Enjoyable coming of age/autobio of a young woman venturing into the startup/app world of Silicon Valley. It's not hugely surprising, sexism and data surveillance are common topics throughout. Slightly odd how house-hold names are not mentioned by name but are danced around (legal reasons perhaps?), that took me out a couple of times.

Well written and an enjoyable read but not something that lives up to the hpye.

Silicon Valley, a place in which Anna Wiener was overwhelmingly outnumbered by men in the technological sphere, is still as dominated by white males as it was decades ago. Minorities and female workers are present but not as often as you might believe. Werner certainly has some mettle to overlook these issues and decide to add at least one more woman to the Silicon Valley workforce. She details some important topics and discusses just how prevalent sexism, unwanted sexual advances and sexual harassment were during her employment at a tech start-up. At its heart, it is a feminist coming of age tale and instead of telling the sugar-coated version of events she courageously tells it exactly how it was. She calls for more women to be employed in these type of corporations to at least try to give some semblance of equality.

It makes you think with the thought-provoking and important topics it touches on but it also is highly readable; I don’t usually read biographies but this one caught my attention and I am so glad I decided to pick it up. I am full of admiration for her but certainly do not envy what she experienced. Every so often we need reminding of the issues still faced by women in the workplace, and this book does a superb job in broaching topics that absolutely need addressing. It's an inspiring, intelligent read with a fierce female telling not just her story but the story of so many other women; the me too movement has certainly started the ball rolling and people feel they are now able to talk about such harmful problems. This is a fascinating book that sheds light on the male-dominated workforce but it's high time this changed. Many thanks to Fourth Estate for an ARC.

Uncanny Valley is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of our generation’s very own gold rush. It’s a story about the tension between old and new, between art and tech, between the quest for money and the quest for meaning – about how our world is changing for ever.

Anna left the world of New York publishing to move to Silicon Valley, with no real tech experience. So follows her journey through the tech boom as public awareness of privacy, the NSA and security is on the rise. As someone in the book world, it's a good (but reality checking) book. Describing the poor pay of publishing by saying sure, it's nice to get free books, but it would be nicer to be able to afford them. I feel that.

Beyond that personal interest, it's a really interesting book on the creative industries vs tech, the money (or lack thereof), and what matters in work. Addictive and new insight into a world largely showcased in hyperbolic press profiles.

Uncanny Valley is a tremendous memoir about a woman working through her twenties in Silicon Valley. Anna faces many of the same workplace issues as a woman working in any industry. The pay inequality, rampant sexism, and harassment. It is also a social history of San Francisco. We see it transformed into a place that only the rich can afford to live in, as they invent driverless cars and robots.
Fascinatingly, Anna takes almost half of the book to realise she works for a surveillance company. In the background, the alt-right rises up and takes over America.

Uncanny Valley is a memoir of the author's time working in Silicon Valley, and is predominantly about how it feels to be a woman in a man's world. Interestingly I felt like many of the issues that she highlighted in this area were down to her own shortcomings, rather than to institutionalised sexism. Maybe that is because the author was too honest about her own failings and how she didn't fit in to that world, lessening her intended message.

I found the book to be very funny in places but, whilst I enjoyed the first two thirds, I found myself getting bored towards the end so maybe could have done with some better editing.

I'd still recommend this book though, but it didn't 'wow' me.

Anna Wiener's memoir follows her departure from the New York publishing circle and change of career where she takes up a position in a tech start-up in of Silicon Valley.

This suffered from unrealistic expectations on my part: I've seen the book billed as a number of things - comparable to Joan Didion, a brutal expose on the sexist bro culture of the tech start-up business - and while, yes, the writing is good, companions to Didion are going a bit far. I don't know much about start-ups and while I don't wish to devalue the not so great experience Wiener had I just didn't find her revelations all that mind-blowing or revelatory.

An easy breezy read (due to the solid writing) which I wouldn't discourage others from reading... I think I'm just burnt out on tech memoirs!

A fun, remarkably honest and original take on Silicon Valley. Despite a lack of explosive revelations, it’s a compelling, informative and ultimately very enjoyable read!

This book is badged as an inside look into the world of tech bro’s by a woman who was there. However, the books main insights, that the men who work in Silicon Valley are mainly white, middle-class and supremely confident men who think that every idea they have has value, are nothing you didn’t already know.

I kept on reading, expecting that there would be a ‘gotcha’ moment, an insight into a well-known public occurrence, but it never came. It felt like it was written for people who don’t follow the online world at all. I’ve never worked in tech but there are so many articles about Silicon Valley culture that give you the same insights without subjecting you to excruciatingly detailed descriptions of awful sounding parties. The author was often negging herself while humble bragging. An odd, but not unenjoyable read.

Uncanny Valley is a memoir about Silicon Valley, about being a woman there, and about the changing tech landscape. Anna Wiener left being an assistant in New York City publishing to work in a startup and soon ended up in Silicon Valley, working in data analytics. The memoir charts her time there and then at an open source repository company, as she looks at how she became deeply embedded in some of the mindsets of Silicon Valley and still felt like an outsider in others, particularly as someone in non-technical roles in those companies.

The memoir is unsurprising in its content, but interesting in the chance to think about the workplace culture at startups and other tech companies. The writing style is like a long-read article, with similar long sections of detail followed by time jumps, and the style suits the book: it feels like this kind of article made longer. Wiener's careful skirting of names—both personal and company—in most cases (even for pop culture references at times) may make the book harder to read for some people, particularly as her use of job titles can make people forgettable. In some ways, it is the story of someone who was pretty lucky, and though she uses this to discuss some of the issues in the culture in Silicon Valley, there could be more reflection.

Uncanny Valley is an interesting look at one person's experience in Silicon Valley, but though the tech company quirks such as endless wearing of company merchandise is good to roll your eyes at, the book doesn't quite say much that a shorter article on her experience couldn't.

Anna Weiner’s Uncanny Valley is a memoir of working in Silicon Valley in her mid-twenties; for me, it felt like a good online article that had been stretched out into more than three hundred pages. Weiner has nothing especially insightful to say about tech, and rehearses familiar critiques: the dominance of young white men, the lack of concern for data security, the distance from the ‘real world’. I also found the way Weiner presents herself as totally unrelatable; she seems to think it’s a classic example of millennial drift, but there’s no solid core to anything about this version of her self, and she comes across as unbearably obtuse. You’re probably better off reading her online output; I stopped reading this around the halfway mark.

A wild ride of a read.a memoir of the beginnings of Silicon Valley a world Anna Weiner enters as a young woman.The culture the money flowing in the sexism startups that were new raw growing.A fascinating eye opening look at the real birth of Silicon Valley.#netgalley#4thestate