A company rating and review website, Glassdoor.com, regularly quizzes employees of tech companies how they feel about their current CEO asking: "Do you approve of the way your CEO is leading the company?" Unfortunately for Steve Ballmer, Microsoft employees gave him the lowest approval rating of any tech company.
Microsoft employees gave Ballmer a 40% approval rating which is down from last years 46%. This is not good news for Ballmer who has already been on the board of directors" naughty list after the failure of the Kin. In 2008, Ballmer said he would retire in 10 years -- with his declining approval rating and recent Kin failure -- another set of mistakes could move that retirement forward a few years.
The second lowest ranked tech CEO was eBay"s John Donahoe, who has an equally appalling 46% approval rating from his employees. This was a big jump in the positive direction for Donahoe, the previous year his approval rating was just 26%. The survey wasn"t bad for all tech CEOs though, Google"s former CEO Eric Schmidt was given a 96% approval rating, the highest among tech companies. Apple"s Steve Jobs was the second highest rated tech CEO with a 95% approval rating from his employees.
The survey also shows that things have not been going well at Yahoo recently as its CEO, Carol Bartz, has shown the largest decline of all surveyed in approval rating from employees over the last several months.