New employee survey reveals the most-hated Bay Area tech CEOs

A newly released survey has brutal statistics for some of the Bay Area’s foremost tech executives.

Blind, an anonymous networking site popular among tech workers, ran a presidential poll-style survey of 13,171 U.S. workers in August, asking employees for opinions on their companies’ CEOs. Tech firms have weathered a rocky stock market and widespread layoffs this year, and it appears that workers at some Bay Area firms are fed up with their top executives.

Blind asked respondents, who prove they work at a company with a corporate email address, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way your CEO is handling their job?” Respondents could answer “strongly approve,” “somewhat approve,” “somewhat disapprove,” “strongly disapprove” or “no opinion.” The results include only firms where at least 100 employees responded, Blind spokesperson Rick Chen told SFGATE. It’s worth noting that anonymous workplace forums like Blind often disproportionately draw irritated employees and potential job-switchers.

David Goeckeler of San Jose’s Western Digital didn’t receive a single vote of approval. The manufacturing company laid off more than 200 Bay Area workers in June. Goeckeler’s compensation package was unusually high last year; he made an eye-watering 3,332 times what Western Digital’s median employee made, the firm reported in its 2022 fiscal year summary.

A few San Francisco tech CEOs hovered near the bottom of the rankings. Just 4% of X — formerly known as Twitter — respondents approved of Linda Yaccarino, who has publicly struggled with owner Elon Musk’s leadership style (16% of the X workers marked “no opinion”). Nextdoor’s Sarah Friar and Unity Technologies’ John Riccitiello also got single-digit approval ratings, as did Airtable’s Howie Liu.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan cut his own salary by 98% when he laid off 1,300 employees in February, but workers at the San Jose video conferencing firm may have had the bizarre end of Zoom’s work-from-home policy fresh in their minds when they took the survey: Yuan’s approval rating was a meager 7%. Peter Rawlinson, of Newark-based Lucid Motors, and Cristiano Amon, of San Diego-based Qualcomm, got the same score.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, played by Sebastian Stan in the new movie “Dumb Money” about the 2021 Gamestop stock drama, got a 16% approval rating. 

Sundar Pichai of Google received a 26% approval rating, and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff got a 29% approval rating. The two tech giants each started the year with massive layoff rounds. Also in the Bay Area, chief executives at LinkedIn, Pinterest, DocuSign, Roku, Block, Splunk and PayPal landed scores between 20% and 30%. 

Respondents were just about evenly split on Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (45%), Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters (47%), and Peloton’s Barry McCarthy (50%).

The tech executives at the top of the approval rankings often had a financial commonality: a stock price that boomed in 2023. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang got a 96% rating — his Santa Clara-based chip-making firm has ridden interest in artificial intelligence technology to a trillion-dollar valuation, three times higher than where it started the year. Tim Cook, of Cupertino-based Apple, notched an 83% rating, and Palo Alto Networks’ Nikesh Arora had an 84% rating.

For context, President Joe Biden’s approval rating has been hovering around 40% since early last year.

Hear of anything happening at a Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.