One of the books of September 2025. I feel like it was mentioned in pretty much all the political podcasts I listened to.

What is it about?

The book is a self-ethnography in which the author recounts her experience working in a famous consulting firm just before the year 2000, working on the Y2K bug.

So what

I don’t subscribe to her position that the Y2K bug was an absolute scam. It was in her firm and her job but her role was also to invisibilise the people who did the actual mitigation work behind the “Everything is a documentation problem” motto.

That said, the book is a good deep dive into a complete bullshit job and how such bullshit jobs can appear as success stories from the outside, having all the external signs of competence while at the same time being absolutely useless.

Final word

The subject of the book is a sore one for me and still hurt while I recover from my burn-out.

That said, as a self introspection, it is much more interesting than Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger which I find a pain to read through.