[IsThisObvious]

I say Ballmer is a bad CEO because of the stack ranking employee evaluations and the rampant smothering of prototype technologies that later turned out to be valuable in favor of "core" technologies - you know, the two behaviors that are absolutely toxic for a tech company.

[twright0]

"Stack ranking employee evaluations"

I agree with a great many criticisms of Microsoft, but this one always strikes me as nonsensical. I was an intern at Microsoft and (while I never participated in stack ranking) it never seemed particularly destructive. I went on a tour of Valve and one question that was asked during the Q&A was what kind of evaluation and ranking system they used - the answer was stack ranking. Companies have to use some form of evaluation and ranking for their employees once they grow past a certain size - it's just an organizational requirement. The alternative is upper management without quantifiable information about the many people under them, which makes it harder to allocate resources and operate efficiently. Or so I imagine, I'm not in upper management at a very large company, but that certainly seems to be the case pretty much everywhere.

[RandallBrown]

Go through a stack ranking where you get a bad review simply because "there are too many good developers on the team" before you say that it is a nonsensical criticism.

Making employees feel like shit for reasons outside their control is bad management.

[throwawaykf02]

Anecdotal, but, I know a bunch of good developers at Microsoft, and I've never heard any one of them complain about that before. They complain about a bunch of things, many of them related to upper management, but that "lost decade" article was the first I heard anyone complaining about stack ranking.

[mynameisvlad]

Stack ranking has been used at Microsoft since 2006. Furthermore, he wouldn't be overly involved in deciding performance evaluations. That's more the role of Lisa Brummel, who is the EVP of HR.

[marshray]

What's, in your view, an example of such a technology?