I never read "Lean In," but one of my favorite blog posts of all time[1] did a truly epic takedown of it, exposing it as a thinly-veiled manifesto for white-collar women to become miserable underpaid status-chasing workaholics.
You don't really need an epic takedown of it to notice it's not how she herself got there. Which is, basically, make friends with famous people (Larry Summers) so they give you unreasonably high profile entry-level jobs.
If the general HN consensus is to be believed, Professional Engineers and Software Engineers Who Write Bare-Metal Code are the only people who have ever attained success commensurate with their effort. Everyone else seems to have had disproportionate advantage - Elon Musk was given too much by his dad, Sheryl Sandberg made friends outside her lane, presumably Steve Jobs parasitized Woz.
Curious distribution. At the bottom are the losers, at the top the cheaters. In the middle are those whose brilliance is undetected by bean counting MBAs who presumably also support open offices, NFTs, and Apple CSAM scanning.
Certainly a large part of her success but the reason she got given those jobs is because of the impression she made, of being a hard working, smart workaholic. Then she continued to be a hard working, smart workaholic. Goal driven people like that tend to do quite well. Not at her level, but she’s unusually smart and unusually workaholic.
Same here. I was never sure if it was a man or woman, I don't think they ever specified (I could be wrong). But they were always fairly upfront about their problems with alcohol. For a while I wondered if it was an alter ego of Scott Alexander.