Microserfs: A Novel (P.S.) [Kindle Edition]

Douglas Coupland (Author)

Book Description

They are Microserfs—six code-crunching computer whizzes who spend upward of sixteen hours a day "coding" and eating "flat" foods (food which, like Kraft singles, can be passed underneath closed doors) as they fearfully scan company e-mail to learn whether the great Bill is going to "flame" one of them. But now there's a chance to become innovators instead of cogs in the gargantuan Microsoft machine. The intrepid Microserfs are striking out on their own—living together in a shared digital flophouse as they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.

Editorial Reviews

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 [e-mail], 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.

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Product Details

• File Size: 1742 KB
• Print Length: 400 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (June 21, 2011)
• Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers
• Language: English
• ASIN: B004W2YZ0I
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,984 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Kindle Edition badly in need of editing/proofreading. July 8, 2011

By Trevor Whitaker

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This would easily be a 4 star book for me and in paperback I'd give it that in a heartbeat but the Kindle edition is horrible. It seems like someone ran a hardcopy through a scanner and then OCR'ed it without proofreading it at all. There are letters missing, a few entire words missing and many, many instances of the wrong letter over and over (like a U instead of a V - there's an entire section where it says Silicon Ualley over and over) and places where the wrong word was picked up (ie - Interiority becomes Inferiority, somewhat appropriate in describing this edition).

I've read the book before and enjoyed it but the Kindle edition was a bit of a chore. It looks like the publisher didn't even proofread this book once before uploading it. A shame, really.

52 of 60 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars everything that is important about engineering culture April 30, 2000

By Philip Greenspun

Format:Paperback

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Kindle version is a mess December 21, 2011

By C Williamson

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

When I spend ten bucks on a digital copy of a book, I assume it's going to be free of sloppy OCR errors and will be proofread. This is not. It is a mess, and chapters near the end are almost unreadable. This is at the quality level of a pirated ebook that some teenager scanned. I want be buying any ebook titles from Harper again, this is just appalling.

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