0.7 Seeing the light

The latter half of the 1980s loom in my memory now as a mass exodus of the wonderful. Jonathan Raban would leave in 1989: His paean to the city notwithstanding, he apparently felt that Seattle’s charms didn’t make up for its cultural deficiencies. In 1985, Rick Herman and his girlfriend Leigh Willis left Seattle for Bellingham, 85 miles north, where they would settle down comfortably, have a son, Eli. and raise him in the kind of laid-back circumstances that were fast fading away in Seattle. My Weekly editor, Ann Senechal, was preparing to move back east that same year, telling me that Seattle felt like an “outpost,” that she had never expected it to be so “small and confining,” and that she kept “running into walls here.” Her leavetaking would set Brewster to editorializing mournfully that Seattle was suffering a brain and ambition drain. A good friend of my wife’s—Marian Docter, a lifelong Seattleite—moved to Alaska because, she said, “All the men in Seattle are wimps.” They lacked even sexual ambition. Jan Allister, having been given 1,600 shares of Microsoft stock before the company’s 1986 IPO, would resign shortly after the company went public at $21 per share, The stock would close its first day of trading at $27.75, and Microsoft’s first stock split would come the next year. turn management of the stock over to her husband, tell him never to tell her how much it was worth, and move with him to the Minnesota backwoods, where they both would take teaching positions at St. Olaf’s College. She had fled the frantic pace and prosperity of California for the remote Pacific Northwest only to have them follow her here; she wouldn’t be taking any chances this time.

The year after Allister fled, Microsoft became the world’s biggest microcomputer software company, with revenues of $345.9 million, and it occurred to me that Allister had made a classic Seattle move: walking out on her employer when it became uncomfortably celebrated and successful, as if the company’s glory and her attendant affluence tainted her. As the wealth—and the legend—of Gates and Microsoft grew through the 80s, as Microsoft employees grew increasingly, cultishly, devoted to their leader, and as talk spread through the halls at Microsoft that Gates harbored ambitions of growing it into a “billion-dollar company,” Allister grew more and more restive, and less and less happy with a work regimen as pointless as it was exhausting. She derived no joy from work whose only reward was monetary. The more successful Microsoft grew, the less she could define her reason for being there. “Why should I keep working like this,” she asked me one day, “just so Bill Gates can make another million?”

Even to me, from my safe remove, there was something exhausting and demoralizing about Microsoft’s drive. No matter how hard and how well people worked there, no matter how much they accomplished, it was never enough. The company was an incessantly hungry beast. You never saw anything in the way of celebration when a milestone was reached; all anyone ever talked about was the exhaustive list of mistakes they’d made in the course of successfully completing a project, how they could have done better, and how much better they would do next time around. Energetic new faces kept pouring into Microsoft, bringing the kind of excitement and energy that kept company old-timers—people who had been there all of two or three years—anxious and on edge. The editors I worked with seemed to have to pick up and move to a new office every six months or so, and now most of the company was moving out of its building as Microsoft expanded into a large complex of buildings on the other side of the highway. There was never any down time there, any time for people to put their work on cruise control and concentrate on the rest of their lives, and it didn’t look as if Microsoft employees would be relaxing any time soon.