The Dread Pirate Bezos?

Google engineer Steve Yegge, who jumped into the spotlight last week after accidentally publicizing a lengthy rant about Google+ and Amazon.com, is back with a new post about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Yegge, who spent more than six years at Amazon, had ripped into the online retailer in his original post, saying Amazon does “everything wrong” and Bezos makes “ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.”

A week later, Yegge is back with a “more balanced picture” of his time at the company and his impressions of Bezos, who he had referred to as the Dread Pirate Bezos.

Yegge describes Bezos as a “giant-brained alien” whose razor-sharp, long-term perspective on everything the company does intimidates and challenges many Amazon employees.

“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,” he writes.

Yegge talked about the challenges of presenting to Bezos, who outlawed PowerPoint presentations at Amazon many years ago.

“Over the years I watched people give presentations to Jeff Bezos and come back bruised: emotionally, intellectually, often career-ily. If you came back with a nod or a signoff, you were jumping for joy. Presenting to Jeff is a gauntlet that tends to send people back to the cave to lick their wounds and stay out of the sunlight for a while,” he writes.

“Bezos is so goddamned smart that you have to turn it into a game for him or he’ll be bored and annoyed with you,” he continues. “That was my first realization about him. Who knows how smart he was before he became a billionaire -- let’s just assume it was ‘really frigging smart’, since he did build Amazon from scratch.”

In the end, Yegge said he worked hard and had fun during his time at Amazon, though worried every day he might be fired:

“Sure, it was a kind of paranoia. But it was sort of healthy in a way. I kept my resume up to date, and I kept my skills up to date, and I never worried about saying something stupid and ruining my career. Because hey, they were most likely going to fire me in the morning.”

Yegge said he wasn’t penalized by Google for the rant – only laughed at – and that the company is already addressing some of the issues he raised.

It's interesting to note that Bezos received an 83 percent approval rating in a recent Glassdoor.com survey on tech bosses. Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt was rated the top tech boss at the time, while Microsoft's Steve Ballmer was rated the worst tech boss, with a 40 percent approval rate.