Product Description

Narrated in the form of a Powerbook entry by Dan Underwood, a computer programmer for Microsoft, this state-of-the-art novel about life in the '90s follows the adventures of six code-crunching computer whizzes. Known as "microserfs," they spend upward of 16 hours a day "coding" (writing software) as they eat "flat" foods (such as Kraft singles, which can be passed underneath closed doors) and fearfully scan the company email to see what the great Bill might be thinking and whether he is going to "flame" one of them.

Seizing the chance to be innovators instead of cogs in the Microsoft machine, this intrepid bunch strike out on their own to form a high-tech start-up company named Oop! in Silicon Valley. Living together in a sort of digital flophouse --"Our House of Wayward Mobility" -- they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.

Funny, illuminating and ultimately touching, Microserfs is the story of one generation's very strange and claustrophobic coming of age.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112361 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-19
• Released on: 1996-05-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Amazon.com Review
Microserfs is not about Microsoft--it's about programmers who are searching for lives. A hilarious but frighteningly real look at geek life in the '90's, Coupland's book manifests a peculiar sense of how technology affects the human race and how it will continue to affect all of us. Microserfs is the hilarious journal of Dan, an ex-Microsoft programmer who, with his coder comrades, is on a quest to find purpose in life. This isn't just fodder for techies. The thoughts and fears of the not-so-stereotypical characters are easy for any of us to relate to, and their witty conversations and quirky view of the world make this a surprisingly thought-provoking book.

" ... just think about the way high-tech cultures purposefully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s," muses one programmer. "I mean, all those Nerf toys and free beverages! And the way tech firms won't even call work 'the office,' but instead, 'the campus.' It's sick and evil."

From Publishers Weekly
With his nose to the zeitgeist, the author of Generation X again examines the angst of the white-collar, under-30 set in this entertaining tale of computer techies who escape the serfdom of Bill Gates's Microsoft to found their own multimedia company. The story is told through the online journal of Danielu@microsoft.com, an affable, insomniac, 26-year-old aspiring code writer. Together with his girlfriend Karla, a mousy shiatsu expert with a penchant for Star Trekky aphorisms, and a tight clique of maladjusted, nose-to-the-grindstone housemates, he relocates to a Lego-adorned office in Palo Alto, Calif., to develop a product called Object Oriented Programming (Oop!), a form of virtual Lego. Much of the story concerns the the Oop! staff's efforts to raise capital and "have a life" amid 18-hour work days. Dan's journal, like much prose on the Internet, abounds in typos, encrypted text, emoticons-:) for happy and :( for sad-and random snippets of information, a format that suits Copland's disjointed, soundbite-heavy fiction. Yet the randomness and nonlinearity of cyberspace hobble narrative. Amid endless digital chitchat and pop-philosophy, this novel's more serious ruminations about the physical and social alienation of life on the Information Superhighway never achieve any real complexity.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
From the author of the sneak hit Generation X (St. Martin's, 1991) comes a look at some stressed-out Generation X employees at Microsoft.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

everything that is important about engineering culture
After reading Tracy Kidder's acclaimed (by the New Yorker crowd) Soul of a New Machine, I thought to myself "here's a guy who spent 12 hours/day with engineers for an entire year and learned nothing about engineering, nothing about what matters to engineers, and nothing about the hearts and minds of engineers. After reading Microserfs, I thought "here's a guy who seems to have spent a week with engineers and effortlessly absorbed everything that is important about engineering culture, everything that matters about working at a big company, and everything that matters about working at a startup." Coupland's writing is better crafted here than in his earlier books, e.g., Generation X.

Imaginative and enjoyable
Being a spanish-speaking person and spanish-language reader, I don't have much opportunities to read American contemporary authors, unless they're writing computer systems technical books. So I must admit, my first glance at Microserfs was motivated by the curiosity of someone trying to describe how tech-obsessed, workaholic and project-slaved workers (as most people in my carreer) thought, felt and dreamed. I thought it would certainly be a challenge to build a plot with such characters. Copeland proved me wrong.

As I read this book, I got lest interested with the similarities to real geeks and more involved in the real metaphor of Microserfs: the search for personal realization in each of this genious but not so life-wise characters. This process, narrated with humor, tech & tv real-world metaphors, self-inspection and lots of deliciously imaginative - and fantastic- theories in the minds of each character, is what really drives the reader to love this book from beginning to end.

So I would recommend Microserfs twice: 1: to get a good understanding of geeks - which after reading this book will probably be no stranger to the reader than any average football fan, or any other obsessed kind, 2, to read a funny and imaginative novel while learning how this 21st century life is reshaping American's relationships and personal quests. The book's ending, fantastically crafted and at the same time full of new questions, is the best example of how this two ideas live together in Copeland's book.

`We assume that tomorrow is another world'
I first read this novel in 1996 just after it was published. Twelve years later and in a new century, it is disturbing to read how much of this is still relatively realistic. It is almost as though the organisational arrangements and lifestyles described have been adopted both as a management and lifestyle model and transplanted, at least in part, around the world.

This book was funny in 1996 when it seemed in part a satirical comment on the new world of geeks and technology. Now it seems more ironic. Many of those for whom this was an accurate depiction of life in the 1990s are still caught in this time warp. The tragedy is that so many others have joined them.

If you have not already read this novel and wondered about the design of a working world in which human interaction through technology has largely replaced direct human interaction: the time is right. After all, in reading this review you are relying on the technology developed by geeks and nerds.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith