Дуглас Коупленд - Microserfs

Later on Ethan then became excited and pulled a crumpled sheet of thermal fax paper from his pocket. It was his list of "Interactive Hiring Guidelines" he had laser-printed and faxed throughout the Valley, like one of those "Thank God It's Friday" posters, and was returned to him, about 17th generation. He felt proud to have entered the realm of apocrypha and urban legendary.

The Eight Laws of Multimedia Hiring:

1)

Always ask a person, "What have you shipped in the last two years?" That's all you should really ask. If they haven't shipped anything in the last two years, ask, "So what's your excuse?"

2)

The "job-as-life phase" lasts for maybe ten years. Nab 'em when they're young, and make sure they never grow old.

3)

You can't trust a dog that's bitten you. You wouldn't want to employ someone who you could steal away from another company in the middle of a project.

4)

The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists – the people who were bored with high school – the sort of people the teacher was always telling, "Now, Abe, you could get At if you really wanted to. Why don't you just apply yourself?" Look for these people – the talented generalists. They're good as project and product managers. They're the same people who would have gone into advertising in 1973.

5)

One psycho for every nine stable people in the company is a good ratio. Too many maniacally-driven people can backfire on you. Balanced people are better for the long-term stability of the company.

6)

Start-up companies beware: kids fresh out of school invariably bail out after a few years and join the big tech monocultures in search of stability.

7)

People are most ripe for pilfering from tech monocultures in their mid– to late 20s.

8)

The upper age limit of people with instincts for this business is about 40. People who were over 30 at the beginning of the late 1970s PC revolution missed the boat; anyone older is like a Delco AM car radio.

I suggested he plug the text into the Net in comp.hiring.slavery, and see what other laws get tacked on, but he got offended and said that because he had the paper version that these were "THE LAWS," and I realized there was no fighting either it or him.

"Ethan," I said, "thermal paper, I mean, how 1987."

Another super-long day. It's 6:00 a.m. I think I see the sky pinking up. Oh God – dawn.

Susan is tormenting poor Emmett now by ignoring him. Poor Emmett is feeling "pumped and dumped."

Susan's switched off her instant mail, and whenever moonstruck Mr. Couch visits her workstation she rations out her words, saying that she's too busy coding and/or too busy working on her Chyx 'zine, called "Duh ...," to speak with him.

Susan set up a Chyx Internet address and forecasts at least a hundred Chyx signed up on the Net by next week. She wants to set up forums about Fry's not selling tampons being a metaphor for men's fear of women, new product ideas, Barbie cults, and so forth. She's obsessively into it.

"I could structure the forums and bulletin boards like an issue of Sassy ... there'd be comments, and a place to ask other women for advice ... what's that column called?"

"Zits and stuff," Karla promptly replies.

"Oh yeah. Well, I wouldn't call it that, but something like personal narratives: 'IT HAPPENED TO ME'."

"I was the best programmer in my division and that jerk Tony got a promotion!"

"It happened to me: I dated a marketing manager and he turned out to be an asshole!"

"It happened to me: I was the only girl in Silicon Valley and still couldn't get a date!" (Susan).

"It happened to me – I wrote a Melrose Place scriptwriting program that generated vibrant, nonlinear, marginally controversial plot lines and made a fortune!"

Susan's on a crusade. Or a rampage.

Karla printed out the following letters and posted them all on her cubicle. They're HAL 9000's letters from 2001:

ATM HIS

MEM

LIF FLX CNT

COM

NUC VEH

Ethan flamed some of Bug's code this afternoon. "Jesus, Bug – what are you making here – hot dogs? You've put in everything including the snout ... everything but the squeal."

Bug told him to piss off, and who does he think he is ... Bill? The old Bug would have held a local McDonald's hostage with a sawed-off carbine. Good for Bug.

We were discussing computer-aided animation and we realized that it would have taken every computer in the world then in existence to morph Elizabeth Montgomery's nose into a twinkle-twinkle on Bewitched -

"ENIACS and all that," said Karla. "You could do it on a Mac now. In two minutes."

Jeremy came over this afternoon, and he's Bug's double. Twinsville.

He showed up at the front door of the office and all seven of us stampeded foyer-ward like 101 Dalmatians to gawk out the front window as he and Bug walked away to Jeremy's Honda.

Karla said the relationship had to be somewhat serious because "you know how hard it is to lure anybody down here from San Francisco." She's right. You could offer San Franciscans a free Infiniti J30 and they'd still have some excuse not to drive 25 measly miles down to Silicon Valley.

Actually, there's a slight back-and-forth snobbery between the Valley and the City. The Valley thinks the City is snobby and decadent, and the City thinks the Valley is techishly boring and uncreative. But I can see these impressions starting to blur. This all sounds like that old Joan Baez song, "One Tin Soldier."

While taking Misty on a walk with Mom through the Stanford Arboretum, Mom was telling me about this conversation she heard between two people with Alzheimer's down at the seniors home where she volunteers:

"A: How you doin'?

B: Pretty good. You?

A: How you doin' ?

B: I'm okay.

A: So you're doing okay?

B: How you doin'?"

I laughed, and she asked me why, and I said, "It reminds me of America Online chat rooms!" She demanded an example, so I gave her one:

A: Hey there.

B: Hi, A.

A: Hi, B

C: Hi

B: Look, C's here.

A: Hi, C!

B: CCCCCCCCCC

C: A + B=A + B

A: Gotta go

B: Bye, A

C: Bye, A

B: Poo

C: Poo poo

"This," I said, "is the much touted, transglobal, paradigm-shifting, epoch-defining dialogue to which every magazine on earth is devoting acres of print."

Oh – Misty's fur was covered in burrs, and it took us fifteen minutes to remove them.

Mom really has all of this new energy now that she swims every day. And her confidence has swelled enormously since winning the swim meet. She's been restacking her rock pile with extra vigor.

Astounding gossip meltdown: Susan and poor, meek little Emmett Couch, our manga-phobic storyboarder, went nuclear. It was SO embarrassing – right in the middle of the office Emmett started bellowing, "You just think of me as a piece of meat, Susan – I'm not sure I like that."

And Susan said back, "I don't call you a piece of meat. I call you my fuck toy."

(Susan surveys room for rebuttal, we all sit there, pretending to work, our eyes like sad-eyed velvet painting waifs, staring at our keyboards.)

"Well, I'm not sure I like that," Emmett says.

"Well, what do you want – to take it further? You want a relationship?''

"Well ..."

"Stop sniveling. I thought the deal was, we just have sex and leave it at that. Don't annoy me. I have to get back to work."