Working in the Code Mine

Dennis Barker

MICROSERFS by Douglas Coupland, Regan Books/HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-039148-0, $21

It's hell working at Microsoft. Or so it is for the techno-turks in Microserfs , a zippy novel about 20-somethings hacking away in Mr. Bill's code mines. In the great work literature of the past, cruelly oppressed laborers slaved in slaughterhouses, sloshing around in guts and gore. These kids are bummed because they have to stay up all night debugging, trying to meet shipping dates, strung out on Cheetos and Tab, living in fear of being flamed by Bill.

Meanwhile, they exist day by day, line by line, lamenting their lack of personal lives ("my universe consists of home, Microsoft, and Costco"), plotting their escape from Redmond, and being sure to check Microsoft's NASDAQ price .

The main characters are programmers -- narrator Daniel works in product testing -- but they talk more like industry groupies. They make a few obligatory references to C++ and class libraries, but mostly they talk Silicon Valley trash: the differences between Microsoft and Apple ("better cafeterias" versus "better nerd toys"), the "weird" corporate culture at Intel (staffers are suspected of being cyborgs), gossip, why Windows is counterintuitive, and the Cult of Bill. And they whine, oh how they whine, that they're not "One-Point-Oh" -- the first people to work on the first version of something. Being One-Point-Oh is what makes you a Cyberlord rather than a Microserf.

Coupland gets a little too cute sometimes, and his characters tend to talk like sitcom people, always quick with the riposte and bubbling with witty asides. But his observations are dead-on; he's much funnier than anyone writing in the high-tech press. There's a great scene set in a meeting with venture capitalists. Daniel uses pop metaphors to describe the money types. There's "VC Woman with Barbra-Streisand-in-Concert Hairdo" and "Young VC guy, who would be the same age as Rosemary's Baby."

Coupland's treatment of computers is more cultural than technical. They are props rather than an essential part of the story. In fact, he's more interested in the low-tech knickknacks of the social landscape than he is in computing technology. For every reference to a Pentium or the Internet, there are a hundred mentions of warehouse stores, Pop-Tarts, Legos, Melrose Place , CNN, and aerosol cheese.

But that's OK. Coupland uses these cultural bits to good effect. Daniel describes his housemates in terms of their dream Jeopardy categories. There are enough pop references in this book to fill a CD-ROM on merchandise and entertainment of the late twentieth century.

Coupland's story is only partially about working at Microsoft. Mostly, it's about people and their relationships, not about the epic struggle to link obj ects. It's all seen through the eyes of 20-year-olds, but don't let that scare you away. The concerns here are universal: family, friends, and making a living.

Compared to some of the great work novels, Microserfs doesn't have the weight of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle , and it doesn't have the low-down grit and pathos of Charles Bukowski's Post Office . But it's a pretty good story, sometimes touching, often funny, and it's a very entertaining chronicle of life in these weird times.

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Dennis Barker has never worked in a code mine, but he's held a variety of editing positions at BYTE. You can reach him on the Internet or BIX at dbarker@bix.com .