Silicon Valley/Beta's - How Not To Run a Start-up

On Boing-Boing, there's a review of a series starting in the 'States called Silicon Valley, a comedy about a programmer who develops a new compression algorithm and, instead of selling out for gazzilions, takes some seed money and tries to run his own start-up. All very Microserf's:

However, this is not the first time programmers have been on the small screen in a comedy. A few months ago, Amazon created Beta's:

I'd normally just cringe and move on (they're not as good as The IT Crowd by the looks of things)

but the other day I expanded my Douglas Coupland collection with jPod and The Gum Thief. jPod was also made into a TV series, sadly unavailable.

Generation X

As you may recall from earlier postings, I recently read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland. I've managed to find Generation X, one of his earlier works, and started reading it:

I like it already. It has these little Urban Dictionary-style definitions as footnotes. One I especially like is:

Consensus Terrorism: The process that decides in-office attitudes and behaviour.

Mmmm. Wonder how often I've seen that. Now I have a name for it. Here's a few more:

Power Mist: The tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation.

Recurving: Leaving one job to take another that pays less but places one back on the learning curve.

As in art, so in life, or maybe the other way around.

"Oh-point-Oh" - Microserfs

I've been reading Microserfs by Douglas Coupland:

I read jPod a few years ago and this is pretty good as well. In it there's a part where everyone is offered jobs at a new start-up and leaves their secure, and profitable, jobs at Microsoft. One of them explains that he want to do it because he will be "oh-point-oh": he'll be in at the start of something new, something potentially revolutionary.

I think that's what's been eating at me the last few years with the job. I've been working, time after time, on systems well past their best years and it's been grating on me a little bit too often. I want to start anew, make something no-one has ever made before, even a new programming language. "Oh-point-oh".

The relationship between the protagonist, Daniel, and his girlfriend Karla also intrigued me. He's not as smart as she is and she provides a way for him to grow into being someone better than he starts off being, while he and his colleagues and family provide something for her to belong to, being alienated from her real family. Maybe this is the post-modern situation, that we are closer to our friends and colleagues than we are to our own flesh and blood?

Daniel keeps a sort of diary on his laptop (an Apple Powerbook) and he writes some of the most romantic and hauntingly direct prose I've ever read:

"I don't want to lose you. I can't imagine ever feeling this strongly about anything or anybody ever again. This was unexpected, my soul's connection to you. You stole my loneliness."

There's a moment when he's with Karla and she's reliving a traumatic episode in her life. He holds her tight, almost holding her together, and says:

"you're a thousand diamonds - a handful of lovers' rings - chalk for a million hopscotch games"

(the elemental composition of the human body: carbon, the diamonds, and calcium, the chalk)

Another one of the themes of the book is the transition, or even evolution, of the characters from merely being corporate cogs in the Microsoft machine ("cannon fodder" as Daniel says at one point), to being individuals in the start-up. It's a little like the self-actualising personality Maslow was on about.

Hey "Karla"! Thought you might like it this way. Try looking at the source.