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 As 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 1991."

* * *

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

WEDNESDAY

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.