Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The author chronicles her work experience in a tumultuous time and touches upon some interesting zeitgeist and trends. I came away feeling that she’s still primarily concerned with her own personal therapy and not much with the experience that she offers to the reader. The first half is engaging and promises an arc of sorts, but the eventual unfurling never happens, the second half of the book feels disappointing and incomplete, as though she didn’t know where to go with it after giddily reveling in her best material. She seems willing to admit several times just how insular the tech world is, even from her (self-described) relatively lowly vantage point, but makes no effort to remedy this insularity for herself as a journalistic author. Her lukewarm tone and episodic narrative oscillate a bit but mostly this book ends up where it started, quietly torn between breathless boosterism and confused liberal guilt. Unfortunately, perhaps due to her truncated exposure to programming and the actual functionality behind new tech apps, the story is limited to her simply recounting personal experience, opinion and interpretation, without much in the way of journalistic curiosity. At times, it reads sort of like a bland HR case study. In a decade when Michael Lewis, Rachel Maddow and many others have charted out such in-depth long-form journalistic territory in analyzing socio-economic trends by way of hundreds of interviews and diligent building of thesis and context, this book comes across as lacking in effort. She’s a good writer but in my opinion should do the work to gain the broader perspective she simply avoids, even lamenting its absence in her own personal journal. By relying heavily upon cutesy anecdotes confined to her immediate surroundings, she falls well short of employing the curiosity and diligence that might have made her piece more distinctive.