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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
Some parts of this, particularly the take on life at Microsoft, rang very true. i knew people just like this.
I dithered between a 3- or 4-star review, but I suppose since I am still reading this 20-odd years after it as published, suggests it isn't as 'of an age' as I once thought.
I haven't read it for years, possibly not in the last 15, since I became a microserf myself, although I never did really.
As I was reading it, it just kept occurring to me that change the names, the events, and the years, and it is basically now. Bill has become Steve, or Zuckerberg, or Ev, with corresponding company name changes. IBM is Microsoft, or Apple, or News Ltd. Oops, if Microserfs had been written twenty years later, would be some social application. The geek houses and the startup office would be exactly the same.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
I haven't read it for years, possibly not in the last 15, since I became a microserf myself, although I never did really.
As I was reading it, it just kept occurring to me that change the names, the events, and the years, and it is basically now. Bill has become Steve, or Zuckerberg, or Ev, with corresponding company name changes. IBM is Microsoft, or Apple, or News Ltd. Oops, if Microserfs had been written twenty years later, would be some social application. The geek houses and the startup office would be exactly the same.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Well, 1995 me was a huuuge fan of this book and found it very moving and wise.
2014 me, on the other hand, finds it slightly embarrassing but still charming.
2014 me, on the other hand, finds it slightly embarrassing but still charming.
Reasons why I love both this book and Douglas Coupland:
1. "I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with three bowls of Cap'n Crunch--had raw gobbets of mouth-beef dangling onto my tongue all day." (Who hasn't had that happen to them? And yet, nobody could have said it awesomer.)
2. I learned 1410 *C = the melting point of silicon.
3. This book is totally the original Big Bang Theory.
4. Dated references to things like Doom and Myst.
5. I enjoy reading nerdy lists of things, like which school is the nerdiest (answer:Caltech ) or what cereal is the most decadent (answer: NOT Count Chocula, he's pro bringing down the ruling class ).
6. I enjoy reading references to places I've been, like the Westin Bayshore, because I know exactly what it looks like!
7. There's a two-page discussion of tampons and a reference to Summer's Eve (p. 286 for the curious).
And here's one more list for the road. If this book were featured on jeopardy its categories would be:
Nerdery
Apple vs. Microsoft
Books With No Conflict
Sappy but Cute Moments
Cliches and Stereotypes
Page Filler
Dated 90's Pop Culture
1. "I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with three bowls of Cap'n Crunch--had raw gobbets of mouth-beef dangling onto my tongue all day." (Who hasn't had that happen to them? And yet, nobody could have said it awesomer.)
2. I learned 1410 *C = the melting point of silicon.
3. This book is totally the original Big Bang Theory.
4. Dated references to things like Doom and Myst.
5. I enjoy reading nerdy lists of things, like which school is the nerdiest (answer:
6. I enjoy reading references to places I've been, like the Westin Bayshore, because I know exactly what it looks like!
7. There's a two-page discussion of tampons and a reference to Summer's Eve (p. 286 for the curious).
And here's one more list for the road. If this book were featured on jeopardy its categories would be:
Nerdery
Apple vs. Microsoft
Books With No Conflict
Sappy but Cute Moments
Cliches and Stereotypes
Page Filler
Dated 90's Pop Culture
Sadly I think I've been falsifying my memory by overwriting it with how much I like Douglas Coupland... and so some first-hand interaction was disappointing, though perhaps it was just this book which I didn't like as much as his others. Though I'm now not sure if I want to spoil my memories of the other books...
It is a fun look at the computer bubble / geek culture early 90s San-Fran. With the humbling quote (I paraphrase): "Sometimes I get as many as 60 e-messages a day". Crazy, given the state of my work inbox.
It is a fun look at the computer bubble / geek culture early 90s San-Fran. With the humbling quote (I paraphrase): "Sometimes I get as many as 60 e-messages a day". Crazy, given the state of my work inbox.
Solid 90s tech satire (timed to be read partly while in Seattle). Lots of this remains distressingly accurate. I like the characterizations in this book. They border on absurd but are pretty down to earth in the end.
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
I had no idea what to expect from this book. Never read anything by Douglas Coupland before. But at the time I found it at the library, I was working at a tech company, and loved a good office-based novel. This isn't one (I'm sure the "serfs" part of the title made me assume it would be), but I love it nonetheless.
I knew I would enjoy it right from the start. The characters get introduced by way of what their top "Jeopardy" categories would be. Their lists say lots, and will prove accurate over the following pages. This set the scene and tone perfectly, and won me over (and got me wondering what my categories would be, though I've never even watched it).
I think that, at its heart, this is a coming-of-age story. The protagonists are smart enough to do things with computers and code many of us couldn't conceive, but they are also 20-somethings who have devoted their early years to fast-tracking their career, and so, to an extent, the rest of their life is just about to start as they get out of Microsoft. Their work changes, their relationships change, their priorities change. The feeling, throughout the book, that they are nearly always in it together, is sweet and moving. The mood shifts towards the end, and events take a more serious turn, but this attitude doesn't get lost.
Even though some of the technical speak may be outdated now, "Microserfs" has aged very well, and it's all down to its human side.
I knew I would enjoy it right from the start. The characters get introduced by way of what their top "Jeopardy" categories would be. Their lists say lots, and will prove accurate over the following pages. This set the scene and tone perfectly, and won me over (and got me wondering what my categories would be, though I've never even watched it).
I think that, at its heart, this is a coming-of-age story. The protagonists are smart enough to do things with computers and code many of us couldn't conceive, but they are also 20-somethings who have devoted their early years to fast-tracking their career, and so, to an extent, the rest of their life is just about to start as they get out of Microsoft. Their work changes, their relationships change, their priorities change. The feeling, throughout the book, that they are nearly always in it together, is sweet and moving. The mood shifts towards the end, and events take a more serious turn, but this attitude doesn't get lost.
Even though some of the technical speak may be outdated now, "Microserfs" has aged very well, and it's all down to its human side.
I came at this one almost exactly the same way that I did with Amy Thomson's The Color of Distance. It was also a AlexLit recommendation, I blanched at the length, it was an author unfamiliar to me. But as soon as I started it, from page 1, rather than the 50 pages it took me to get into the Thomson, I was hooked.
Coupland is the voice of our generation, whatever our generation is: the first group of people to work with computers. This book is a codification of that heady feeling. It praises geekdom, while also shining a blinding white light at the superficiality of this most materialistic culture. It also gets underneath the surface of high tech low-lifes (and I don't mean the cyberpunks--these are the geeks, the ones who stare at a monitor all day and all night, who never have time to make the score as a Gibson character) to show that even they are still human. Even geeks love. If you prick them, even they bleed.
The cultural references here are overwhelming. I predict in the future people will use this as a nostalgic device at parties. You can pull up almost any page and find enough brand name and object references to stun even the most jaded of computer nerds. To finish it off with, Coupland here explains his concept of Lego as the ultimate geek toy, something he has elaborated on recently in Wired magazine.
This is not just for those people who wonder what life as a Microsoft employee is like. While Coupland captures the feeling for a certain segment early in the book, it is only a portion of what he's casting his net for. What he is really trying to do is show you what life for the young, computer literate college-aged is like, where the world is your oyster, and you prefer pizza.
Coupland is the voice of our generation, whatever our generation is: the first group of people to work with computers. This book is a codification of that heady feeling. It praises geekdom, while also shining a blinding white light at the superficiality of this most materialistic culture. It also gets underneath the surface of high tech low-lifes (and I don't mean the cyberpunks--these are the geeks, the ones who stare at a monitor all day and all night, who never have time to make the score as a Gibson character) to show that even they are still human. Even geeks love. If you prick them, even they bleed.
The cultural references here are overwhelming. I predict in the future people will use this as a nostalgic device at parties. You can pull up almost any page and find enough brand name and object references to stun even the most jaded of computer nerds. To finish it off with, Coupland here explains his concept of Lego as the ultimate geek toy, something he has elaborated on recently in Wired magazine.
This is not just for those people who wonder what life as a Microsoft employee is like. While Coupland captures the feeling for a certain segment early in the book, it is only a portion of what he's casting his net for. What he is really trying to do is show you what life for the young, computer literate college-aged is like, where the world is your oyster, and you prefer pizza.
To sum it up: startups and true love fix broken nerds. This book works, though; the characters, the format, it just feels real.