Microserfs

Critics

• Bugged

  ‘You can leave Bill, but Bill never leaves you,’ one young Microsoft refugee in Douglas Coupland’s microserfs muses on hearing that the chairman has got married on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. It’s a believable sentiment, the lingering awe of an imp ... (read full critics)

  lrb published on Sun, 5 Sep 2010

6 Reviews

• 4 people find this helpful

  Here's an important thing to understand about working at Microsoft right out of college. You are young. You are in a new city. You don't know anybody. There's nothing to do, and you're a computer geek, and the fun toys are at work, so chances are, after getting your take-out dinner at the Taco Time ... (continue)

  Here's an important thing to understand about working at Microsoft right out of college. You are young. You are in a new city. You don't know anybody. There's nothing to do, and you're a computer geek, and the fun toys are at work, so chances are, after getting your take-out dinner at the Taco Time driveup counter, you'll just be bored so you'll go back to your plush office with a view of mountains and 100 foot evergreens and code. For many of these young programmers life outside of work is pretty lonely and empty, which works great for Microsoft, because you put all your energy into the really fun part of the day, developing cool software.

  Nothing quite captures the feeling of being a young programmer at a big software company as well as Microserfs. Douglas Coupland's portrayal of life at Microsoft in the early 90s was so stunningly on-target it floored me -- but then he went further and provided a moral and ethical understanding of what was going on that hadn't quite occurred to anybody. Nobody understands the emptiness, the banal loneliness, and the quest for personal connection of modern age North America like Coupland.

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  J.S. (testing) said on Oct 20, 2005 about the Others edition | Add your feedback

• 2 people find this helpful

  

  Lovely geeks in love.
  Coding, debugging, trying-to-get-a-life.
  A desperate and yet ironic, funny book.

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  ascar said on Jun 15, 2007 about the Others edition | Add your feedback

• 

  I really don't know why I've waited so many years before reading this book. An unmissable classic!

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  Matteo said on May 20, 2011 | Add your feedback

• 

  "Went into the office and played Doom for an hour. Deleted some e-mail.
  Morris from Word is in Amsterdam so I asked him to try out the vegetarian burger at a McDonald's there."

  "I think that Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, o ... (continue)

  "Went into the office and played Doom for an hour. Deleted some e-mail.
  Morris from Word is in Amsterdam so I asked him to try out the vegetarian burger at a McDonald's there."

  "I think that Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212 Farenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot? It takes hours to cool off-it's so hot it's undrinkable-and by the time it's cool, you're sick of waiting for it to cool and that "coffee moment" has passed."

  "I am really terrible at remembering three-letter acronyms. It's a real dead zone in my brain. I still barely can tell you what RAM is [...] I'm realizing that three-letters acronysms are actually words now, and no longer simply acronyms: ram, rom, scuzzy, gooey, see-pee you... Words have to start somewhere."

  "Well, Windows is nonintuitive... counterintuitive, sometimes. But it's so MALE to just go buy a Windows PC system and waste a bunch of time learning bogus commands and reading a thousand dialog boxes every time you want to chenge a point size or whatever... MEN are just used to sitting there, taking orders, executing needless commands, and feeling like they got such a good deal because they saved $200. WOMEN crave efficiency, elegance... the Mac lets them move within their digital universe exactly as they'd like, without cluttering up their human memory banks. I think the reason why so many women used to feel like they didn't 'understand computers' was because PCs are so brain-dead... the Macintosh is responsible for upping not only the earning potential of women but also the feeling of mastering technology, which they get told is impossible for them. I was always told that."

  "Narratives (stories) traditionally come to a definite end (unlike life); that's why we like movies and literature-for that sense of closure-because they end."

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  Don't Panic! said on Nov 24, 2008 | Add your feedback

• 

  a milestone for the Nineties: the description of a dreamless generation, the quest for normal life, the empathy between nerds.

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  maelstrom said on Aug 24, 2008 about the Others edition | Add your feedback

• 

  1.0

  This book lets you understand how a developer can be lucky when he can work at a version 1.0.

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  Filippo said on Jun 8, 2007 | Add your feedback

Book Details

• Rating:
  (128)
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• English Books
• Paperback 384 Pages
• Edition: New Ed
• ISBN-10: 0007179812
• ISBN-13: 9780007179817
• Publisher: HarperPerennial
• Pub date: Mar 15, 2004
• Dimensions: 1226 mm x 839 mm x 194 mm Just how big is that?
• Also available as: Mass Market Paperback, Hardcover, Audio Cassette and Others
• In other languages: other languages Livres Français, Deutsche Bücher, Libri Italiani, Svenska böcker

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