Silicon Valley’s worst of the worst

Think life is bad? Well, it could be worse. You could be working for LexisNexis’ Andy Prozes, the most unpopular CEO in all of techdom. Prozes scored dead last (at 15 percent positive) when employees of 57 technology companies were asked to rate their boss by Glassdoor.com.

What did Prozes’ minions have to say about their company’s culture? Here you go: “Very inflexible, very rigid, and uncompromising. Archaic working practices and terrible office space.”

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Then there’s Jim Crowe of Level 3 Communications, approved by just 22 percent of the workforce. Comments included: “Work/life balance does not exist if you want to continue to be an employee. Corporate culture is fear-based, people are afraid to push the envelope for fear of reprisal. It’s who you know and how much you are liked that will get you promoted or moved into a more desirable position.”

Glassdoor is a career site with a database of about 100,000 companies. The site’s 150,000 registered users rate their employers and CEOs on a scale of 1 to 5, based on surveys in eight categories: work/life balance, career opportunities, communication, compensation and benefits, fairness and respect, employee morale, recognition and feedback, and senior leadership. Ratings are monitored by actual people to be sure that someone with a grudge or a vested interest in a high rating doesn’t game the system by voting multiple times.

Hewlett-Packard’s fall from employee grace

While I’m always happy to beat on bozos, I have to say that the terrible rating given by employees to Hewlett-Packard is very sad. HP was once considered a great place to work, attracting top talent and providing long-term employment for tens of thousands of hardworking people — not any more.

The legacy of two badly flawed CEOs (Carly Fiorina and Mark Hurd) and the questionable hiring of a failed CEO from SAP prompted employees to say: “Eroding pay and benefits. Stagnant would be an improvement. Outsourcing model gives no security for U.S. personnel. Employees treated more like a necessary evil then they are an asset.” HP was tied for 55th place with a rating of just 2.2 on a scale of 5, better only than Samsung Austin Semiconductor and tied with GSI Commerce.

People I know at SAP were more than happy to see Léo Apotheker go to HP. “We called him ‘the breaker,'” one executive told me this week. Why? “Because he broke everything he touched.” SAP America, by the way, got a decent rating of 3.4, and co-CEOs Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott won approval by 69 percent of the employees who rated them.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg: Man of the year or bozo of the year? Although Mark “Boy Billionaire” Zuckerberg has played fast and loose with the privacy rights of much of the world, it appears that he and his company Facebook are pretty darn popular with the folks who work there. Indeed, Facebook was at the very top of the heap — in both tech and nontech — as rated by Glassdoor’s contributors. Facebook earned a 4.6 rating out of 5 points. SAS Institute, NetApp, Apple, and Google followed. (When looking at rankings beyond the tech sector, the top four companies following Facebook were Southwest Airlines, Bain & Co., General Mills, and Edelman.)

Zuckerberg’s CEO rating was 96 percent, tied for second place with Google’s Eric Schmidt and James Truchard of National Instruments. Only Steve Jobs of Apple fared better, earning a near-perfect rating of 97 percent.

Zuckerberg has also just been named Person of the Year by Time magazine, a title given to an individual who has “for better or for worse … done the most to influence the events of the year.” Time’s editors say the title isn’t necessarily an honor — Adolf Hitler was once Man of the Year — but I suspect the Boy Billionaire isn’t feeling much pain today. The introductory essay about him managed to mention “privacy” just twice in 725 words. Time’s fawning coverage even included a collection of family snapshots, starting with Baby Zuckerberg looking adorable as he crawled around the floor of the family home in Dobb’s Ferry, N.Y.

Sorry, but for the sake of Zuckerberg’s profits, Facebook has sold out users not just once, but over and over again, blithely exposing users’ private information to any advertiser or creep who happens to get interested. It’s a tired drama. The company messes up, it gets caught, the media freaks out, the company apologizes. Then the cycle starts all over, as it did earlier this year when the Wall Street Journal learned that it’s not just Facebook harvesting personal data — Facebook’s platform developers are in on it as well. That data is being shared with advertisers and Internet tracking companies, whether or not users have opted for privacy.

Person of the Year? Bozo of the Year is more like it.

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This article, “Silicon Valley’s worst of the worst,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com.