The book paints an intimate and deadly accurate picture of the time period, and makes you feel like you belong to the group characters as if you know them personally.
This work provides examples of:
- A Friend in Need: When Dan's mother has a stroke and becomes paralyzed, his friends all help take care of her.
- Artifact Title: The main cast all quit Microsoft relatively early on in the book and never go back.
- Brick Joke: The Marilyn Monroe wig.
- Dance Party Ending: Sort of, the last entry is about the night Dan and his friends attempted to recreate a Pink Floyd stage show with laser pointers for his disabled mother.
- Heroic Safe Mode: It's implied that Dan's dad has been in this state ever since his little brother died. He was using his work at IBM to defer the grief of Jed's passing, and when he gets laid off early in the book he can defer it no longer and has a
Tear Jerker of a breakdown. - Indestructibility Montage: Several programmers do this to a Microsoft "Ship-It" award plaque by pouring acid on the plaque, dragging it behind their car on a rope, and so on. The result? A few almost-invisible scratches.
- Late Coming Out: The code tester "Bug Barbecue" comes out at age 31, as a result of being so close to San Francisco after the group moves to Silicon Valley from Seattle.
- Limited Social Circle: While most members of the group are shown as having other friends, they mostly interact with each other rather than these outside friends.
- Mood Whiplash: Dan's dad in mourning for Jed after losing his IBM job is followed up with an entry that consists essentially of "Went to Boeing surplus, bought zinc".
- Never Had Toys: Dusty's hippie parents only bought her a single store-bought toy; it was a Spirograph, and they only bought her it because she convinced them that it was an "educational" toy.
- Quirky Household: In the beginning of the book, five of the characters live in a group house, which Abe has been renting for years despite having boatloads of money from Microsoft stock. Dan's description of it is very telling of their nerdy quirks.
- Production Foreshadowing Dan notices Karla never seems to talk to or about her family. She only tells him they're psychotic. Dan quips that all families are psychotic.
- Tech Bro: Todd and Dusty are vain bodybuilders who work as computer programmers.
- True Companions
- 24-Hour Party People: Susan's vesting party contains these people in rare literary form.
- Unions Suck: The trope is discussed:"I'm sure the Hollywood unions are just waiting with bated breath for coding and multimedia production to unionize. What's it going to be - I write the code and then somebody from I.A.T.S.E. comes in and has to press the return key?"
hellojed
