I forgot about this book I’d requested from the library months ago until it showed up in my holds today. The full title is Voices From The Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do – And How They Do It, from an imprint run by editors from Logic Magazine.
6 interviews with people named only by their job title. It’s a humble little book and a quick read, but the breezy and straightforward format is very accessible, almost confessional, such as this discussion with a data scientist.
Why it’s interesting
Until I’d read it, I don’t think I’d ever read anything that represented the perspective of any working people in Silicon Valley side by side with so-called knowledge workers. A cook. A founder. A massage therapist. An engineer.
Why we care
Themes emerge when these perspectives are check-by-jowl and read one after the other. There is a sameness to all of the stories, despite each person’s work being quite different.
Not to say there is equality. The founder says, “I went from being basically broke […] to not having to worry about money anymore,” but not the cook or the technical writer.
Usually critical perspectives on will be alarmist, but this book captures the blasé, the polite fictions with ample convenient parking in Sunnyvale. It rings true to the work, and I’ve parked there.
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