire TV-show
I remember someone noticing that their Techcrunch Disrupt crowd was very white but they were using real footage.
Although the best commentary probably comes late in the series, and very briefly so it's easy to miss, when a sociopathic (white, male) COO comes to Pied Piper offices and right off the bat comments that the gender balance is quite nice but could use a little colour.
She does evolve and there also a female VC. There’s some stereotyping though. Later episodes have other female character arcs but the are only in scope around the main characters.
>boiler plate views [] on SV with no real insight.
Judging by only this article and the author's n+1 article, I get the expectation that the contents will be not-wrong but not-far-enough. The "boiler plate views" as you put it are popular because they contain blind spots - intentional or not - where a lot of damning criticism can be found. But their exclusion gives comfort to people with one foot in the valley bubble. People will more readily accept criticism of something that involves them if they get to sit on the periphery unscathed.
The risk to such coverage is that the reaction is surface level adaptation. Where problems don't get fixed, they just evolve to be less tangible.
I've seen this type of book before, a liberal arts major's take on Silicon Valley. I'm sure it has clever prose, literary references, overrought descriptions of excess, etc. written with a mild sense of superiority but I wonder if it covers new ground.
It was comedy, and I took it as such. The writers did a good job of poking fun at Silicon Valley while making relatable characters. I can't speak to its accuracy, since I haven't worked in Silicon Valley for a long time.
I haven't lived/worked in SV, but have hated my limited experiences dealing with the culture there.
I have been told (and seen many times on HN) that the show is closer to a documentary than a satire. That's anecdata, obviously.
It reminds me of the (satirical) show Veep, which had to rewrite an entire season because it was too similar to what the actual US White House had done.
The creator, Mike Judge, was actually a Silicon Valley software engineer, albeit very briefly and in the 80s. That’s where some of the ideas for Office Space came from as well.
My take is that it’s accurate enough. They touch on thing a that are real and then blow them out of proportion for humor.
It’s pretty accurate but my biggest problem with it is that it’s not funny. It might be funny to people outside Silicon Valley itself but it’s so close to real life I don’t find it funny at all.
This is what I've heard. I didn't watch Girls because I knew too many women that behaved like them, and I couldn't watch Silicon Valley because my few experiences with SV people/companies were very similar.
I don't want to spend time with those people in real life, so the humor has to be very absurd to get me past my initial feeling of repulsion.
> "In the book Wiener condenses four years of working at tech startups in Silicon Valley into a neat narrative about outsized male egos, dramatic wealth disparities and the psychological toll on young female employees."
She certainly learned a lot about all of the top buzzword tech issues of 2020 in 4 years, with perfect timing to capitalize on it.
My interpetation reading it is the mathematician's answer for both "yes".
To elaborate the article, book, and promptional articles for books are fundamentally part dealing with the same thing which ha raised alarm bells.
The sort of formulaic overexposed attempt at monetizing some sort of Zeitgeist while making sensationalist claims. It even checks boxes of the "literary fiction which slavishly keeps to conventions of setting, copious use of symbolism, and serious topics, and thinks itself better than genre fiction not realizing it is just another genre itself" pretension.
It may theortically actually be good and groundbreaking but it feels like a paint by numbers "guru", ignoring unsolicited emails and banner ads claiming you won something is the default behavior for good reason. The heuristics default to "ignore".
Not the OP, but I think it's fairly obvious they're dismissing the book based on the description of the book from the article that the OP just quoted.
To be fair: The Guardian really needs to include less of Anna Furman's (the article writers) sensationalist summaries and more of Anna Weiner's (the actual book author) work.
It doesn't read as a sense of inferiority to me. It reads as a sense of being in danger, like living under a repressive regime. Which, since that's something that Silicon Valley, for all its flaws, manifestly isn't, is a deliberate choice.
Judgment? Of course. That's one of the main things we ask writers to do. But that's not the same as superiority – especially the shallow thoughtless sort that you expected from the author.
You're not even trying to give this an honest go. Look at the context for your quote:
> Our soft skills are a necessary inconvenience. We bloat payroll; we dilute conversation; we create process and bureaucracy; we put in requests for yoga classes and Human Resources. We’re a dragnet — though we tend to contribute positively to diversity metrics. There is quiet pity for the MBAs.
The "inferiority" isn't the author looking down on her job. It's Silicon Valley looking down on her job. And if you keep reading you'll see how much she appreciates her skill at something necessary, even though the business culture forces her into subservience:
> I’m good at subservience, but it isn’t what I would lead with on a first date. I enjoy translating between the software and the customers. I like breaking down information, demystifying technical processes, being one of few with this specific expertise. I like being bossy. People are interesting — unpredictable, emotional — when their expensive software product doesn’t behave as expected.
You prejudged this, looked for some easy pull quotes, and haven't even bothered to read.
> I've seen this type of book before, a liberal arts major's take on Silicon Valley.
Which particular undergraduate field of study do you prefer when it comes to authorship? Maybe we should also get her high school Chemistry final grade before cracking open the cover.
The article makes me suspect (and the n+1 piece only raises my suspicion that) this is all very Valley-approved criticism of the Valley. The new cultural train chasing the old one out.
All the new ground I've read comes from places that are easier just to ignore. Mostly bloggers removed enough that they don't care about surrounding a potentially-uncomfortable message with prose that accommodates the sensibilities of the valley. They manage to drive readers away before getting to the point. The ideas have to travel like a meme among the disillusioned until the sharp edges are sanded down enough for the general-purpose cynics, who refine it into something suitable for consumption.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Comments like yours here lead to petty bickering and worse. We're trying for at least a little better than that on this site, so please stick to the guidelines when posting here.
It's so aggravating going to these news sites. It's almost as bad as the days of search bars installed in your browser. I'm not on the biggest screen in the world, but I can't even see the title of the article. https://i.imgur.com/UYT7qpN.png
I've been to plenty of other sites just as bad too. It instantly kills my desire find the article and read it.
Use ublock origin and invest time in zapping the offending divs for the sites you frequent. Within a few weeks you'll find the internet a much more pleasant place.
I will check that out, don't believe I've heard of it.
I can utilize tools like these to make things easier for myself. But this view is what the average new reader experiences, it's surprising that they don't care more about that.
Maybe try a CSS selector based off of the next parent element that does have a permanent identifier? first-child/nth-child and friends can get you a long way.
The fact that we're seriously talking about having to install plugins and manually munge the HTML of an everyday corporate site just to make it minimally navigable is, in my mind, absolute madness.
It really is a return to the bad old days of the late 90's web where one wrong click would kill your browser with 20 new popups. Except this time these corporations are willingly doing it to themselves. I wouldn't have believed it even a few years ago. Surely this must be killing engagement on their sites?
There are many ways to pay for it, either by offering mining cpu power, or money, or bare with me- somebody works really hard to circumvent the drm of any site - and shares the content.
Which would be really easy and almost always cheaper if we had the technology to duplicate and spread that decode-work. So we are still waiting for journalism to go bust and get streamed like it happened for music and movies?
I don't think that's all there is to it. For the first part of last year I started paying for a subscription to several news sites of various scopes. I still got some annoying ads, albeit fewer, but annoying emails and other messages increased because they needed my engagement (because they were STILL selling ads), and my daily reading was still overwhelmingly flooded with click-bait style journalism (again, they need my engagement and that's what they think will engage me).
I agree: I think the dirty little secret about advertising supported journalism (or really most websites producing new "content" with some regular frequency) is that much of the "content" is absolutely vapid fast food.
I don't know what an internet without all of the worthless ad-supported "content" looks like, but however it looks, suspect it is the steady-state equilibrium that will exist in the future. Because the ad-supported business model -- bad UX by definition -- is so obviously a house of cards.
Crowdfunding could do it, but it comes with its own fairly large transaction costs. Most crowdfunding platforms are also far from politically neutral, which is a problem if this is supposed to be the future of journalism.
I can imagine a vision of the future where the internet has become more akin to a public utility, like electricity, and the novelty of websites has worn off.
In this world, I can imagine a patronage model working: wealthy individuals support particular journalists, perhaps privately, and the infrastructure of the internet is used to get the word out in a way that is analogous to the chat or messaging of the present.
Yes, the transaction costs of sending money over the internet (even BTC has a pretty high energy-cost per transaction, that's ultimately paid by BTC hodlers) mean that the relatively-wealthy are far more likely to provide this kind of support. It's a lot cheaper for one person to fund a journalist, blogger etc. with $10,000 than for 10,000 people to fund her with $1 each.
I wonder what the breakeven cost would be of a monthly subscription to ad-free journalism on the quality level of the New York Times (or your preferred equivalent). Something like $200-300 maybe? If it were actually ad-free and zero-clickbait, 100% high quality journalism, I'd be willing to pay about that much.
I wouldn't be willing to pay that much, maybe 10% of that. But the actual cost to the newspaper would be far higher. What you pay could be as low as that cost / # subscribers, or higher if there's no competition.
Journalism had almost always been predominantly funded by advertising and rich people looking to influence public opinion.
I don't see how paying for journalism solves anything on itself. You have to pay for specific kinds of journalism and create tools to allow discovery and differentiation of that journalism.
This is the natural outcome of an ad-supported web, which was always a bad idea. It was only our technoutopianism that let us think that computers were somehow exempt from the forces that operate in other media. If only we had devoted as much time in the 1990s to fixing our business models and our online social dynamics as we did to fixing bugs, the world would be in much better shape today.
It's unfortunate that advertising became a kinda, sorta, but not really barely good enough (and increasingly less so) monetization mechanism for the web generally--largely because it worked pretty well, albeit with tradeoffs, in other media. Perhaps if it had been an obvious non-starter from the beginning, micropayments or other mechanisms would have been made to work because there was simply no other choice. (And we'd simply have less of the marginal content that people would be unwilling to pay for.)
Of course, that may have meant that sites like YouTube and a lot of other content simply wouldn't exist.
I'm not sure it does work any better in traditional media. When I flip the page in a magazine, and I get a full page about how I'd better buy Johnnie Walker, that's a popup ad as far as I'm concerned. We've just learned to have higher standards on the web.
By "work any better," I was referring to supporting a viable business model. On the web, advertising is increasing intrusive (and data mining) and it still basically doesn't bring in enough money on its own in many cases.
An immediate solution is to enable NoScript on all news sites. Disabling JS speeds up load times to instant and hides most of the cruft. It's working great so far for me (using Firefox on Android).
I do not agree that it is my responsibility to help fix The Guardian's business model.
Maybe the presence of these banners says something important about the value of the content (in this context) and the respect that the organization has for its readers.
I actually am willing to pay for journalism, but it becomes a constant research project to find out what source isn't on a biased agenda crusade. Any recommendations on pure journalism source I should check out?
There has never been such a thing as "bias-free" journalism. We all have biases, and so do journalists and their editors.
If you're willing to pay for journalism, find a newspaper – any newspaper – and buy a subscription. I assume from your posts that you're in America, and politically right-of-centre. What about the Wall Street Journal? It broke the Theranos story and many others, and employs a raft of very good journalists doing important work.
The wsj does seem to not cater as much to opinion pieces or clickbait titles. I guess that's what I was asking. I get plenty of opinions and editorials for free these days, I don't want to pay for that even if I agree with them. I miss the outlets that seemed to focus on straight up news.
We had a local paper in my area, The Western Star, that ran for 206 years. It was the last source that I was really dedicated to, because I cared a lot more about local.
Remember that for a paper like the WSJ or New York Times, opinions/editorials consume a tiny fraction of the budget: an editorial on Theranos might cost the newspaper $500, but the series of articles that eventually led to the downfall of the Theranos might easily cost 100 times that.
Yet we can't all be buying subscriptions for every single online newspaper and magazine(on top of all the streaming services) just to read the occasional article. That just encourages quantity over consistent quality.
There was a day where, if we wanted to read an edition of a newspaper or a magazine, we would pay a dime or a quarter to receive a copy. We could do essentially the same thing on the internet, but for some reason everyone huffs and puffs and insists that it wouldn't work. Yet it hasn't truly been tried. I would certainly "insert" a quarter to receive a day-pass in order to read something I'm interested in. Just give me the option. For the people who don't want to pay, they can choose to view ads and annoying modals.
Thanks, I truly didn't know if people really understood how bad it can be for new users. If you go to these sites with blockers and extensions, I'm sure it's fine, so they would think I'm exaggerating. I'm on a new machine from work, so I'm seeing some things from an average user's perspective.
As far as I can tell all this shows is they didn't expect people to use the site in landscape on an 18.5:9 phone while spoofing a desktop user agent. Which is fair enough since pretty much no one does that.
I've run into honestly much more bizarre stuff without ever venturing outside portrait...
But I assume I'm missing something really obvious.
The bigger satire here is upstart liberal arts kid thinking a few years of experience is sufficient to launch a sanctimonious book (called “Uncanny Valley” no less).
It’s like she doesn’t realize she is herself a trope character straight out of a Douglas Coupland novel, and a core part of the whole problematic ecosystem she is criticizing.
Yes new people do have that vinegar, then over time pretty much all of them just go with the system and pension surf mentality, learn how to be seen to be busy, all the office political tricks and what to say and not say and get all the promotions. Then there are those who still give a damn, who either burnout or burn speaking out.
It's a pattern in many walks of working life with office space.
This is an interesting quandary you present - if you can't write a book without many years of experience, but you also cannot write a book if you are a part of the 'problematic ecosystem,' when can you? How can you get experience in a system without ever being part of that system?
If you work for a long time in a broken system and really have something to say, you could write that book.
This author doesn’t have anything to say. It’s the expose equivalent of junk food meant to catch onto some zeitgeisty populism to win fame.
I think part of what makes the author part of the problem is the mixture of lack of experience with myopic delusion that what she has to say matters despite that. It’s the same problem many start-up founders and venture capital have that beget all the very things she’s writing about.
She's been here so long that she's now a core part of the problem, but so little time that she can't write critically about that same problem? I'm going to need you to draw me a diagram or something.
I vehemently disagree that any part of my comment is name-calling or a personal attack. Can you specifically point to it? Stating the background facts of the author is not name calling, and if it loses the author credibility, that’s not an attack but a reasonable consequence.
Comparing the author to a satirical character in a Coupland novel is likewise in no way name calling or attacking. The author herself uses satire as a judgement mechanism for coworkers and others she observed and mentioning eg Coupland serves to point out her hypocrisy.
I strongly disagree with the reprimand on this one.
"Liberal arts kid" is obviously name-calling in the sense the site guidelines ask you not to do. That's also a personal attack, and so is "It's like she doesn't realize she is herself a trope character". How would you like someone to say that about you?
Generally speaking, everyone thinks they're breaking the site guidelines 1000x less than they actually are. (That's true of me too.) We don't perceive it in our own case, but when there are thousands of readers you can be sure that many, many others will perceive it.
You have the folks who only think of FANG as far as anything tech / coding practices goes.... or only think of their greenfield startup as how things are done.
Or that everything is some ultra deep back end computer science project ... and they bring those points of view to everything (that isn't necessarily bad or good).
Granted, all that variety is nice, but I suspect a lot of the grass roots coding world just isn't quite what we see on HN.
This common criticism misses the fact that FANG, and greenfield startups, and even HN, set the tone for much of the tech industry.
It is very likely that these grass root coders are or will be in the coming years using the very tools, methodologies, and even business practices devised in the Valley.
In popular culture, yes. If you count up the sales or revenue numbers of very large companies then there are lots of the old companies left. I work for hp and I would also consider Intel, Apple and many of the chip suppliers as part of the original silicon valley. My dad worked for Shockley when SV started so for me it's hard to consider the FANG companies as "silicon" valley companies at all although they are shaping our lives just as much or even more as the previous generations of companies started there.
It's interesting. She sounds like a pro writer. I wonder if her four years were really research for a planned book. That kind of thing is very common. If so, it's paid off. She's hot news, right now. Being exec producer on a movie before the book is even out, is sort of...Silicon Valley.
My own perspective is kinda weird, and I don't pretend to be an expert in the culture.
I started programming in 1983, with machine code, and I've been doing this stuff a very long time. As I look around at folks in the industry, I see that it is a very long time, indeed. There's not many people with the length of time in the industry I have (which is not necessarily something that has been beneficial to me).
I spent most of my career at a top-shelf Japanese corporation. It was a frustrating, but also awesome, experience that has almost no analogue at all with Silicon Valley culture. It was basically a "silo."
After leaving that company a couple of years ago, I have been acclimating to a vastly changed landscape. It's been rather eye-opening.
The one thing that has struck me the most, is that money seems to have become rather corrosive, while also energizing. It powers a lot of growth, innovation and energy, but also brings with it an almost complete moral vacuum. The Japanese corporation had many flaws, but I was impressed by their focus on teamwork and almost insanely high ethical standards (It was a very "old-fashioned" company). I regularly worked (and argued) with some of the most brilliant scientists and engineers in the world.
I like the energy, and I think some of the tools and techniques that have developed are really nice, but I have been rather taken aback by the manner in which our culture is expressed, these days. It's very different from the rather "scrappy" and hopeful way we thought about things back when.
I'm figuring out how to navigate the new world. I need to learn how to work in the fast-paced, cutthroat culture, while holding to my ethical compass, and my workflow.
" I wonder if her four years were really research for a planned book."
Given that she worked at various startups in tech for four years, and the classic whiteboard/algo/coding/etc. required, that's quite a bar purely for a single book.
This is so interesting, whenever I hear about a woman in tech people (including me) usually assume they have a technical role, but statistics say that most women in tech doesn't.
For obvious reasons, a lot of people here tend to equate jobs at tech companies with software engineering. But a ton of jobs in tech aren't primarily about writing code and may not involve writing code at all, even if they do often require some understanding of relevant technologies at some level.
This is true generally. However, it's also the case that gender ratios can be quite different for different roles.
Some of the best coders I ever worked with were women.
I worked for a Japanese company, and the engineering floors probably had about 40% women.
That's not necessarily for a positive reason, but I won't get into that. Suffice it to say that I worked with quite a few brilliant, disciplined and well-educated women.
At my company, everyone in Tokyo had at least a Masters' degree (it was a marquée company), and there were a lot of Ph.Ds around.
In her case, I think she was in customer support, but she talks about having a [rather unsuccessful] crash course in JavaScript.
1) Japan is an outlier is every cultural aspect compared to the West. HN is not a Japanese forum.
2) Japan is notorious for low wages for software. So what you're really saying is that one demographic willingly accepts being underpaid. That doesn't sound brilliant to me.
>She sounds like a pro writer. I wonder if her four years were really research for a planned book.
That makes it sound rather nefarious. Rather than the experience motivating a book, it reduces it to a muckraker looking for drama. Non-fiction p-hacking. This is a big accusation dressed up as idle speculation, and it's motivated by nothing other than the fact that she's really good that this? I'm saddened to see this sitting up here as the top comment.
Sigh. No nefarious intent meant. I suspect that it started off as genuine employment, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if things changed. I have known a number of folks like that.
Personally, I like them, and I completely support this. It's far better than writing from an ivory tower.
In fact, I find it rather interesting that you assign nefarious intent to me.
Nah, I'm not assigning you nefarious intent ("sigh" but i could find it rather interesting that you perceive that I am, if that's how we're doing this now). I'm saying that it would be less innocent of her to go in with the intent of collecting material, which makes your idle speculation potentially damaging.
Not at all. I think this is just an example of one of those "differences in culture" that I was mentioning.
We seem to have a "combat psyche" in our communications, these days, where we start off from a critical PoV, and degenerate from there; always looking for wrongs and weaknesses.
I see this a lot, possibly because I don't hide my age, and may be perceived as "ok boomer." It could also be that I simply come across in a rather "starchy" fashion. That's deliberate. If you knew me personally, you might (possibly) have a different view, as I might, of you.
No big deal. I'm getting my comeuppance. I used to be a rather..."pithy" troll, in the UseNet days. I tend to overcompensate for that, these days, and probably come across as "stuffy."
I just don't ever want to go back into that cesspit again. That's a big reason that I stick my personal brand on all my work and interactions on the Web.
I want to be held to account for what I say. If I say something that offends you, you know where to find me (look at my HN account page).
With that said, you actually have a good point. I did not mean it that way, but it's easy to see why it was interpreted that way. I screwed up how I wrote it.
However, just because someone misinterprets my intent, does not make their interpretation correct, even if I screwed up the way I wrote it, and encouraged that interpretation.
I'll see if I still have time to edit it, and maybe correct it.
> It's interesting. She sounds like a pro writer. I wonder if her four years were really research for a planned book. That kind of thing is very common. If so, it's paid off. She's hot news, right now. Being exec producer on a movie before the book is even out, is sort of...Silicon Valley.
Of course she sounds like a pro writer, she is a pro writer. That's like going to the bookstore, picking up a random novel and saying, "hey, this guy should write books!".
It's a bit off-putting to suggest that she started her big-tech career with the express goal of writing a book. It isn't common.
I changed the headline because the site guidelines call for titles to be changed when they're baity, as "the explosive memoir exposing Silicon Valley" is.
That doesn't mean I changed it to anything optimal—I'm at an event this morning and doing moderatory things on breaks, so everything is hastier than normal. If anyone can suggest a better title—that means more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article—we can happily change it again.
>To illustrate this point she highlights public goods or services that are increasingly privatised, like for-profit coding boot camps, which are marketed as an investment or a substitute for a four-year university degree. “The tech industry is trying to provide solutions to crises that they didn’t necessarily create, but that they are now exacerbating.
This is a good example of how lines of thought like the author's that purport to be democratic socialist are actually committed to maintaining the institutions that entrench existing inequalities in cultural, social (and of course, financial) capital.
Anna Wiener, a former GitHub employee, authors a book titled "Uncanny Valley" about "Unregulated surveillance, ruthless bosses, sexual harassment..." in Silicon Valley.
Also, from TFA: "in January 2018, Universal Pictures optioned film rights; the screenplay is now in its initial development stages and Wiener is executive producer."
I read the article. I have no respect for this "oh poor me" woman. It's no easier for men in Tech--the whole business is a minefield that you have to run through at full speed. It's not a place for everyone.
Everything in the story has her cant on it. That's not reality for the majority of people who are trying to make their mark on the world or just make money in SV.
Let's understand another thing: When attractive men hit on women, it's not sexual harassment, only when the ones they don't prefer do it is it a problem. I think it's more just that this woman couldn't perform in her job or socially and is now blaming everyone else. OMG, a man might give you unwanted attention? Katy, bar the door!
Her parents are assholes: "Gun control advocate in NY" is about all I needed to hear to understand what kind of fools raised this woman. City folk! I know some people applaud these "progressive" bona fides, but they miss the fact that this is the destruction of our civil rights in process. Might as well call them "Anti-Civil-Rights Activists." Cuomo made my father an overnight felon in NY State. No forgiveness for that, thanks activist assholes traitors!
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] thread(As literary magazine names go, “n+1” is pretty relatable haha)
Also the self reflection of being in the industry is notable.
I recently read a number of historical treatments of the late gilded age and the roaring twenties, as well as some notable treatments of 20th century American history that partially covered that era, or provided additional insight into it (e.g. "The Glory and The Dream").
There are two strong impressions of that era that jump out from the historical literature. They are something like: "where are the adults?" and "business activity at full-speed, moving nowhere at all".
Here's the HN post from April 2016:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691
"The Metrics of Backpacks" by Victoria Gannon
https://www.artpractical.com/column/the-metrics-of-backpacks...
Yawn.
It's from someone with experience in the environment, so maybe it's just that the “boilerplate views” are common because they accurately reflect the situation, which would itself be a valuable (though uncomfortable to the same people that like to dismiss the perspective as “boilerplate views”) insight.
Essentially, she says: “It’s important to remember that Google is an ad platform and that Facebook is a surveillance platform.”
Google does indeed run an ad platform. But that's like calling any magazine or newspaper an ad platform. True, yet neither accurate nor interesting.
And don't get me wrong. I'm all for adblocking and razing Facebook to the ground. But I don't want to read empty mood affiliation pieces.
At least newspapers and magazines have subscribers that pay directly for the content. In fact, since Google and Facebook have eaten their advertising lunch, legacy publishers are more dependent on subscription revenue: https://medium.com/the-graph/advertising-vs-subscription-a42...
Although the best commentary probably comes late in the series, and very briefly so it's easy to miss, when a sociopathic (white, male) COO comes to Pied Piper offices and right off the bat comments that the gender balance is quite nice but could use a little colour.
Judging by only this article and the author's n+1 article, I get the expectation that the contents will be not-wrong but not-far-enough. The "boiler plate views" as you put it are popular because they contain blind spots - intentional or not - where a lot of damning criticism can be found. But their exclusion gives comfort to people with one foot in the valley bubble. People will more readily accept criticism of something that involves them if they get to sit on the periphery unscathed.
The risk to such coverage is that the reaction is surface level adaptation. Where problems don't get fixed, they just evolve to be less tangible.
What did you think of it?
I have been told (and seen many times on HN) that the show is closer to a documentary than a satire. That's anecdata, obviously.
It reminds me of the (satirical) show Veep, which had to rewrite an entire season because it was too similar to what the actual US White House had done.
My take is that it’s accurate enough. They touch on thing a that are real and then blow them out of proportion for humor.
I don't want to spend time with those people in real life, so the humor has to be very absurd to get me past my initial feeling of repulsion.
She certainly learned a lot about all of the top buzzword tech issues of 2020 in 4 years, with perfect timing to capitalize on it.
To elaborate the article, book, and promptional articles for books are fundamentally part dealing with the same thing which ha raised alarm bells.
The sort of formulaic overexposed attempt at monetizing some sort of Zeitgeist while making sensationalist claims. It even checks boxes of the "literary fiction which slavishly keeps to conventions of setting, copious use of symbolism, and serious topics, and thinks itself better than genre fiction not realizing it is just another genre itself" pretension.
It may theortically actually be good and groundbreaking but it feels like a paint by numbers "guru", ignoring unsolicited emails and banner ads claiming you won something is the default behavior for good reason. The heuristics default to "ignore".
To be fair: The Guardian really needs to include less of Anna Furman's (the article writers) sensationalist summaries and more of Anna Weiner's (the actual book author) work.
The essay that was precursor to the book lacks literary references, and if anything is infused with a sense of inferiority.
I think that's pretty valuable; I'm showing you where to teach yourself! Teach a man to fish, and all that.
> It’s easy for me to dissociate from the inferiority of my job because I’ve never been particularly proud of my customer-service skills.
Clearly she looks down on her job.
> well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN
Try to tell me with a straight face that this isn't full of judgement.
You're not even trying to give this an honest go. Look at the context for your quote:
> Our soft skills are a necessary inconvenience. We bloat payroll; we dilute conversation; we create process and bureaucracy; we put in requests for yoga classes and Human Resources. We’re a dragnet — though we tend to contribute positively to diversity metrics. There is quiet pity for the MBAs.
The "inferiority" isn't the author looking down on her job. It's Silicon Valley looking down on her job. And if you keep reading you'll see how much she appreciates her skill at something necessary, even though the business culture forces her into subservience:
> I’m good at subservience, but it isn’t what I would lead with on a first date. I enjoy translating between the software and the customers. I like breaking down information, demystifying technical processes, being one of few with this specific expertise. I like being bossy. People are interesting — unpredictable, emotional — when their expensive software product doesn’t behave as expected.
You prejudged this, looked for some easy pull quotes, and haven't even bothered to read.
I like how this perfectly describes your own comment
For example here's a recent piece by Wiener on the new Salesforce Park in San Francisco: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
It's simply beautiful prose.
Which particular undergraduate field of study do you prefer when it comes to authorship? Maybe we should also get her high school Chemistry final grade before cracking open the cover.
All the new ground I've read comes from places that are easier just to ignore. Mostly bloggers removed enough that they don't care about surrounding a potentially-uncomfortable message with prose that accommodates the sensibilities of the valley. They manage to drive readers away before getting to the point. The ideas have to travel like a meme among the disillusioned until the sharp edges are sanded down enough for the general-purpose cynics, who refine it into something suitable for consumption.
Comments like yours here lead to petty bickering and worse. We're trying for at least a little better than that on this site, so please stick to the guidelines when posting here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've been to plenty of other sites just as bad too. It instantly kills my desire find the article and read it.
I can utilize tools like these to make things easier for myself. But this view is what the average new reader experiences, it's surprising that they don't care more about that.
for reference, this[0] is what the above page looked like when I landed on it
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/LyeybN2
It really is a return to the bad old days of the late 90's web where one wrong click would kill your browser with 20 new popups. Except this time these corporations are willingly doing it to themselves. I wouldn't have believed it even a few years ago. Surely this must be killing engagement on their sites?
I don't know what an internet without all of the worthless ad-supported "content" looks like, but however it looks, suspect it is the steady-state equilibrium that will exist in the future. Because the ad-supported business model -- bad UX by definition -- is so obviously a house of cards.
In this world, I can imagine a patronage model working: wealthy individuals support particular journalists, perhaps privately, and the infrastructure of the internet is used to get the word out in a way that is analogous to the chat or messaging of the present.
The advertising supported web has created perverse incentives, which doesn’t serve web users.
I don't see how paying for journalism solves anything on itself. You have to pay for specific kinds of journalism and create tools to allow discovery and differentiation of that journalism.
Of course, that may have meant that sites like YouTube and a lot of other content simply wouldn't exist.
To turn it around: what journalism have you paid for recently?
Maybe the presence of these banners says something important about the value of the content (in this context) and the respect that the organization has for its readers.
If you're willing to pay for journalism, find a newspaper – any newspaper – and buy a subscription. I assume from your posts that you're in America, and politically right-of-centre. What about the Wall Street Journal? It broke the Theranos story and many others, and employs a raft of very good journalists doing important work.
We had a local paper in my area, The Western Star, that ran for 206 years. It was the last source that I was really dedicated to, because I cared a lot more about local.
RIP Western Star https://ohiomemory.org/digital/collection/p16007coll84
There was a day where, if we wanted to read an edition of a newspaper or a magazine, we would pay a dime or a quarter to receive a copy. We could do essentially the same thing on the internet, but for some reason everyone huffs and puffs and insists that it wouldn't work. Yet it hasn't truly been tried. I would certainly "insert" a quarter to receive a day-pass in order to read something I'm interested in. Just give me the option. For the people who don't want to pay, they can choose to view ads and annoying modals.
I've run into honestly much more bizarre stuff without ever venturing outside portrait...
But I assume I'm missing something really obvious.
It’s like she doesn’t realize she is herself a trope character straight out of a Douglas Coupland novel, and a core part of the whole problematic ecosystem she is criticizing.
Is your criticism about lack of experience? IMO, new players in a system are often have clearer perspective than entrenched dinosaurs.
Looking forward to reading about your Character in the book ;)
It's a pattern in many walks of working life with office space.
This author doesn’t have anything to say. It’s the expose equivalent of junk food meant to catch onto some zeitgeisty populism to win fame.
I think part of what makes the author part of the problem is the mixture of lack of experience with myopic delusion that what she has to say matters despite that. It’s the same problem many start-up founders and venture capital have that beget all the very things she’s writing about.
The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
Comparing the author to a satirical character in a Coupland novel is likewise in no way name calling or attacking. The author herself uses satire as a judgement mechanism for coworkers and others she observed and mentioning eg Coupland serves to point out her hypocrisy.
I strongly disagree with the reprimand on this one.
Generally speaking, everyone thinks they're breaking the site guidelines 1000x less than they actually are. (That's true of me too.) We don't perceive it in our own case, but when there are thousands of readers you can be sure that many, many others will perceive it.
You have the folks who only think of FANG as far as anything tech / coding practices goes.... or only think of their greenfield startup as how things are done.
Or that everything is some ultra deep back end computer science project ... and they bring those points of view to everything (that isn't necessarily bad or good).
Granted, all that variety is nice, but I suspect a lot of the grass roots coding world just isn't quite what we see on HN.
It is very likely that these grass root coders are or will be in the coming years using the very tools, methodologies, and even business practices devised in the Valley.
I think they also are a bit of a rabbit hole / and plenty of their tone never reaches the wider world while they chase new and shiny things.
My own perspective is kinda weird, and I don't pretend to be an expert in the culture.
I started programming in 1983, with machine code, and I've been doing this stuff a very long time. As I look around at folks in the industry, I see that it is a very long time, indeed. There's not many people with the length of time in the industry I have (which is not necessarily something that has been beneficial to me).
I spent most of my career at a top-shelf Japanese corporation. It was a frustrating, but also awesome, experience that has almost no analogue at all with Silicon Valley culture. It was basically a "silo."
After leaving that company a couple of years ago, I have been acclimating to a vastly changed landscape. It's been rather eye-opening.
The one thing that has struck me the most, is that money seems to have become rather corrosive, while also energizing. It powers a lot of growth, innovation and energy, but also brings with it an almost complete moral vacuum. The Japanese corporation had many flaws, but I was impressed by their focus on teamwork and almost insanely high ethical standards (It was a very "old-fashioned" company). I regularly worked (and argued) with some of the most brilliant scientists and engineers in the world.
I like the energy, and I think some of the tools and techniques that have developed are really nice, but I have been rather taken aback by the manner in which our culture is expressed, these days. It's very different from the rather "scrappy" and hopeful way we thought about things back when.
I'm figuring out how to navigate the new world. I need to learn how to work in the fast-paced, cutthroat culture, while holding to my ethical compass, and my workflow.
Given that she worked at various startups in tech for four years, and the classic whiteboard/algo/coding/etc. required, that's quite a bar purely for a single book.
This is true generally. However, it's also the case that gender ratios can be quite different for different roles.
I worked for a Japanese company, and the engineering floors probably had about 40% women.
That's not necessarily for a positive reason, but I won't get into that. Suffice it to say that I worked with quite a few brilliant, disciplined and well-educated women.
At my company, everyone in Tokyo had at least a Masters' degree (it was a marquée company), and there were a lot of Ph.Ds around.
In her case, I think she was in customer support, but she talks about having a [rather unsuccessful] crash course in JavaScript.
2) Japan is notorious for low wages for software. So what you're really saying is that one demographic willingly accepts being underpaid. That doesn't sound brilliant to me.
That makes it sound rather nefarious. Rather than the experience motivating a book, it reduces it to a muckraker looking for drama. Non-fiction p-hacking. This is a big accusation dressed up as idle speculation, and it's motivated by nothing other than the fact that she's really good that this? I'm saddened to see this sitting up here as the top comment.
Personally, I like them, and I completely support this. It's far better than writing from an ivory tower.
In fact, I find it rather interesting that you assign nefarious intent to me.
We seem to have a "combat psyche" in our communications, these days, where we start off from a critical PoV, and degenerate from there; always looking for wrongs and weaknesses.
I see this a lot, possibly because I don't hide my age, and may be perceived as "ok boomer." It could also be that I simply come across in a rather "starchy" fashion. That's deliberate. If you knew me personally, you might (possibly) have a different view, as I might, of you.
No big deal. I'm getting my comeuppance. I used to be a rather..."pithy" troll, in the UseNet days. I tend to overcompensate for that, these days, and probably come across as "stuffy."
I just don't ever want to go back into that cesspit again. That's a big reason that I stick my personal brand on all my work and interactions on the Web.
I want to be held to account for what I say. If I say something that offends you, you know where to find me (look at my HN account page).
With that said, you actually have a good point. I did not mean it that way, but it's easy to see why it was interpreted that way. I screwed up how I wrote it.
However, just because someone misinterprets my intent, does not make their interpretation correct, even if I screwed up the way I wrote it, and encouraged that interpretation.
I'll see if I still have time to edit it, and maybe correct it.
EDIT: Nope. Too late.
Of course she sounds like a pro writer, she is a pro writer. That's like going to the bookstore, picking up a random novel and saying, "hey, this guy should write books!".
It's a bit off-putting to suggest that she started her big-tech career with the express goal of writing a book. It isn't common.
You have a point.
I did not mean that, but didn’t articulate myself in a productive manner.
What is it about GitHub in particular that attracts these activists?
Nobody who doesn’t already know Anna Weiner or Uncanny Valley would understand the meaning of the headline.
That doesn't mean I changed it to anything optimal—I'm at an event this morning and doing moderatory things on breaks, so everything is hastier than normal. If anyone can suggest a better title—that means more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article—we can happily change it again.
comma grammar at your discretion
"Anna Wiener on her book 'Uncanny Valley'"
This is a good example of how lines of thought like the author's that purport to be democratic socialist are actually committed to maintaining the institutions that entrench existing inequalities in cultural, social (and of course, financial) capital.
Anna Wiener, a former GitHub employee, authors a book titled "Uncanny Valley" about "Unregulated surveillance, ruthless bosses, sexual harassment..." in Silicon Valley.
Also, from TFA: "in January 2018, Universal Pictures optioned film rights; the screenplay is now in its initial development stages and Wiener is executive producer."
Everything in the story has her cant on it. That's not reality for the majority of people who are trying to make their mark on the world or just make money in SV.
Let's understand another thing: When attractive men hit on women, it's not sexual harassment, only when the ones they don't prefer do it is it a problem. I think it's more just that this woman couldn't perform in her job or socially and is now blaming everyone else. OMG, a man might give you unwanted attention? Katy, bar the door!
Her parents are assholes: "Gun control advocate in NY" is about all I needed to hear to understand what kind of fools raised this woman. City folk! I know some people applaud these "progressive" bona fides, but they miss the fact that this is the destruction of our civil rights in process. Might as well call them "Anti-Civil-Rights Activists." Cuomo made my father an overnight felon in NY State. No forgiveness for that, thanks activist assholes traitors!