Indeed, after just 10 months, Cook already ranks as the country’s top-rated chief executive, based on sentiment within the company. And not just in tech — across all industries.

According to the anonymous Apple employee rankings posted to careers community Glassdoor.com, Cook has a 97 percent approval rating among the rank and file. That’s the same cumulative rating Jobs had when he stepped down as CEO — and two points better than the rating given him in his final year in that role.

Not bad for a new CEO who’s following a guy with one of the most impressive legacies in tech.

Clearly, Cook, who worked closely with Jobs after joining Apple in 1998, is intent on hewing to the vision of his predecessor, while putting his own mark on the company as well — instituting a charitable matching program for employees, for example.

As Cook told Apple employees at Jobs’s memorial last October, “Among [Steve's] last advice for me, and for all of you, was to never ask what he would do. ‘Just do what’s right.’”

And according to Cook’s employees, he’s doing exactly that. His 97 percent ranking placed him ahead of not only Qualcomm’s Paul Jacobs and Ernst & Young’s Jim Turley, but Google’s Larry Page and American Express’s Ken Chenault, as well.

Astonishing.

In a down economy–one in which Challenger, Gray and Christmas expects some 180,000 tech sector jobs to be lost–career and workplace chatter is more likely to include the word “layoff” than not. That’s the word from Glassdoor.com, a site that collects insider reports on the salaries, work conditions and workplace attitudes of employees at companies around the country.

In fact, according to Glassdoor, the percentage of employee comments mentioning layoffs has grown six out of the last eight months, increasing some 64.2 percent from a low of 2.8 percent in April to a high of 4.6 percent in November. Says Glassdoor, “We searched company reviews on Glassdoor.com for various forms of the word ‘layoff’ and found that the percentage of reviews that mention ‘layoff’ has increased sharply, particularly with employees at AOL/Time Warner, Sprint Nextel and Alcatel-Lucent.”

So there’s an uptick in employee mentions of the word “layoff” at companies destined for them.

In other news, all brontosauruses are thin at one end; much, much thicker in the middle and then, thin again at the far end….