Stop writing code. Start reading it.

We recorded this episode with Steve back in October of 2025, before he invented Beads and Gastown. Several of his predictions have aged well in the months since.
Steve Yegge has been VP or head of engineering at four companies. He keeps stepping down on purpose.
Not because things went wrong — his organizations were doing well. He’s the kind of leader whose reputation travels through a company; at Amazon, at Google, engineers lined up to transfer onto his teams. He stepped down each time because he noticed the same thing: the moment he stopped being able to code alongside his engineers…