Last year I moved back to Iowa, the place where I grew up, the
place I'd left eight years earlier for graduate school and Seattle.
The move raised a lot of eyebrows: It was made clear to me, by
both Seattlites and Iowans, that you move to only one of these
places and away from the other. Clearly I had it backward.
"Why leave Seattle?" people would ask, and I'd say, "to get
away from Microsoft." This always got a laugh, until they realized
I was in earnest. I had a near-compulsive, overwhelming need to
escape all things Microsoft, to elude the corporation's
omnipresence in the Emerald City. Unfortunately for me, the
company and the city had become one.
Before actually moving, I first tried quitting my job. I had
been a contractor on "the campus" for three years. I worked in
four different buildings, had seven offices and contributed to six
different products. I'll never know how much of my life was
sacrificed to the daily commute across Lake Washington, but a
little more than 1,000 hours, or 42 days, is a rough guess. I made
at least one and a half times the salary I now make -- which means
I went out to eat that much more, bought that many more clothes,
put a great deal more into savings and saw a therapist on a regular
basis. I also had free beverages and inexpensive,
company-subsidized food from the campus's many cafeterias. I
weighed about 10 pounds more, and my back felt like it was
approaching 70 years old rather than 30.
I had vowed never to work for Microsoft -- having observed the
poor effect the company had on the disposition and sleep cycle of
a friend who worked there. But after I earned my master's degree
in English and a teaching certificate, I needed work, and my friend
helped line up a project developing a teacher's guide for a
Microsoft product. I worked off-site, was paid well and figured
I'd find a regular job in education once it was over. But I didn't
foresee the lousy Seattle teaching market. So I signed on for a
longer Microsoft haul.
I had a small but telling experience during one of my first
weeks on campus. Introduced to a full-timer with relative power
whose star would crash and rise again before I left, I stuck my
hand out to shake his. He ignored it, gave me a sideways glance
and said, "Do I need to know you?" I laughed nervously and returned
to my den.
My first on-campus task was to read Encarta, the company's
multimedia encyclopedia, from A to Z and find possible
cross-reference listings for articles. For instance, "Gerbil" was
in the "Mammal" category, but it could also go in the "Pet"
category. More complicated were scientists -- should they go only
under "People" in the overriding "Science" category, or should
they also be placed under their individual disciplines? Weekly
meetings with my nervous, overworked supervisor dwelled on
questions such as these. It wasn't rocket science, but it paid the
bills.
These were the nascent days of multimedia, before the rush to
the Web, when everyone was under the illusion that CD-ROMs were the
Next Big Thing. The upstairs of Microsoft's Building 10 was still
mostly empty when I moved in. (By the time I left, I was in an
office with three other people, and even full-timers were having to
share their rightful space.) I had an office that reminded me of a
subterranean cavern. Although many window offices were available,
it would have been against policy to spare one for a temp.
Men -- better described as boy-men clad in shorts and sandals
no matter the weather, with pop cans lining their office interiors
and college stereo speakers booming -- inhabited the sleepy
hallway. I only saw one other woman roaming this vacant wing, and
occasionally when I'd meet her in the kitchen or bathroom I'd
consider making small talk -- a lost art at Microsoft. Once, about
to make some friendly quip regarding our icy surroundings, I
hesitated at the sight of the large diamond gracing her hand. I
soon found out she was Melinda French, Bill Gates' then-intended.
Across the hall from me was a guy who had five computers in
his office. He also had an electric guitar, an espresso maker
complete with demitasse set, pictures of his kids and one of those
brightly colored plastic air guns that shoots sticky balls. I
tried making contact -- hello, a smile -- but he'd have nothing to
do with me. After a few weeks of niceties, I gave up and began
exchanging glares with him. Then, somewhere between "Ketchikan"
and "Khmer," I was startled by a THWACK against my hallway window.
Suddenly, a yellow ball came hurling toward me, only to stick next
to another ball on the window. My jaw dropped as I looked up at
this guy aiming his air gun at my office. He grimaced, fired again,
then turned back to his work.
I could not believe that I was working for a company where a
guy who merited five computers and an external window would shoot
toy balls in my direction without comment. Obviously, I'd made a
lot of wrong assumptions.
Having reached "Z" in Encarta, I was asked to stay on and
serve as some sort of education specialist. Someone thought that
a product made mainly for kids should have someone with teaching
experience working on it. But my mantle was absurdly vague -- and
as a contractor, I had neither a title nor a business card. Still,
I was pleased. I'd work with schools and teachers; I'd initiate
exciting, inventive collaborations. But as I blindly searched the
company for other people whose jobs encompassed "education," I
realized they were just marketers in sheep's clothing. In the name
of "education," Microsoft was simply offering money-making schemes
aimed at the young -- just a small notch above Joe Camel.
At one presentation, a bunch of fifth-graders showed a product
team what they had done in school with the software. The kids were
thrilled to be on campus with a group of interested adults; their
teacher beamed. A few people tried to make kid-friendly chitchat,
but then a product manager abruptly exposed the true purpose of the
children's visit. "Would each of you like to have this product at
home?" he asked and was quickly greeted by a positive chorus. And
then the suave stinger: "Do you know what kind of credit cards
your parents have?" Not a hint of a smirk crossed the guy's face
as he held his pen, poised to jot down their responses. Dickens
couldn't have written it better.
At Microsoft I got a full tour of the underworld of geekdom.
I once sat in the cafeteria just to hear how long two guys could
discuss which parts of the Star Trek Enterprise's Holodeck could be
real. After an hour, I had to get back to work. Then there was
the guy who appeared from thin air in my friend's office and asked
her for a lunch date without so much as introducing himself --
instead, he asked which product she worked on.
But the geeks aren't the problem. It's the meanness, the
pomposity that I found most dispiriting. Although contractors were
not above the nastiness, true spitefulness was doled out by "real
people." Those full-time, benefit-earning, stock-collecting folk
flaunt their top-dog status and get away with murder. No matter
your number of degrees, your age, your general decency (a real
drawback), a contractor is always reminded of the true hierarchy.
During crunch-time on one project, a developer (i.e. full-timer)
put it succinctly when he asked the lead editor (i.e. contractor)
to "get your little people off the system!" The developer was
probably 5 feet 6 inches tall and around 25 years old; the editor
had a law degree and at least five years on the guy, not to ment
ion a few inches.
What's the source of this climate? As a tour guide in London
once told me, "Look up and you will see a city's true history."
The same applies at Microsoft, where looking up, up, up lands one
face-to-face with Bill Gates. I only saw the man once: While
eating lunch outside, he walked past just as a massive sprinkler
system began drenching me. The spray of water knocked a sweater
from my hands into the air. Gates walked on, oblivious to the
unfolding comedy.
Gates' ruthlessness is legendary, and the people I met at
Microsoft who were gung-ho about the place definitely shared it.
Everyone else -- those not wholly caught up in the
divide-and-conquer mentality -- seemed like they'd been drained of
some of their vital fluids. The place has an eerie effect on
people. After some time on campus, smart people who could probably
lead rich lives filled with reading, home-cooked meals and
non-computer-related friends will fly off the handle about whether
a button should be on the bottom of a screen or the top. These
same people give up eating anything remotely nourishing for weeks
on end as a project comes to a harried, tension-filled finale and
the remnants from pizza deliveries and Chinese carry-outs collect
in offices. How anyone maintains personal relationships,
especially of a sexual nature, is beyond me -- though it explains
the very high number of Microsoft partnerships.
There's a chill about the place that emanates from the top.
It's widely known that Gates has little regard for people who don't
understand the technical end of the business. (If you work on
content, you can expect the short end of any project stick.)
Meetings with Bill or one of his top people are often replete with
a barrage of expletives and other disdainful comments. One
co-worker of mine who had developed a prototype for a new product
was asked to present it to a divisional manager. He worried for
weeks about the meeting, and when the day arrived he even drove
home at lunch (an hour-long journey) to make sure he looked just
right. Midway through the presentation, the manager stopped him
and asked coolly, "Why are you showing this to me?"
I'm now working in a small company -- the whole of which
wouldn't begin to fill one of Microsoft's 30-some campus buildings.
The men who control the purse strings probably vote more
conservatively than Bill, something that doesn't altogether please
me. But people say hi to each other in the halls and talk at the
coffee maker. For the first month or two, I must have seemed like
a cold fish, having lost the ability to chat. After all, one of
the few conversations I recall having at Microsoft with a stranger
was when a guy furtively -- for he knew he was breaking the
cold-shoulder code -- asked where I'd bought my shoes. Every time
we saw each other after that was awkward, as though we'd shared an
inappropriate intimacy.
Now, though, I put my lunch in the refrigerator without
marking my name on it, confident it won't be stolen. And each day
I'm less amazed by the miracle of watching people arrive at 8 a.m.
and leave in unison at 4:30 p.m. There's a civility to it that
Microsoft, for all its bucks, will never attain.
Editor's Note: Jennifer New is a writer living in Iowa City, Iowa.