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**Adam Stacoviak:** Earthquake rubble? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, tell me more. What is a survival keychain? |
**Steve Yegge:** I don't think he ever showed it to me. I just heard rumors about it. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay... |
**Steve Yegge:** And he took one photo every day, which was like a big deal back in the 90s, when -- I don't know, where would you put them? I don't know if. |
**Jerod Santo:** S3? |
**Steve Yegge:** There was a time when people actually thought that was like a big deal. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... |
**Steve Yegge:** But the story I was going to tell it was I had to do a presentation to him. It was called "The Fundamental 50." It was a proposal that I had made to make our engineers kind of more broadly generalists, which something Jeff always wanted. Jeff's dream was that engineers were just chess pieces; not even ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Checkers. |
**Steve Yegge:** Checkers pieces, right, that he could just move around fungibly, from project to project, because that's the easiest way to plan... But of course, it never works out that way in practice. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Steve Yegge:** So anyway, I was trying to level everybody up with this sort of - effectively, a training program. And they liked it enough that they decided to put me in front of Bezos. And so I'm sitting there, but this time it was in a larger conference room, and I had about 10 or 12 of his lieutenants sitting arou... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Just to make it harder to read, or... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[26:03\] Do you, like, put the blanks there? Is it like "There should have been a paragraph here..." |
**Steve Yegge:** No, no. We just like literally skip stuff, and just cut stuff, and let him make the leaps. Franz Liszt - he used to be so good at sight-reading that he would -- only on the first read-through, he would play it correctly, and after that, he'd start embellishing. And Jeff's mind is just -- like, think ab... |
So we prepped and prepped and prepped for this stupid presentation... And you know we were excited about it, but I went to probably 12 principles and engineering directors and said "Vet this for me. It's going to Jeff." We all vetted it, and I showed it to Jeff, and he looked at the list and said, "So where's machine l... |
**Jerod Santo:** They wanted to be on the right side of history... Of Jeff's history. |
**Steve Yegge:** And they did not want to commit to liking my proposal or not liking it until Jeff had committed, which was the biggest pile of bullshit I'd ever seen. So to your superpower, the one that you wanted, which is make people freeze themselves trying to please you, you'd better be right. The thing is, Jeff w... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's a good combo of powers. |
**Steve Yegge:** Yeah. But if you're wrong, then you're just going to be super-wrong. |
**Jerod Santo:** Who's gonna tell you? |
**Steve Yegge:** And so this group, finally -- like, I laughed, and I said, "You got me." I said, "12 principles and indirects vetted this list, and we forgot machine learning. And you got me straight up." And I congratulated him, and he went, "Ha-ha-ha!" And then we moved on. It was no big deal. I said I'll get it int... |
And everybody in the room relaxed, and sort of smiling, and clapping me, and clapped me on the back after the meeting, and came up to me going "I've been in a lot of meetings with Jeff, and they never go that well", and whatever. And it was like "Yeah, thanks for the support before he smiled..." |
**Break**: \[28:18\] |
**Jerod Santo:** How much do you attribute to your career success your ability to think on your feet and respond in the moment? Because it sounds like it was pretty key. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You're pretty good at it so far. Two for two. |
**Steve Yegge:** Yeah, I'd say it's a pretty important survival skill, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Steve Yegge:** Especially when things get heated. I mean, it's a leadership thing. You're always gonna wind up in situations where two people have pretty heated opinions that are diverging, or are not aligned... And you've got to be able to navigate those things and that solution space really fast; really fast. So ye... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's your analogy to that? Do you think it's like "Be like water"? Because water takes on any form its container is, and can go anywhere, really, if necessary... I suppose heat might change its ability to travel, because it changes state, but what's your analogy to advice for how to do what you do... |
**Steve Yegge:** Oh, how to think on your feet? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, like "Be like water." I don't know, is that something? \[laughter\] I'm trying to feed that to you, Steve. Is that |
accurate? |
**Steve Yegge:** No, it's fire. Put your feet in the fire. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, okay. "I'm on fire...!" |
**Steve Yegge:** And then say "I'm learning!" |
**Jerod Santo:** See, I expected Steve to have a good answer to that one. |
**Steve Yegge:** I've been in a lot of fires. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, you wrote that they call you The Closer at Amazon. Maybe this lines up with that. Because you close sales? What was this idea with the closer? |
**Steve Yegge:** No, I closed interview candidates. So we would frequently get candidates who had really fat offers from Microsoft, or Google, or whoever... |
**Jerod Santo:** I see. |
**Steve Yegge:** And Amazon didn't pay well at all. And probably still doesn't, because Jeff is cheap... And so we'd be dealing with, you know, super, super-big com packages. |
**Jerod Santo:** Gotcha. |
**Steve Yegge:** And honestly, the perks, too. Amazon didn't have any perks. Your perk was you get to work at Amazon, and pay for parking. Right? I mean, it was like, it was bad. |
**Jerod Santo:** So how would you close them? I mean, it sounds like a terrible comparison. |
**Steve Yegge:** That's the thing, is I got every single one of them to come to Amazon. Every single one. And then when I went to Google, I was a great closer too, and I had a track record that went for, I think, eight years of complete success. 50 to 70 people I had closed... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Complete success. |
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