Uncanny Valley

by Anna Wiener

It was nice to get new hardcover books for free, but it would be nicer if we could afford to buy them.

No one had warned me that in San Francisco and Silicon Valley interviewing was effectively punitive, more like a hazing ritual than an airtight vetting system.

As we swapped safe observations about being women in tech, I tried to imagine a life in which we became close. While it was easy to picture her visiting me in the hospital if I ever had a terminal illness, I had a harder time envisioning us getting stoned and watercoloring, or going to an experimental dance performance. What were we going to do, talk about sex? Talk about sexism?

the hot tub—a sous vide bath of genitalia.

I wanted the men on my team to think I was smart and in control, and to never imagine me naked. I wanted them to see me as an equal—I cared less about being accepted by men sexually than I did about being accepted, full stop. I wanted to avoid, at all costs, being the feminist killjoy.

Everyone I knew in tech had a story, first- or secondhand. That week, I heard new ones: the woman who had been offered an engineering job, only to see the offer revoked when she tried to negotiate a higher salary; the woman who had been told, to her face, that she was not a culture fit. The woman demoted after maternity leave. The woman who had been raped by a “10X” engineer, then pushed out of the company after reporting to HR. The woman who had been slipped GHB by a friend of her CEO. We had all been told, at some point or another, that diversity initiatives were discriminatory against white men; that there were more men in engineering because men were innately more talented. Women kept personal incident logs. They kept spreadsheets. They kept tabs. Some were beginning to step forward and speak about their experiences openly. It felt like the start of a sea change.

how it was frowned upon to acknowledge that a tech job was a transaction rather than a noble mission or a seat on a rocket ship. In this respect, it was not unlike book publishing: talking about doing work for money felt like screaming the safe word. While perhaps not unique to tech—it may even have been endemic to a generation—the expectation was overbearing.

He didn’t stand up at the end of the day and think, as I did: Oh, right—a body.

Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by startups, the seed accelerator’s founder had microblogged. The accelerator claimed to want people who wanted to beat the system, but a tool for organizing workers was perhaps beating the system too hard. The wrong type of collaboration software.