Suddenly, I got the luxury to read through these two books within 30 days apart.
Not only are they published fairly recently (Anna’s in January of 2020 while Kathy’s just less than two months ago), their book titles, as well as their book cover styles, are also very similar to a point I wonder if the authors ever exchanged some notes.
Even though Anna’s is a memoir of her own experiences and Kathy’s a made-up Russian spy story, they are actually about the emotional journey of the female engineers working in the high tech companies in Silicon Valley.
That’s why many details in both books resonated so much with me, a Silicon Valley female engineer who then reluctantly moved to middle managerial roles for many years till one day called it quits.
I enjoyed Kathy’s first book very much, largely due to the small anecdotes of strangely funny Silicon Valley high-tech behaviors she sprinkled through that book. She was immediately commissioned to write up this second one as soon as her first book was accepted. HarperCollins was rumored to offer her 1 million dollars for the bundle deal.
I placed the pre-order even before the book was published in late May 2021.
Kathy surprised me to use a Russian spy plot as the overarching storyline, but it offers a good canvas to allow her to give out what she is best at — the almost satirical way of spotting on the female perspectives of the high-tech world.
I laughed hard at her mocking of the Chinese ABC engineers. Yet simultaneously, I am worried whether her almost pathetic view of the Chinese ABCs is something very universal, and we, as the first-generation immigrant parents, did fail them miserably in helping them building better social skills.
What Kathy did not point out but implicated was that the unconscious bias against different gender, race, culture, age, professions, etc., is everywhere. The best shield is to ignore them, consciously or unconsciously.
Anna Wiener could not ignore them. She is too intellectual and emotionally alert to allow herself to go blind-spot with these issues. Nor could she ever leave behind of her literature and publishing career and mentality and made peace of being a very productive and content GitHub customer support high tech professional.
I am glad she chose not to be transformed into a blissful Silicon Valley white female corporate executive type, which in my veteran’s view, she could have had an effortless way to get on to if she preferred to do so.
Instead, she quit the job and went back to writing up this excellent book.
The first half of her book looked very much like Kathy’s made-up novel, full of the only-happen-in-Silicon-Valley type of funny stories and moments. The second half of her book started to morph into some deep reflections of the various social, technology, and cultural aspects of Silicon Valley and its good and bad influence and impact on our current society as a whole.
Anna is brave and smart enough to spend a good five years of her late youth in the core life-lines of Silicon Valley startups and made very fresh and sharp observations of the cons of the high-tech world. Her progressive views and caring are reflecting all over the place in the second half of the memoir.
Glad that a well-connected deep thinker like Anna stays in the Bay Area as a sharp observer and reporter with intimate first-hand experience of the high-tech world. We need more people like her here.
As for myself, I am the very forgiving and simple mind minority type and enjoy my Silicon Valley work life tremendously, especially so when some obscure small moments occasionally pops up, like last Friday I went back to the office to work there voluntarily the first time after SIP, only to find the entire floor was mine and mine only. I hosted, attended meetings just by walking into any conference rooms, which we used to fight good fights to obtain a spot, and felt spoiled.
