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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

(danluu.com)
371 points greggyb | 3 comments | 28 Oct 24 21:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.626s | source
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FuriouslyAdrift ◴[29 Oct 24 13:17 UTC] No.41983561[source]▶
Everyone forgetting about Lisa Brummel and "stack ranking"?

That nearly ruined Microsoft...

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-ditches-syst...

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fsckboy ◴[29 Oct 24 14:01 UTC] No.41983931[source]▶
"grading on a curve" is a good idea, and if athletics wasn't run that way, nobody would watch.

that doesn't mean it's easy to implement, manage, or impossible to game, or that it plays nice wrt human factors, but to attack the core idea as essentially wrong is anti math, science, and rationality.

Microsoft always suffered from rewarding egotists and political animals over people who did actual work.

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1. psunavy03 ◴[29 Oct 24 17:41 UTC] No.41987274[source]▶
This is ridiculous. You grade people to a standard, not against each other. Stack ranking Jack Welch-style is basically operating under the assumption that if you had Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos on a team, that one of them would have to get a shitty grade and be fired.

All it does is make true talent not want to work with other true talent for fear they get screwed over.

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2. fsckboy ◴[29 Oct 24 18:57 UTC] No.41988105[source]▶
>Stack ranking Jack Welch-style is basically operating under the assumption that if you had Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos on a team, that one of them would have to get a shitty grade and be fired.

no, it's not, you are wrong. It is based on the probability that you will not have all those outliers on one team, a probability that is very very high.

also, it's not used for teams of a dozen people where you can easily know everybody personally, it's used for teams of 1000 people, and Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos 'S jobs would all be safe (if they could get along with each other, which they couldn't, there'd be so much backstabbing productivity would grind to a halt :)

3. rvba ◴[30 Oct 24 07:18 UTC] No.41992527[source]▶
Nadella didnt build anything though. He is there to outsource. Microsoft products start to feel cheap and buggy. But hey, they are probably made by people who are earn less.