Hard drive: life at Microsoft

Interview, August, 1995 by Ian Verchere, Todd Eberle

They're young, many of them millionaires who live in group houses that resemble student dorms and are within walking distance of the office. Which is a good thing, because an eighty-hour week is not uncommon. And while the money is an incentive, that's not the main reason most Microsofters do what they do. Basically, they're in it because they want to change the world.

Like an alternative to the alternative music scene, at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, a group of computer whiz kids known as Microsofters are infusing geek culture with the aura that once belonged to rebel culture. Unlike rebel culture, however, Microsofters seem to embrace the corporate zeitgeist. As the corporate campus of the computer age, Microsoft headquarters - referred to by Microsofters as "the campus" - employs about five thousand people who write, test, design, and market computer programs that run the majority of computer systems around the world. But while so much attention has been focused on the product, with the exception of the company's founder, Bill Gates, little has been written about the producers. Last year in Wired magazine Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X, offered one of the first glimpses into the personal lives of young Microsofters in an article that inspired his latest novel, Microserfs (Regan Books/HarperCollins). It struck us that this subject begged for an insider/outsider anthropological approach, providing our readers with pictures that say a thousand words about one of the first really new tribal cultures to come down the pike in a long, long time. So we commissioned the photo essay that you see here of some homes and offices of those twenty- and thirty-year-olds who didn't want to be rock stars, movie stars, or any of the other things kids usually dream about. Instead, they turned into computer stars. According to one employee, Microsoft essentially "offers us the same life we had in school, except we get paid to do our work and, unlike school, at Microsoft we get to do the really cool stuff." What follows is a peek at life in today's techie lane.