Words cannot express my contempt for the stack-ranking system that Ballmer liked. I saw perfectly good engineers being forced out because managers had to find f

Words cannot express my contempt for the stack-ranking system that Ballmer liked. I saw perfectly good engineers being forced out because managers had to find five or ten percent of their staff to let go. Some groups deliberately hired under-performers so they could fire them and protect the "real" members of their teams. His "everything has to be Windows" philosophy was toxic, too. (Then I realized that he didn't really care about the underlying technologies of things, and as long as you called your embedded system that had an event loop and some interrupt handlers "Windows Event Loop And Some Interrupt Handlers, Enterprise Edition" you would be politically safe).