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Microserfs

By Douglas Coupland

(130)

| Mass Market Paperback | No ISBN

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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 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

First Edition

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db's.books said on Aug 5, 2009 about the Others edition | 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 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback