This is a horrifying account of repeated harassment and awful culture through science and engineering. It wasn’t my favorite style of writing or telling, but the subject matter is so relevant that it is worth it. ( )

Susan Fowler's account of her time in Silicon Valley (notably Uber) is predictably infuriating--the details are already known from her 2017 blog post.

Luckily there's more to her story--how she got to be a software engineer in the first place, and how her original plans to become a physicist were derailed. If anyone doubts that so much could happen to one woman before she turned 30, it just shows how good a job we do of covering up sexual harassment and discrimination, and how we've got institutional policies in place from universities to corporations to ensure it stays hidden. Fowler has a decent writing style and the book is a quick read. ( )

It got to the point where I wasn’t able to hold back my tears until after meetings anymore. I found myself wiping tears from my face right there in the meetings, hoping that nobody would notice; then I’d go home after work and cry myself to sleep. On days like that, I thought seriously about leaving Uber. I even applied for several other jobs. But, ultimately, I decided to stay. I was twenty-five years old. Uber was the third company I’d worked at since I graduated from Penn only a year and a half earlier. How could I convince the companies I applied to that the problem was with Uber, and not with me? Even worse, what if Kevin and Duncan were right, I’d wonder, and I was really an awful engineer? What if I was so awful that I would never get another job in engineering?

This book is the result of Susan Fowler's efforts after she posted a famous blog post about working at Uber for a year. She was the victim of structural sexual discrimination that flourished in the company, where a culture of sweeping all 'problems'—i.e. sexual-abuse complaints to HR and management—under the rug was the norm.

Fowler is a deft writer who takes the reader on a journey through her younger years, finding her way into both logics and philosophy and later into programming. She was hit with discrimination during her education at the University of Pennsylvania; in the end of that bout, she let it be:

I took the lawyers’ advice and decided to move on with my life. But before I did, I carefully documented everything, saving every email, every call log, every text message. There was part of me that wondered if perhaps I’d change my mind about suing them in the future. And there was another part of me that thought I’d want to write about it someday. My heart broke when I realized that moving on meant giving up on my dream. The professors I’d been counting on for letters of recommendation now refused to talk to me because of the situation with Tim, and without the recommendation letters I needed, I knew I would never be accepted into a physics PhD program. So I trashed my graduate school applications and, with them, my hopes of becoming a physicist.

She made her way to Silicon Valley and spread her wings, first, at a company named Plaid:

Everyone went out for drinks that night to celebrate the two new employees: me and the new office manager, Heidi. We were the only women in the office; as I later learned, they had us start on the same day so that we wouldn’t feel “alone.”

Ooh, the misogyny doesn't seep through: it pours.

Fowler writes well about sexism and other types of work-related abuse becoming normalised. She writes about leaving Plaid for another company, PubNub:

Within a few days, I found out that my boss—who managed me and one other employee—was openly, unabashedly sexist. He commented on my clothing, making fun of me if I ever dressed nicely and telling me I was dumpy if I wore jeans and a T-shirt. He told me that he bet any man I was dating was off secretly having sex with prostitutes. He was also anti-Semitic, frequently commenting about how “stingy” and “Jewish” he thought the founders were (I didn’t dare tell him that I was Jewish, too). The only way I could deal with it was to keep my head down, do my work, and try not to pay attention to anything he said. To keep myself sane, I read the philosophers Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius every morning on my way to work and during my lunch breaks.

Fowler loves—or, at least, loved—stoic philosophers. This paragraph jumped out at me as seeming very strange:

The words of the Stoics reinforced what I already knew: I couldn’t control what others did to me, but I could control how I reacted.

I disagree with not being able to control what others do; this book is proof that one's actions lead to how others treat you. Also, it's not always possible to control one's own reactions, e.g. if raped. These are important distinctions.

Before signing on with Uber, Fowler searched the web to see whether she could find any wrongdoings at the company; she found nothing:

What I didn’t know at the time was that the mere fact that there was no public record of wrongdoing wasn’t because Uber had a spotless record, but because all Uber employees were bound by forced arbitration. Forced arbitration clauses are often included in employment agreements that workers must sign as a condition of employment, usually on their very first day of work—not only at tech companies like Uber, but at many companies in the United States.

Nefarious, to say the least.

One early warning sign at Uber was this:

Uber encouraged employees to spend time working with their coworkers over the holidays rather than with their families and offered employees free all-inclusive trips almost anywhere in the world if they chose work over family.

Her manager swiftly started writing about his open relationship with his girlfriend and went into sex immediately and often. When Fowler turned to HR to rectify the situation, they reacted:

Then she gave me a “choice”: I could stay on the cloud team, with Jake as my manager—though I would likely receive a bad performance review from him because I had turned down his advances and reported him to HR—or I could transfer to a different SRE team.

This book should be read by men, especially men in manager or executive roles, to not only make them understand how non-men are being treated by men, but also make them aware of their fallacies: if something is brought to HR, it must be treated with the urgency it deserves. Everybody deserves to be treated equally and nicely at work.

Fowler bravely fought Uber, their HR people, went to executives, spoke with friends and family, and went further than a lot of people would dare or have the strength to do, while battling an earthquake of issues that were designed to make her quit working at Uber.

Still, she persisted, and the rest is history: one person can make a difference (even though more persons than herself were involved in toppling Uber's sexist structure, which may still be in place for all I know).

There are lovely segues throughout the book that point to a promising future for non-male tech workers (including men):

Rigetti Quantum Computing and Uber Technologies were at opposite ends of the spectrum: Chad wanted Rigetti Quantum Computing to be a company filled with joy, where people came into work excited and passionate about the technical challenges of building quantum computers and working as a team to solve hard problems; Uber, on the other hand, was a company driven by aggression, hell-bent on destroying the competition no matter the cost, where it felt like people came into work to tear down, not to build up.

To quote Beastie Boys: 'be true to yourself and you will never fall'.

Susan Fowler was brave enough to stand up against a tech giant and they fell.

This book is both a lovely example of how critique and whistleblowing must be included in a worker's guide and how great workplaces can be built. ( )