this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Funny

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[–] sunbrrnslapper@lemmy.world 75 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Balmer was a terrible CEO by nearly every measure, but the one that stands out for me is the culture he cultivated where team members would actively undermine one another just for a better performance review.

[–] jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 53 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I worked under him. We gamed the system by doing a round robin of bad reviews with the understanding the next review will be a huge improvement.

[–] sunbrrnslapper@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Genius! I hope you did well there 🙂

[–] jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 month ago

Yeah, we did really well. It wasn't until Satya came on and after a few weeks he laid my entire department off.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

God that's just a slightly newer version of adding loops into Mainframe Cobol so you can increase performance when you needed to prove you were busy

[–] jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago

Honestly it's sorta a known tactic in this industry. I got the idea from old coworkers at Intel. They do the same shit.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 24 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Balmer was a terrible CEO by nearly every measure

Steve Ballmer has an estimated net worth between $130 billion and $145 billion, consistently ranking among the top 15 wealthiest people in the world

What other measure is there?

[–] sunbrrnslapper@lemmy.world 45 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Under his watch MS missed the smartphone boat, waffled between consumer and commercial products, Windows Vista, Bing, stack ranking employees, organizational silos, pushed a know it all mindset (as opposed to a learning mindset), etc.

The next CEO did a lot of cleanup for many years.

[–] piccolo@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 month ago

Yeah? But how much money did he earn the shareholders? Innovation doesnt matter if your making bank already

[–] nightwatch_admin@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

His net empathy was -53647863919406 but it never went up, so it was not a usable measurement.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How much money they made shareholders.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

I believe he was Microsoft's single biggest shareholder, after Gates diversified.