So charming! I was immersed in academia in the 90’s and came to “Silicon Valley” culture in 2003, yet still felt connected to the characters in this reflective fictional diary and I indulged in the same experience I had reading "Still Life with Woodpecker" in high school: lots of "YEAH!" reactions to snippets of text. I’m glad I waited to read this; I think in 2022 it’s far more poignant than it would have been if I’d read it in 1997. (And for totally unexpected reasons I cried at the end!) Spookily, most (though not all) of the predictions have indeed come true. For funsies, I've written up a list of quotes that inspired me to mark up the pages, and have recorded them here before I pass the book along.

* I'm trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition. My life is lived day to day, one line of bug-free code at a time.
* My relationship with my body has gone all weird. I feel like my body is a station wagon in which I drive my brain around, like a suburban mother taking the kids to hockey practice.
* What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?
* There's this eerie, science-fiction lack of anyone who doesn't look exactly 31.2 on the Campus. And, of course, major death denial. I'm 26 and I'm just not ready to turn 31.2 yet.
* It must have been so weird - living the way my Dad did - thinking your company was going to take care of you forever.
* What's the engine that pulls us through the repetition?
* Where does morality enter our lives, Dan? How do we justify what we do to the rest of humanity?
* We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.
* Why are we so hopeless with our bodies?
* Karla says we're all trying to figure out what we really need in life, as opposed to what we simply want.
* You can put anything on a label and people will believe it. We are one sick species, I tell you.
* I want to forget the way my body was ignored, year in, year out, in the pursuit of code, in the pursuit of somebody else's abstraction.
* There's something about a monolithic tech culture like Microsoft that makes humans seriously rethink fundamental aspects of the relationship between their brains and bodies - their souls and their ambitions; things and thoughts.
* Having nothing feels liberating.
* I'm no sci-fi buff, but doesn't this seem like a dangerous way to be messing with the structure of time - allowing the corporate realm to invade the private?
* Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our paychecks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.
* There's an endemic inability in the software industry to estimate the amount of time required for a software project.
* In Los Angeles everyone's writing a screenplay. In New York everyone's writing a novel. In San Francisco, everyone's developing a multimedia product.
* How will games progress as 30somethings turn into 50somethings? [Fantastically, as it turns out!]
* You never heard about people 'not having lives' until about five years ago, just when all of the '80s technologies really penetrated our lives.
* He is lost. He does not connect privilege with responsibility; wealth with morality.
* Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.
* Do you think humanoids - people - will ever design a machine that can pray? Do we pray to machines or through them? How do we use machines to achieve our deepest needs?
* I think that's why it's so hard for me to understand my body. Because our family was so zero-touch.
* And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?
* Many geeks don't really have a sexuality - they just have work.
* Machines really are our subconscious...by monitoring the machines we build, and the sorts of things we put into them, we have this amazingly direct litmus as to how we are evolving.
* I think your problem is that you think everyone else is a freak except you, but everybody's a freak - you included.
* Where does your individuality end and your species-hood begin?
* Humans are the only animals to have generations.
* When technology accelerates to a critical point, as it has now, generations become irrelevant.
* Subjectivity is so much faster to scale.
* Politics only makes people cranky. There must be some alternative form of discourse. How is the political will generated?
* We've peripheralized our essence.
* Eating crap makes you feel like such an outsider in the Bay Area.
* Rants are the official communication mode of the '90s.
* When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of these gyms and all of this scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.
* The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists. Look for those people - the talented generalists. They're good as project and product managers.
* There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's the there's no point to remembering everything. Being able to find things is what's important. [Library science teaches us this, too!]
* But 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. 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."
* Todd's almost cybernetic relationship with his answering machine seems a precursor of some not-too-distant future where human beings are appended by nozzles, diodes, buzzers, thwumpers, and dingles that inform us of the time and temperature in the Kerguelen Archipelago and whether Fergie is, or is not, sipping tea at that exact moment. [That future is now.]
Randomness is a useful shorthand for describing a pattern that's bigger than anything we can hold in our minds.
* What does all this stuff tell us about ourselves as humans? What have we gained by externalizing our essence through these consumable electronic units of luxury, comfort, and freedom?
* The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory - first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power.

1995 02/01

I don't think this was the first book I read and felt myself to be the target demographic (that would have been Less Than Zero), but it may have been the first book I read where I felt like the author was really thinking about people like me. As a member of the baby bust, there haven't been as many of those moments as I might like.

Re-reading this years later was worthwhile for me after having worked for a giant cult-of-personality-driven tech company and lived in Silicon Valley. As with most of the Coupland books I've read:

...it really seemed like one of those foreign movies that you rent and return half-wound because they're too contrived to be believed, and then real life happens, and you wonder if the Europeans understood everything all along.

Another note: is "fishwich" a Canadianism? Coupland (as always) is dead-on about culture. He explores and reveals a lot about what language and technology say about culture (or the progression of the species, as some characters from this book might put it). But there are always these details that are most-decidedly "off." Like referring to the Silicon Valley arterial road El Camino Real as "Camino Real" instead of "El Camino." …or putting a definite article in front of highway numbers that aren't "101" (nobody says "the 280" that I've ever heard). I'm not trying to nit-pick. There's something about these off details that lends credibility to Coupland's critique. The old you-can't-really-understand-something-you're-only-been-a-part-of idea. It makes him seem like more of a visiting anthropologist who has extracted the essence of the people under study while flubbing some inconsequential details because of illegible field-notes.

Loved the book. Glad I read it again. I'd recommend this to anybody who has worked in technology, or wants to understand more about how the tech industry has developed culturally, or wants to be reminded of the 1990s.

For me Coupland has some 5-star books. This is not one of them. The characters come across as flat and uninteresting. And the story as a whole was kind of dull. One of his earlier books, perhaps that’s what caused the lack of polish.

It's like Big Bang Theory. Except it's funny. And insightful. And well written.

So, nothing like Big Bang Theory.

This book has not aged well.

This is always the problem with Douglas Coupland. His books are always in the here and now of the moment in which he wrote them. Can you imagine a book about tech culture that doesn't feature the following:

DVDs, Google, Smart phones, Facebook, Netflix, Thumb drives, Minecraft?

None of these things existed in the public consciousness when Microserfs was published in 1995. In fact, at the time, Yahoo! was still a PhD project at Stanford.

I think in the 90s, people saw Coupland as a visionary, but for the most part he was just able to comment on the world around him. He hits as much as he misses in this book (although one big hit is that the Oop! software the main characters in the book write sounds a hell of a lot like Minecraft.)

I'm sure that in 1990 when this book came out, I lapped this up. But now it seems a lot like a relic.

One of the best books I read in 2016- so many amazing one liners and multi dimensional characters. A glimpse into the beginning of the tech world that is now a part of all our lives but once was for nerds only.

My wife read Coupland's 2004 novel, "Eleanor Rigby" and found it to be pretty good. I learnt that he is both an author and a "post-modern" artist. I often see Douglas Coupland books in the scifi section of the bookstore. 1995's "Microserfs" was about coders working for Micrsoft in the 1990's. My son is currently a coder working for Microsoft. I thought, perhaps this might give some insight of his world. This is not scifi, but rather, techfi. Though I've never worked in an office cubical, am not a gamer and rather low-tech (not a cellphone carrier), I enjoyed this much more than I thought I would.

This is the story of a group of Microsoft employees in the early 90s who leave the company and go to silicon valley to go to video game software startup company. The book is mostly about the lives and the trials and tribulations of these programmers as they try to figure out their personal lives while working all the time.

The writing style of this book is very interesting. The story is told from the perspective of one of the characters from his diary that he writes in because he can't sleep. It is an effective way of telling the story. I was really interested in this book, it was very interesting to compare and contrast how things are the same and different at Microsoft than they were 15 years ago. Granted, that is something that only Microsoft employees can think about while they read this book. In general it seems like a fairly good and accurate fictional account of what it is like to work in the software industry.

I read this book because I am a microserf, and I wanted to see what it was like for the microserfs 10-15 years ago.

Is it possible to be nostalgic for a time never experienced? The Geekiness of the lot behind Oop! makes me feel just that for the 90s: nostalgic.
Microserfs is the first book I’ve read by Coupland. To say I enjoyed the book is an understatement. His ability to blur the line between humor and Just Plain Geekiness has created a new word to describe not only an era, but a group of people: microserfs.

Reading Microserfs for the first time right now is a strange feeling. Parts of it are so distinctly 90s dot-com culture that I feel like I'm watching people through a time warp. It's as if I had gone into a time machine and emerged 20 years in the past.

But despite the progress we've made in technology, the ups and downs of Microsoft and Apple, and the age of the internet, some things never really do change. One of these things are geeks. The characters in Microserfs are multi-dimensional, introspective, and most of all, anyone who's worked in the tech industry will recognize their archetypes. The Ethan character reminded me so much of someone I used to work with that I wondered if it really was based on him.

Coupland is good at bringing humor to a lot of strange situations that arise in the tech world, but what surprised me about this book was that it wasn't just a complete comedy. Most of the book is an accurate portrayal of culture of Silicon Valley during the 90s, but it goes much deeper than that. There are heartfelt discussions about what it means to relate to another person and what it means to be human.

I had a few problems with the last quarter of the book, but most of it is just personal preference. The Bar-Code/Michael thing resolved itself too nicely. If the situation had happened in the real world, I think the 40 year old man in diapers scenario would be more likely.

It's hard to fit this book into a specific category. It's a humorous book about the tech culture, but what I think it ultimately is is a coming-of-age story of a group of geeky friends. I'm going to recommend this to all my programmer friends.

Back in 1993, we ALL talked like Coupland, especially with the geeks that lived in a sealed office next to ours, and came out to service our computers. Their supervisor was named Pierre.

Pierre was a paunchy, funny, gone-a-bit-to-seed guy who, last seen after he moved to his bosses' organization after the relocation of logistics, developed a bad hernia from lifting desktop units for overhaul, before his much needed retirement.

Computers were weighty in that stone age.

Anyway, I so much loved Coupland's style in Gen X, that I got this one, read it, and gave it to a friend during the period of my first signs of office burn out in 1994.

I was working half days, and would frequent our neighbourhood mall before making the bus connection to the office. I bought this, there.

The Old Guard, like my own supervisor, avoided computers. My supervisor - like nearby Jack, a former LCol as he was - delegated most of their computer work to staff.

I was the overburdened staff my supervisor picked.

He couldn't even type. As if I had the time!

***

But we young bucks loved our gadgets!

Those were the happy days when workers were still human before automation was robo-totalized.

For us Coupland was an advance scout in that Brave New World of Microserfs -

And a darned Funny One at that.

But he SAW our future so clearly:

For now we are all, working or retired, only worn-out little microserfs…

Whose computers are Winning out as we Frazzled Humans DECLINE!

***

And what about my wacky ex-nerd buddy Pierre?

Well, I can only picture him in his bucolic retirement home, feet up on an ottoman and comfy pillow beneath his back, listening to his Beethoven and thinking with a chuckle of his difficult evangelizing at Delegate ‘n Disappear of our senior officers -

Who were more apt to joke around over lunchtime suds at the RCAF Mess -

Than get with the program and learn how their computers worked!