Vivian Marsh

Vivian Marsh spent nearly two decades inside the human resources departments of large corporations, in rooms where headcount decisions were made long before anyone outside those rooms found out. She watched policy turn into practice, and practice turn into consequence, one quiet meeting at a time.

Her essays on workplace automation and human judgment appear at vivianmarsh.com. When automated systems began taking over the calls that used to sit with people, she started writing the novel that became The Optimization. She is already at work on her next book.

Readers of Daniel Suarez, William Hertling, and Dave Eggers will recognize the territory: corporate power, automation, and the systems that quietly run modern working life. Vivian writes it from a different vantage point, inside the HR and people operations side of the room, rather than the engineering side.