Steve Yegge: Follow Up to His Accidentally Public Rant

The whole thing felt like I was meeting the President - layer after layer of aides and executive assistants, tons of security, and briefings on where to sit, where to not sit, where to stand, where to not stand, look him in the eye when you shake his hand, etc etc. It was kind of surreal.

I haven't presented to any other big-corp CEO other than him, so I can't really draw any comparisons.

One thing Yegge brought up that I also felt the same about walking out of that room: Jeff is really smart, like really, really smart. I was warned about this beforehand and spent two weeks poring over every single detail, potential feature, everything about the idea I was presenting. He still managed to come out of left field with relevant questions that none of us had even thought of. So I can corroborate that side of the story.

The comparison to Liszt also seems apt - before we were even done presenting, he'd already grokked it to a surprising degree, and was already expanding upon the idea in out loud. You could hear my manager scribbling like a madman trying to get all of this down. This might not seem especially amazing, but the Director and VP level people I presented the very same idea to had not the same depth of insight. I remember being very impressed on the spot.

I'm no longer with Amazon, and I don't particularly want to go back - but that's not due to bad top management, IMO Bezos is one of the keenest tech CEOs around. He might be the closest thing we have left to Jobs.

To balance it out a bit and not make this seems like a complete Amazon love-fest: Jeff loved our idea, he gave us the green light right away. We left that room ecstatic thinking we were about to change the online retail experience forever.

Then middle management showed up. There was political infighting about who owns the project - it straddled multiple disciplines (hence why it was so groundbreaking), and there was a mixture of both hot-potato-oh-god-you-take-it and this-is-amazing-we-need-the-credit-on-this.

The teams that were interested were unwilling to yield to other teams that (rightfully, given their expertise and domain) wanted in, and some teams we needed support from kept punting it since it wasn't in their yearly plan (put together, well, a year or more ago). The project would have provided very powerfully tangible, very high-profile benefits to the customer, but said benefits weren't part of the metrics on which our department was getting judged, so at the VP level the willingness to devote resources was almost non-existent. There was lots of lip service given - especially about how a few people were able to hack together this thing and make it all the way to a Jeff Presentation.

But ultimately the project froze. It was, actually, probably the main reason I decided to leave Amazon for a smaller, more agile startup, where if the CEO wants something done, by golly, it's gettin' done.