Fiction 01 Jan 2005 16:02

Microserfs

coverMicroserfs
Douglas Coupland

I’ve read Microserfs before, but I decided to read it again because I thought it would be a fun book to read over the holidays. I was right.

Microserfs tells the story of a group of Microsoft employees who “jump ship” and move to Palo Alto to work for a start-up created by one of them. This is fiction, of course, but it could be real, and it feels real, specially if you were around the Silicon Valley at the time the action in the book happens (1994, before the Internet boom). The book is written as a series of diary entries by Dan, one of the programmers who make the move, and he chronicles the changes in environment and culture that happen when you go from working to a large company in Washington state to a start-up in California.

He also chronicles the “maturing” of his friends and himself, as they approach 30 years of age and start to want more from life than coding and “geeking out”.

Make no mistake, this is a book for geeks and about geeks, and there’s no way around it. You’ll not understand many of the jokes, or even realise that they are jokes, if you’re not a geek (at least partly). Anyway, it may also be a good book to help you understand a geek who’s close to you, if this is the case.

By the way, this is one of the books I would reread again (and again…) every few months, if I had the chance.

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