After Accidentally Public Rant, Google Engineer Follows Up With A Homage To Jeff Bezos

Remember Google engineer Steve Yegge’s long rant about his past experiences at Amazon and his current employer’s own issues with creating platforms on Google+ (which he dubbed a “knee-jerk reaction” and a “pathetic afterthought”? If you haven’t read it yet, it’s well worth your time.

Yegge has now followed up on his it-was-meant-to-be-an-internal-memo diatribe, saying nothing bad happened to him at Google after his rant went viral. He did get laughed at a lot, he adds, by everyone all the way up to the top (Google co-founder Sergey Brin publicly said he didn’t read all of it because it was too long but sometimes used it as a “night-time aid”).

Importantly, he also points out that Google listened to what he had to say and are “already figuring out how to deal with some of the issues I raised”.

He goes on to sing Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos‘ praises. And then some.

I mean, imagine what it would be like to start off as an incredibly smart person, arguably a first-class genius, and then somehow wind up in a situation where you have a general’s view of the industry battlefield for ten years. Not only do you have more time than anyone else, and access to more information than anyone else, you also have this long-term eagle-eye perspective that only a handful of people in the world enjoy.

In some sense you wouldn’t even be human anymore. People like Jeff are better regarded as hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.

It’s a good read, especially in light of what he wrote about Bezos in the first post, which garnered heaps of attention. In it, he wrote Amazon’s chief makes “ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies” and that “Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day” as an Amazon employee.

Later, in a comment on his own Google+ post, Yegge adds:

I’ll post some more stories sometime, whenever I get time. I have a bunch. Years of jaw-droppingly unusual stories. Amazon is an astoundingly interesting business. You have no idea the stuff that happens behind the scenes to get you those brown boxes!

Do bring it on, Steve.

(Picture courtesy of another Steve: Jurvetson on Flickr)