Today’s book: Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters

Adam Barr spent ten years as a programmer at Microsoft before cashing out his options and writing this book. At MS he worked on Windows NT, an early interactive TV set-top box project, SoftImage Digital Studio, and, as best I can tell, NT/Win2K again at the end. This isn’t a bad book although I think you really want to know about the new hire interview process at the company to really enjoy it; there’s also a long involved portion on Barr’s travails at the SoftImage group which he holds up as reasonably typical of MS. A long interlude in which he describes his early teenage efforts at running a BBS and college internships follows, although I think either he or his editor lost interest/steam here. Finally he looks at the antitrust case and sides with his former employer but for good reasons and he gives his opinion on the company’s chance at continued world dominion (he says they’re spreading themselves too thin and forgetting what made the place great).

I read this book based on an interesting article he wrote for called Dr. Selfpub, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Amazon.Com detailing his experience in getting the book published. The ‘selfpub’ he refers to is that the book is published through iUniverse, which means you can read the book online at no cost but only one page at a time, no downloading it in one fell swoop in, say, Acrobat format.