Ask someone what working in Silicon Valley is like, and theyll probably default to industry buzzwords and rhetorical talking points: unicorns, clouds, big data.

In Anna Wieners new memoir about working in technology startups, Uncanny Valley , she uses her personal experience to define what this corporate jargon actually means.

Wiener documents her path in her mid-20s, starting when she leaves her job at an e-book startup in New York. She is hooked by the classic startup pitch: In Silicon Valley, people are not just doing their jobs, but changing the world. She moves to California for an analytics startup and buys in, proudly wearing the company T-shirt despite enduring regular humiliations. The job interview involves taking a section of the LSAT on the spot. And when a male colleague verbally harasses her, a manager tells her thats just who he is. The CEO makes her cry in a meeting and bullies his employees into working harder. He mircomanaged, was vindictive, Wiener writes. We regularly brought him customer feedback, like dogs mouthing tennis balls, and he regularly ignored us.

After the inevitable burnout, she resets her career at a remote-friendly, open-source startup emerging from a gender harassment scandal . The pace is slower and the job pays well, but Wiener is increasingly disconnected to her work. The book finishes when she leaves the job in 2018 to write.