Newsmakers 2011: Google engineer Steve Yegge, the accidental newsmaker

We’re just a few days from finishing the rollout of our 2011 GeekWire Newsmakers, a roster of people who made an impact on the tech industry over the past year. Today’s honoree, Steve Yegge, is unusual because he probably never would have expected to make the list.

Not that the Google engineer isn’t doing important work. But he made news this year by accident, when an exceptionally insightful rant that he intended for internal consumption was inadvertently made public through the Google+ social network — generating widespread headlines for its brutal candor about Google and Amazon.

Yegge, a UW grad based in Google’s Kirkland office, called the recruiting process at Amazon, his former employer, “fundamentally flawed” and said Amazon founder Jeff Bezos “makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.” Writing about Google, his current employer, he said “We don’t understand platforms” and called Google+ “a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product.”

Here’s the best part. He still has his job, which says a lot about Google’s appetite for healthy internal criticism.

“Amazingly, nothing bad happened to me at Google,” Yegge wrote in a follow-up post. “Everyone just laughed at me a lot, all the way up to the top, for having committed what must be the great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screwups in tech history.”