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This time they want to keep her.įor a twentysomething memoir, Uncanny Valley is remarkably chaste.

After three months, she’s awarded a $10,000 raise. “Some days, helping men solve problems they had created for themselves, I felt like a piece of software myself, a bot: instead of being an artificial intelligence, I was an intelligent artifice, an empathetic text snippet or a warm voice, giving instructions, listening comfortingly.” When a customer tells her to check out his vacuous blog, she actually does. Not called upon to exercise much personal judgment, she finds herself turning (not unpleasantly) into a machine. Wiener doesn’t really understand the intricacies of her company’s technology, but her customer support job only requires her to help the user figure out how they’ve used the product incorrectly and then to apologize for their mistake. Somewhat to her surprise, she fits in well.

“I wanted my life to pick up momentum, go faster.” Haven’t we all. “It was easier, in any case, to fabricate a romantic narrative than admit that I was ambitious,” the author writes. She tells her struggling literary friends that she’s moving to try something new. After acing the test, she gets her offer: a customer support job at $65,000 a year with full benefits plus a $4,000 relocation stipend. Wiener flies to San Francisco and interviews at a data analytics start-up, where they ask her to take a section of the LSAT. Not wanting to go back to publishing with her tail between her legs, she takes her bosses up on their offer to place her in another tech job. “I meticulously noted their preferences and tried to keep things interesting,” she writes, “a box of clementines one week, bags of cheddar popcorn the next.” Later Wiener wonders if they wanted her more for her gender than for her humanist perspective.īefore long they realize Wiener isn’t doing that much, and they fire her.

As it turned out, her job was mostly to order snacks for the four men. Looking for something more, in early 2013 she joined the small staff (one, plus three founders) of a New York–based e­books start-up for $20 an hour-bargain basement wages for tech, a raise for Wiener. When the book begins, she is a flunky in literary New York, one of the “expendable,” “nervous,” and “very broke” assistants, stuck competing with interns who are literally cheaper than a dime a dozen, since they are not paid at all. Uncanny Valley is Wiener’s account of her short career in tech. As Anna Wiener puts it in her new book Uncanny Valley, selling out is “our generation’s premier aspiration, the best way to get paid.” It’s not selling out, it’s “cashing in,” and who can blame anyone for that?