The author, a millennial who became a writer for The New Yorker on technology topics, has written a sort of tell-all memoir about her experiences in her late twenties, when she left the New York publishing scene to try to get ahead in her career and her life by working in customer support for high-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley.
Although she doesn't name the several companies where she worked (choosing instead to use descriptive words such as "the social media company" rather than explicitly naming them, although it's not hard to guess), we get a full tour of her experiences as a young woman from the East Coast in the Bay Area start-up and venture capital tech scene.
She describes how excited she was to be part of small teams doing big important new things, but how she also felt discriminated against, both because she was female, and because her educational background and interests were not in technology, but in literature.
I found it an insightful and touching personal account of a young millennial woman's coming-of-age experience, with a nice amount of snark thrown in about the precious world of the high-tech entrepreneurs and workers of her generation.
It takes us back to that time (not long ago) when the Great Recession had just happened, and young tech entrepreneurs were busy selling venture capitalists and the public on their dreams of vast wealth creation (mostly for themselves), and the transformative social power of apps. Recommended.
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