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Leave Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson Alone!
theodp writes "Over at The Daily Beast, Dan Lyons says Resumegate is overblown and says it's time to stop picking on Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson. Even without the circa-1979 CS degree some incorrectly thought he possessed, Lyons argues that Thompson is still perfectly capable, his critics have ulterior motives, and his competitors have all lied before. 'Forgive me for being less than shocked at the idea of a CEO lying,' writes Lyons. 'Steve Jobs [college dropout] used to lie all the time, and he's apparently the greatest CEO who ever lived. Google lied about taking money from Canadian pharmacies to run illegal drug ads, but finally had to come clean and pay $500 million in fines to settle the charges. Mark Zuckerberg [college dropout] last fall settled charges brought by the FTC that his company had made "unfair and deceptive" claims—I think that's like lying—and, what's more, had violated federal laws.' So what makes the fudging of a 30-year old accomplishment on the Yahoo CEO's resume a transgression that the 'highly ethical and honest folks in Silicon Valley' simply cannot bear? 'Facebook is a cool kid,' explains Lyons. 'So is Apple. Yahoo is the loser kid that nobody likes.'"
The assumption is that an employee who lied on his resume would likely be fired, but a CEO is too important to fire.
then I'm a multi-billionaire, have multiple advanced degrees from prestigious universities, and I screw the world's most desirable women several times a day.
And I have the first post!
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Ah, the "everyone else is doing it" excuse. How quaint.
I guess this means that it's fine to lie to Yahoo when applying for a job. They've established a precedent that they won't fire someone who was caught doing so.
They've just moved to the top of my list of potential employers! Did I mention that I created the Internet, the World Wide Web, and all the programming languages they use?
Some people are missing the point. While the line isn't always clear, in general it's NOT OK to lie on resume to obtain a job or gain advancement. You need to think about this from the standpoint of you being the boss, and having people apply for a job on your team and finding out one of the applicants is being dishonest on his/her resume about qualifications or certifications they may have. Those people would usually be removed from consideration immediately. That's not to say you necessarily need a college degree to be a good, productive employee. I would give full consideration to an applicant who was forthright about their lack of paper qualifications as long as they could demonstrate that they have acquired the ability to do or learn the job through other means.
When it comes to the people who are leading a division or organization, this becomes even more important. What kind of shady deals would these people be willing to make, what kind of precarious situations would they be willing to put the company in? If you lie to get into the company on the bottom rung, it becomes more and more difficult to correct those lies as you progress in your career and climb the corporate ladder. If you choose to go that route, you'd better switch companies once you've acquired some experience and start your new job without lies.
Yes, we can be a bit literal minded. But we depend on knowing the straight dope to do our jobs ; our core competencies are founded on the ability to employ facts that we know to be, well, factual.
Hence it's not really a surprise to find that we don't like people lying. It unsettles us. It's like some ghastly evil magic, the ability to blithely say things that aren't true without suffering any kind of stress reaction at all. Even that thing that management do where they misunderstand what you are saying about the capabilities of a technology and misrepresent it in a meeting brings us out in hives. Discovering that they are doing it on purpose really offends us.
If he's dishonest enough to lie about something inconsequential like whether he had a CS degree several decades ago why do we think he'll be honest with billions in Yahoo money? Integrity matters and correlation between little lies and huge ones are pretty strong.
"his critics have ulterior motives, and his competitors have all lied before. 'Forgive me for being less than shocked at the idea of a CEO lying"
So lets ignore all CEOs that happen to lie. Lying is not important if the person is a CEO, in fact we expect them to lie! Same goes for board of directors I guess.
-wow, unbelievably ignorant of author
Your résumé is not just a piece of paper. It's a piece of paper with lies written all over it.
More seriously... Who doesn't beautify his résumé by slightly exaggerating his or her achievements and level of responsibilities?
Not to mention the VP et al labyrinth of meaningless corporate title BS.
What Dan Lyons fails to grasp is that unethical behavior is unethical no matter if everybody is doing it or not. Also, if a person is unethical about one thing he is likely unethical about other things as well. Our leaders, be they political, military, the police, businessmen, etc. need to act ethical in the best interests of society. The last thirty or more years of letting people get away with ethical violations instead of holding them to a higher standard have resulted in the mess our society is in today. If we don't stand up and say certain behavior is unacceptable in our leaders, we'll continue to get greedy, lying sociopaths leading us.
"Even without the circa-1979 CS degree some incorrectly thought he possessed, Lyons argues that Thompson is still perfectly capable, (...)"
If his capability is not affected by not having the degree, then why did he lie about it in the first place? He could have told the truth and it wouldn't have mattered.
Unless, of course, either the assumption that his capability is not affected is wrong (unlikely for a CEO), or the assumption that he was chosen based on his capabilities is wrong (much more likely), or that his stunt does damage the company but sacking him now is too complicated (less likely but possible), or maybe by lying he demonstrated another of his capabilities that would be valuable as Yahoo's CEO (depend's on the company's goals).
Gotta get paid!
Do you post anything other than anti google comments on slashdot? What are you, being paid to post what you write?
So it's acceptable for people to lie if they are important? I suppose paying a small fine for doing unethical actions purify the actions somehow. Society seems to accept this and society is always correct so those that don't agree are big dodo heads and totally unreasonable.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Paraphrasing the article:
"Google lied ... and paid $500M when they got caught" ... and settled with the FTC when they got caught" ... so just leave him alone, people!"
"Facebook lied
"Scott Thompson lied
I post what interests me. How is that surprising?
http://i.imgur.com/7SwCq.jpg
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
There are a few things that lying about is completely unacceptable and disqualifies you as a member of civilized society. Education is the most important. All those that now protect Thompson do not seem to get it. My guess would be quite often due to a lack of education and in some cases certainly because they have done the same. If lying about degrees suddenly becomes acceptable, everybody will do it and degrees become meaningless. As degrees do not only provide the degree itself, but specific skills, knowledge and insights, if degrees become meaningless, incompetence in critical positions will raise.
The second thing is that lying about a degree speaks volumes about the personality and character of the person doing it. It speaks of somebody that claims to be something he is not. It speaks of ambition without skill. It makes it highly likely he lied and continues to lie in other regards and that he is a generally dishonest person, at least whenever he thinks he can get away with it.
As to the matter in detail, yes, even an old CS degree matters very much. It gives a different perspective on a number of things that have not changed at all. Details may have changed, but the fundamental issues are still the same, and this person does not have the skills to assess them. You cannot go from nothing to master just watching these things from the outside. You have to have hands-on experience and a CS degree provides that.
For these reasons, Thompson must step down and his career must be over. Otherwise we will get even more dishonest and incompetent (but power-hungry) people in comparable positions.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The summary missed perhaps the most interesting part of the article:
The guy who broke the news about the phony degree is Dan Loeb, a hedge-fund manager and activist shareholder whose company owns a 5 percent stake in Yahoo, making it the largest outside shareholder. He’s been pushing Yahoo to get rid of some board members and put him and three other nominees on the board instead. Yahoo won’t do it. So now Loeb creates a public-relations nightmare for them, and maybe this will help his chances of getting his board seats.
The point being that everyone is dishonest, and while this guy got caught in a particularly clear-cut case of dishonesty, it's not very important, and it's not at all as bad as what the guy who accused him is doing. I agree with him there. The only thing I wonder about is the intelligence of a guy who felt the need to lie about his degree when it matters so little given his work experience and which can easily be checked. Sadly I question the competence of a CEO who can't lie well. Maybe that's what the board is really investigating.
I assume that's the "Leave Britney Alone" guy...I was amused by the pun in the /. article title...
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I would say it should be rather hard for any Yahoo engineering employee to respect their CEO any longer.
The other examples are one thing, a CEO lying isn't a big deal, that's usually about stuff the engineers really don't want to bother with anyway and don't care how it is done.
But lying about having an engineering degree? Is there really any engineer at Yahoo who doesn't think stuff like "pathetic", "if I did that I'd be fired", "he's too stupid to fake engineering" etc.?
Having half the work force making fun of the CEO sure isn't a convincing way to lead the company out of trouble.
"Why would you fire an employee who lied on their CV, yet does the job well?"
To send a message.
Provided the employee does in fact the job well, it can't be because of the statements in his resume that led to hiring him so, from the part of the contractor it was blind luck. If you are going to hire under a "blind luck" assumptions, you surely should better fire all your hiring personnel and just hire on, say, a first come first gets it basis (hummm... for so many companies I think it wouldn't be such a big loss anyway).
If, on the other hand, you do believe that your hiring process has anything to do about the outcome of those hired, you'd better make a strong position about not tolerating anybody trying to jump it over, from CEO downwards.
This is an astonishingly ignorant thing to write. What part of CS is different now than from 1979? Has O(n) suddenly become equal to O(log n)?
Regardless, recent trends have been bringing computing back to the mainframe model. Computation started out concentrated on mainframes because computers were so expensive. Microcomputers pushed computation out to the edges. Cloud and webservices are swinging the pendulum back to a centralized model, but guess what? CS has been relevant and valid though that entire spectrum.
Whether or not CS is important to the CEO of Yahoo! is arguable. I think most people are concerned about Thompson's values, not his knowledge of balancing trees.
College should not be used as part of hiring. Even more so in the tech field.
So what some who is doing a IT job lied about College?? (may to just get past HR) who cares if they can do the job? You know not all people are not college material but they can take tech classes / go to tech schools. So what if they when as a non-matriculated student or took classes non degree?
That is why at least for TECH there needs to be some kind of badges system.
so you want a sandwich artist to have a BA in art? you better keep a eye on the cash register so funds don't disappear as min wage can't pay off the loans.
What's at stake here isn't whether his lack of a degree matters or whether this is one of those innocent embellishments.
We shouldn't let ourselves be lulled into a debate over what we think the real issues are -- the same standards and punishments should be applied to this CEO as would be applied to any other employee in the organization. There shouldn't be a double standard for this guy just because he's the CEO.
"This is an astonishingly ignorant thing to write."
If you hadn't noticed, Slashdot is dominated by IT types who may be excellent sysadmins or even good software engineers, but have very little idea what computer science is.
and only the republicans seemed to care about that one..
if he is doing a good job (not up to us to decide), then this is a very small issue.The point for the board to continuously evaluate is whether he is capable. This is now a social issue caused by a shareholder who is looking purely to disrupt the company because they cant get a board seat.
Dan Lyons wrote several articles siding with msft/scox, in msft/scox's preposterous scam lawsuit against IBM.
Leave Scott Thompson alone? No! And Steve Jobs is not the greatest CEO ever. What a sorry, pathetic apologist Mr. Lyons is being! Does he like Lloyd Blankfein, Tony Hayward, Angelo Mozilo, Dick Fuld, Brian Moynihan, Ken Lewis, and Ken Lay too?
Stop being bedazzled by wealth and power, and not caring whether it was ill gotten! Too many people still venerate them, even now, when memories of the most recent disaster perpetrated by our wealthy elite should still be fresh. It's dangerous. Are honest people all idiots, chumps, dupes, and mushrooms? What kind of world does Lyons want for us all?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
It's not only this. The logical implications of the arguments present in the article make us believe that it's ok to lie if you're important and have money. It's pretty depressing that money is the moral validator of our society and the media that should reprehend this kind of behaviour is endorsing it.
So if I read this correctly, we're now at the point where our collective opinion of CEOs is so low that any standard of behavior above "didn't go on a shooting spree" is considered acceptable?
Sorry, but no. We should expect at least out of our so-called "leaders" what we expect out of entry level staff or unpaid interns. That many CEOs are too morally bankrupt to meet that standard doesn't mean we lower it.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Dear mr. Lyons,
Just because they all lie, doesn't make it okay for any single one of them to lie.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I'm not even sure they are IT guys. They sound like PR or marketing people in a tech area.
but what can I say? I'm not an IT guy. I try not to talk about what I don't know, but hey, not everyone know what they are ignorant about.
why do you sprinkle the [college dropout] comments like they are an insult ?
"But mooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmm! They did it fiiiiirssssst!"
The funny thing is nothing is ever new in IT... Its all the same old stuff with new marketing, as the natural cycle turns. There is a huge competitive on the job advantage in having experienced the previous cycle(s) which noob IT people are completely blind to.
Also its impossible to be a good software engineer or good sysadmin without knowing CS. Almost an oxymoron. Maybe they don't know enough math to follow Knuth, but a good one has at least a gut level instinctual level of low level CS knowledge. Its always hilarious for me to watch IT noobs learn the CS guys not only have formulae and charts and provable theorems about their little scalability problem, but their 2010 gut level guesses and hard fought failed experiments were all figured out by the CS guys in the 60s/70s if they'd only have bothered to learn.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
There is another difference that was not mentioned. If I had shares in Yahoo, I would expect the CEO to defend the company's best interest even if (it pains me to admit this) he has to lie to the general public to do so (up to a certain level or course!!). I would expect the CEO to pretend we have a better product then we do and that we have a more competent team. This is a Collective lie! However, by lying on his resume, he does not serve Yahoo's interests at all. On the contrary, how does Yahoo look like now? This is not the same kind of lie. It only serves Scott Thompson's selfish interests and you have to be a fool to think that this is OK.
I think with inflation it's now O(n^2)
Thank you for this demonstration of how age discrimination works in the tech industry. For the record, PCs existed before 1984, and as long as you don't insist on IBM-standard they also existed in 1979 (e.g. Commodore PET, TRS-80, Apple II). And there were CS degrees even before those existed.
I have a CS degree from the 1980s (transcripts available), and as a matter of fact I did learn to write Fortran on a DEC minicomputer (a Vax 11; the PDP was in high school). Very little of my CS coursework was done on microcomputers: just graphics, assembly language, and an independent study. I had my own micro in my dorm room, which I used to dial into the Vax, for word processing, and to play Missile Command. No Internet, just a BITNET e-mail gateway. In fact, very few of the technology standards in use then are still in use now; even ASCII is on the way out.
But what I learned back in the Dark Ages (before the Windows opened up) wasn't simply Fortran, command-line interfaces, and the use of parity bits over a serial connection. What I learned was how to solve problems, and those skills remain just as relevant and valuable today as they were a quarter century ago.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Maybe the fact that there are people who lie on their CV and still do a good job means that the actual importance of a CV is hellishly overblown.
unemployment will never go above 8% on my watch
stimulus will work
i didn't know what that preacher Wright was saying
etc., etc.
not to mention all the shady-ness (back room deals and political give-aways) that went on to pass Obamacare
"What part of CS is different now than from 1979?"
The complete computer part is different.
"Has O(n) suddenly become equal to O(log n)?"
He doesn't write software.
"Regardless, recent trends have been bringing computing back to the mainframe model."
No, its moving to the tablet model.
Seriously, I've written more software than you ever have, including PDP11, and *I* don't have a CS degree because the CS degree was maths in my day with a sprinkling of computers. That was because their access to computers was a timeslice on the mainframe and a little bit of a PDP11.
So they built a CS degree which had little to do with computers and most to do with maths. Your comment typifies this. I bet you've never invented a sort algorithm, but you've studied how to describe the performance of sort algorithms 50 different ways.
"This is an astonishingly ignorant thing to write."
No it isn't.
"I think most people are concerned about Thompson's values, not his knowledge of balancing trees."
WTF? Seriously? We shareholders want him to make money, we know Gates is an a****hole, we know Jobs had a reputation as one, and WE DON'T CARE. We're not electing Mother Theresa here, he had to run a company.
BTW, I also don't care if he knows how to use log tables, a slide rule, a tape drive, and you know what, even a B-Tree, because he never has to invent the B tree and despite your CS course, neither did you.
Liars make good CEOs.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
There's a slight difference between IT in 1979 and IT in 2012.
Good software engineers know CS like good civil engineers know physics. A good civil engineer has to have an excellent knowledge of things like Newtonian mechanics, but doesn't really need to know much or anything about relativity, quantum mechanics, or most of the rest of physics. And he really doesn't need to know how to produce new knowledge of physics.
The difference though is in the target of the lie.
- Good: When you lie to the SEC or another company, that's just being a good businessman and valued member of your own corporation.
- Bad: However lying to your boss and your shareholders means you're not to be trusted with the position you hold.
it took me a hell of an effort and time to get my Degree, you tell me i should have just lied about it and spared the time, money and effort?
Good software engineers know CS != IT.
This can't happen because this happened in America!!! Because you abide and live by high ethical and moral standards!
If you accept a little lying and a little deception, it's like your founding fathers accepting "almost free speech" or an "almost clear constitution".
In time: no irony intended. No double-words.
I'm brazilian. I live in a place were people lie and cheat ALL THE FUCKING TIME!
Be radical to your principles. Do what you learned to do. That's what made America the greatest nation in the world. Go for your roots. Ignore the postmodern bullshit that says you that a little cheating, or a little blablabla is OK!
If americans at large accept or otherwise ignore deception tactics... Then I'll be sure we're living in a just more colourful Dark Age(tm).
Really, if you have to use fallacies to support your position, is your position actually really a sustainable one?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You do all understand, I hope, that Lyons is himself hardly the picture of virtue. This is a guy who gave SCO a free ride for years and even when he finally forced to admit he'd been wrong, still managed to blame Linux supporters for the whole thing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Dan Lyons is a troll. He is basically saying it is ok to lie because others do. Well, Dan, lying is lying - and it is wrong whoever does it.
You lie on your resume: you should be fired. Why? You kept someone who actually had the qualifications from getting the job.
Scott Thompson should be fired because he would do the same to anyone under him for lying on their resume.
A good leader will talk his way out of trouble. It's an important skill for a leader.
Therein lies the paradox. Yahoo is not known for good CEOs.
For the record, PCs existed before 1984
Not only did computers exist, but I'd say the biggest, most fundamental developments of computer science happened in the 1970s. In that decade, the greats like Lamport, Dijkstra, and Knuth were making the discoveries that underlie all modern systems.
To name a few, linear programming, multithreading, distributed systems and processes, routing, and NP-completeness all got developed during the 70s. Would have been an awesome decade to be a computer scientist.
At least some of the people who were designing machines in 1984 will have had a 1979 CS degree and if they're still designing machines today I'd hazard that they're quite good at it by now.
I honestly don't care in the slightest that some stupid CEO lied to other people. That's their problem. What bothers me is all the idiots who insist on putting "gate" at the end of whatever so-called-scandal they see. I'm sick of it. Can we please ostracize those retards into obscurity, instead?
between lying for the company and lying to the company. Lying to the FCC is fine, sure if you get caught it's a PITA but there's some upside for the company when you aren't.
Lying to the company is a whole different beast.
It always funny when some fat cat loses their job because they lied on a resume decades ago and some how couldn't find a way to change their CV (and hope no one checks previous records - just remove the lies and leave it vague for a few years then add in the real details) so at least there's some upside for everyone else.
Lets stop paying CEOs
Stop feed the liars
I'm not even sure they are IT guys. They sound like PR or marketing people in a tech area.
Actually, I think the majority of them are kids too young to have a job - or much perspective.
#DeleteChrome
You forgot to mention your mad Multiplan skillz0rs.
#DeleteChrome
Good software engineers know that IT == stalled carrier.
IT is internal support for an enterprise. You are a cost center and will always be treated as such.
Get a job at a software vendor (or consulting house) and you are a revenue generator. Star developers are rainmakers.
As the GP said CS is the underlying science. IT workers (digital janitor types) need less CS then software engineers.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Maybe that's true generally, but it's not true for Yahoo.
Although uninformed, the GP has a point. My 5-minutes of research indicates that Stonehill did not offer a CS degree in 1979. The first CS degree was offered by Purdue University in 1962. Before that, CS education was often part of the Math department and still is in some places. The point being that CS courses existed well before CS degrees.
It is possible that that Scott Thompson has a CS education with the technicality that his degree was granted by the department of Mathematics.
In such a case, it would certainly be quite common for a placement agency to twist the description slightly so as to make the resume more attractive.
Still, it seems that Scott Thompson is claiming to have 2 degrees from Stonehill, one in Accounting and one in CS. Stonehill has apparently confirmed his degree in Accounting and that is all. So, it would seem that he only has the one degree and it is unethical to claim 2 no matter how the description is twisted.
We don't want programmers who lie no matter how well qualified they are. We shouldn't want a CEO that lies, either. The trust in the CEO is far more important than the trust in the programmer.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
So far, I have yet to see anything that says he has the degree out of his own mouth or the papers. Innocent until proven guilty. Way to buy into the hype slashdot commenters. The video, he doesn't say he has a degree, he doesn't say he doesn't have a degree. He did the same things that politicians do all the time.
Also, weren't yahoo's last quarter results up since Thompson took over?
Who did Loeb want to put on the yahoo board? Wasn't it the guy from NBC who yanked the tonight show from conan and gave it back to leno after 6 months? And this is a sign of trustworthiness?
Yahoo already has a lot stacked against it. Finally they're doing long time changes that are needed. Scott was successful w/ paypal and other companies, so let him give it a try.
Difference between FB/ Google/ Scott is that Scott break any laws. Sure, _if_ he did lie on his resume, it looks bad, but it's not a binding agreement. You can put whatever you want on it. You shouldn't to be in good faith, but it's not something he would have to pay a fine or jail over.
Or if your SCO, it's okay to lie and be a proxy for Microsoft because there's money to be made in asserting ownership over something you do not in fact own.
That's something that Lyons should know all about.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And what interests you is Things That Get You Paid! Fuck Yeah!
Lyons hit the dirty truth! Yahoo is the looser whimp kid that everybody, i.e. the other loosers, love to hate and Thompson's decit plays into their stratigy to up themselves.
Yes indeed. Thompson IS a breathing, living, talking and walking Ponzi Scheme and no different from the other (zombi) Ponzi Schemes known as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Barak Obama, Zukerburg, Jobs, and any and all of the other governence and corporate administration personal at any location on the planet.
Thompson is just following the 'norm' within Yahoo 'culture' as is the norm within Government [name here] or Corporate [name here] culture.
LoL
Actually, you're on to something. Stonehill College did not have a straight CS degree in 1979 although they did have a Math/CS degree somewhere around that time.
I don't know why you think pre-PC CS is irrelevant. That's just stupid.
I mean I thought there was a study a few years ago that basically pointed out a CEO is more likely to be a literal psychopath than would be expected when compared to the general population.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
The whole argument comes down to: You can get away with being morally bankrupt if you make a lot of money.
There's a slight difference between IT in 1979 and IT in 2012.
Like what? I've only been in the biz for $$$ since 1992 although I've been doing home computing since 81 and its always been in the family. I can't think of anything profoundly new.
I would bet all you can give is fuzzy stuff like "certain numbers are larger" (who cares just say TB instead of MB and you'll be having the same conversations) and perhaps some waffly stuff about mobile platforms which don't really change any of the problems or problem solving techniques, just changes the players.
IT is a game of working around and within limitations. I will give you that the exact ratios of storage space and processing speed and especially latency have varied, but not enough to fundamentally change the game or create anything new.
Gladiatorial combat is still gladiatorial combat, even if you have a new generation of fighters and the arena has been recently remodeled, and even if the swords are an inch longer or shorter than a generation ago.
Please don't tell me you think vmware recently invented the concept of virtualization, or Sun/Java recently invented tokenized/pcode and/or chroot jails. Oh wait, the service bureau known as cloud computing... We had widespread RAID, we just called is DASD... We had cluster computing under VMS and IBM products.
Most importantly, we had the same fundamental problems and tradeoffs as today. The manufacturers and some specification numbers have changed. Nothing has fundamentally changed in the biz since then.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
People my age write in English.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Slashdot is [NOW] dominated by IT types who may be excellent sysadmins or even good software engineers, but have very little idea what computer science is.
FTFY. It wasn't always this way. Something bad happened after that number was made illegal. btw, mod up! Computer science is mathematics and only mathematics; CS is not coding, not SQL querying, not sysadmining... and a computer scientist installing software for a living is akin to a medical doctor working as a licenced practical nurse. Think of the poor LPN that must compete against M.D.s for their jobs! Think of the lowly auto mechanic that must compete against mechanical engineers just find gainful occupation! Computer scientists are worthy of awe... but if you're a legitimate and degreed computer scientist, and you took my desktop support job... fuck you.
The Admin and the Engineer
When my then employer (Overture) was acquired by Yahoo they took the resume of every employee on file and submitted it to a research firm that checked the accuracy of every checkable fact, and a flag report was issued for everyone. The only anomaly on mine was that the award date of my Masters was a different month than what I stated - I used the month they handed me the diploma, it was recorded the next month (I have never felt a need to embellish my resume). A number of people were severed at that time for resume inconsistencies.
Are you telling me that Yahoo did not do this for its most important (and expensive) employee. The one employee whose qualifications are a maater of public record, and material facts for SEC filings?
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Why are you so new to Slashdot?
LegendMUD
He was hilarious on Kids in the Hall.
Missing mod option: -1 blatant lies
So a lot of people are asking a variant of the question: If Yahoo!'s CEO lies on his resume, then how can Yahoo! expect prospective employees to be honest on their resumes?
What people don't get is that there are no prospective employees. Yahoo! want to lay people off, not hire people. Think about where Yahoo! is headed right now. Computer science degree, accounting degree, no degree, proven liar, convicted felon, suspected serial killer, whatever--none of these things intrisically disqualifies someone from running the company at this juncture.
Missing mod option: -1 blatant lies
Missing mod option: -1 astro-turfing.
This whole argument boils down to: Just because other people do it doesn't mean it's all right to do. Hold yourself to a higher standard.
It is theodp?
Dan Lyons is a fucking cunt, and anything he says in the defense of Scott Thompson is by definition a further indictment.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Specially for the facial hair...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
screws everyone and he doesn't get screwed? he deserves it.
Cut his salary and fringe benefits if not firing him? Firing would be better.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The top mgmt has to be perfectly transparent and bulletproof precisely to protect the business from asshats like that Loeb guy.
YAHOO CEO is a chink in YAHOO's armor. He has to fall on his sword as a part of damage control, if nothing more.
It depends on WHEN he lied.
Really? If he thinks it is acceptable to lie to make himself look better then on his CV then, were I a Yahoo! stock holder, I would be concerned that he might also think it acceptable to lie to make the company's bottom line (and by extension himself) look better. In many ways the ethical behaviour of the CEO is far more important than those in the rest of the company - if the sandwich guy decides to behave unethically you risk losing a few $100 of sandwiches. If the CEO behaves unethically you can lose everything.
Liars win, that's the moral. Honesty wimps are losers.
Being a decent member of society is not a prerequisite to being a CEO.
Sad, but probably true. However I'd use the same rule I do with politicians: it is almost inevitable that many are going to lie and cheat for their own advantage but they should at least be intelligent enough to be able to hide it. At least with this combination you know that you have politicians that have a sense of what ethical (even if they do not behave that way themselves) and are competent which is probably the best we can hope for. If they keep getting caught with their hands in the till they are clearly both dishonest AND incompetent which is worse.
We need a business executive hall of fame, so that we can use the same decision procedure as baseball: keep an obvious cheat in the center ring because it drives mass audience and profit, but then refuse to induct the integrity-lite executive into the executive hall of fame after he or she retires with fat millions or billions, because that really hits takes the shine off the manicured landscape at the third residence.
Linear programming was invented and developed in the late 30s and throughout the 40s, not the 70s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_programming#History
Personally, I find it incredibly hard to buy all the posters here who claim to be so amazingly honest that one lie is utterly unacceptable (and would actually make you question everything else the guy has or will do). I seriously doubt there's anyone here who hasn't lied ever in their adult life, probably even if you exclude basic white lies. Probably, a significant majority here has even lied about something work-related. So, frankly, I find it pretty hypocritical to be so down on this guy for even the hint of a lie (it's really not yet entirely clear where the claim came from).
I learned FORTRAN on a PDP 11/70 in college - BASIC on an 11/40 in high school. What little hax0r I allegedly know was due to contamination from younger co-workers a decade ago. Usually they reveled in pointing out how I was doing it wrong.
#DeleteChrome
Even though you are wrong about the existence of 1970s-vintage CS degrees, nobody cares about his actual CS qualifications. They care about the fact that he lied about them, which means he's apparently got a severely degraded sense of ethics and he is less trustworthy than a CEO should be. The flip side is that he's a bad liar, which is perhaps even worse for a CEO.
It's not the relevancy of the degree, it's the relevancy of ethics and honesty. I don't care what decade you got your education or where from. It's always relevant. Trust is the #1 qualification for someone to manage millions of dollars of company on behalf of other people, be they employees or stockholders. I can't think of any legitimate reason why he should get a free pass for such a big mistake.
Well, in 1979 (okay, maybe a wee bit earlier) at many universities, one of the major jobs of the IT guy was to receive couriered boxes of punch cards from other universities that didn't have computers, run those through the computer, then mail back the resulting syntax error.
Yes, but they're a little fuzzy on the SE != CS part.
As to the 1979 CS degree, is there such a thing? PCs only existed since about 1984's so any degree he had has no relevance at all to modern computing. Who care what he did on PDP11s in Fortran?
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." - Edsger Dijkstra
Leadership in business is starting to act very much like leadership in politics, and vice versa, where lying is not only accepted, but apparently expected. The ironic (hypocritical) thing is that as this is going on, the personal lives of the "little people" who actually are responsible for companies success, or nations' greatness, is increasingly scrutinized, and less apt to be forgiven, or overlooked, in contrast to the "leaders" who can lie on their resumes, and keep their jobs.
Does business now equal politics? As businessmen increasingly influence (buy) politicians, and often become them (like Romney, for just one of many instances,) are we seeing the lines between business and political power being blurred, or even erased? Because successful big businesses are rather like sharks, in that they have a single-minded focus on generating revenue and profit for their masters, with all other actions still ultimately focused upon the harvesting of as much cash as they can lay their greedy little hands on, you don't REALLY want them running your government, which by its nature is supposed to be about the greatest good done for the majority of their citizens, (at least in our country)!
In countries where the government is in it for itself, monarchies and the like, well... you can see from historical precedent how they operate, and as a democracy drifts into a finocracy, or corpocracy, or hegemony of some kind run by the rich, er... corporations, we'll see our government acting more and more like one of them.
Lying on your curriculum vitae may seem harmless. But in the eyes of the law, it is commiting fraud by false representation with a maximum penalty of three to ten years in prison in most western countries.
There are many examples of people lying on their CV to get a prestiges job. When the fraud is discovered, they get fired and maybe sued, judged an jailed. Not being an American, I guess US laws on falsifying documents are as tough as in UK and rest of Europe, as this examples shows in UK: A woman jailed for six months after lying on here CV
It's a false premises in calming that CEO's lies all the time, so adding a lie don't count as long as they earn chunks of money for their company. After the Enron bankruptcy December 2001, the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX) was passed by the US Senate. In short, the law can prison lying CEO's for max 20 years if they give false information to the stock exchange or to investigating authorities. In such cases, a CEO who lies will be risking jail for months or years. someone brings it to court. It's before and after Enron. Dan Lyons at The Daily Beast may live in a world before Enron. The court system are more updated, Therefore lets wait for the court case against Yahoo who Daniel Loeb at Third Point has announced, and see how that goes regarding document fraud and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act:
The Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX for short)
But the "good" 4 years places don't offer sys admin / desktop type classes. CS is not really for that work.
You lying, deceitful bastard prick... you, of all people, Mr. Fake Steve Jobs... the same guy who swore that Darl McBride and the SCO Group would teach all those Linux "crunchies" a lesson, and that SCO would win because they were telling the truth...
Dan Lyons, you wouldn't know the truth if it smacked you upside the head with a clue-by-four. Go fuck yourself.
I don't think there's a hypocrisy there. Why would you fire an employee who lied on their CV, yet does the job well?
As to the 1979 CS degree, is there such a thing? PCs only existed since about 1984's so any degree he had has no relevance at all to modern computing. Who care what he did on PDP11s in Fortran?
It looks like someone's raking through his past trying to discredit him and thus undermine Yahoo. Presumably MS wants to buy the remainder dirt cheap after the Carl Icahn attack failed to kill it totally.
Holy crap, what a stupid dumbass thing to say. Who the hell tell you that CS == programming? Seriously, please turn in your geek card and refrain from participating in CS/software related discussions that involve anything more complex than an if statement or html.
The article speaks of how rife lying is in the Silicon Valley and that its unfair to put Scott Thompson on the rack when so many others have committed the same offense and go on their merry ways. First of all, this is a 5 year old's response to have been caught with your hand in the cookie jar. You are the CEO of a major company. You're the standard bearer, the head and to some degree the soul of your company. If you make lying, deceit and misrepresentation the norm, you undermine not just the integrity of your business, but its ability to perform and relate to others on a global scale.
I'm not certain this demands falling on a sword, but its time for some heroic coming clean. A wise leader nips something like this in the bud. How can they hold others in their organization to account when the CEO is guilty? It creates a gaping hole in the fabric of an enterprise's ability to hold people to account. Or if they do attempt to hold lower employees to a standard, the hypocrisy creates such a toxic stench that employee morale will certainly suffer.
The fact that profit or the pursuit thereof seems to have come before personal integrity, lawful operation or even human dignity in American business, is itself a powerful indictment that we're fast heading into dark water. It is high time that we stop this march to mediocrity and morale collapse and reclaim whatever it takes to recover our personal high ground. Perhaps it time for privately held companies with strong character to begin pushing these bad boys off the playing field. I for one would be overjoyed to take my business to a privately held company that put personal integrity ahead of profit.
This is an astonishingly ignorant thing to write. What part of CS is different now than from 1979? Has O(n) suddenly become equal to O(log n)?
Yeah, it is not like we had any advances in parallel computing, operating systems, artificial intelligence, networking, computer architecture, language design, cryptography, or anything since then. Oh wait, it turns out we have had major advances in all of those areas.
Big Oh notation was invented in 1894. Are you arguing that we haven't had any advances in Computer Science since then?
Fuck everyone attacking yahoo. You probably think it's okay for the author of the original linux kernel to get a degree in Visual Basic, before he's allowed to manage your hosting firewall. (Show me a degree for that, and I will make sure you don't get hired) Fuck all your degrees, idiots, they are just little pieces of paper, you ego driven pieces of shit. Go hassle the banksters. Do something productive and leave yahoo the fuck alone, quit destroying business in America with all this fucking bullshit laws, and rumors and seed stories. You don't need a degree, you only need to be smart, this might require some education in some things. Even Henry Ford did this, and look what he did, --with NO DEGREE.
CS is incredibly different now than it was in 1979. Database theory as we know it today didn't exist. Huge swaths of AI did not exist. Most modern Machine Learning techniques did not exist. Natural Language Processing was still in the phonics stage. Public Key Encryption, one of the four cornerstones of information security, did not exist.
I could go on . . .
Anyone who thinks computer science is only about Algorithms and Data Structures is living in the stone age. It's almost like saying that Mechanical Engineering is only about physics.
I guess lying and blatant abuse works.
That's right, it does.
And it will continue to work until the alphabet soup government agencies who supposedly provide oversight start handing out penalties that are larger than the gains to be had. It's not a punishment if it's cheaper than doing things the right way, it's a discount.
IMO, the computer science department is the only one left with consistently 1970s hair.
Which is why he'll be fired. Or resign.
I was responding mostly to this statement:
CS from 1979 is certainly still relevant to modern computing. It doesn't encompass everything, but it is a solid foundation. If you took somebody from the class of 1979 and showed them the curriculum for CS today, it wouldn't look that alien to them. After all, lots of people teaching the class of 2012 are graduates of the 1979 era.
"If lying about degrees suddenly becomes acceptable, everybody will do it and degrees become meaningless....if degrees become meaningless, incompetence in critical positions will raise."
Too late. That sailed with the H1B and offshoring ship pushed along by quarterly earnings trade winds. Bolstered by a fleet of Phoenix, DeVry and other mills catering both to the lazy employee and the lazy HR administrator.
The main point is that his university didn't start doing CS degrees until 1983, see one of the many articles on allthingsd.com And yes CEOs and politicians may lie, but something as checkable as this is just silly.
The attitude here is that, if everyone else is doing it (however you define "everyone else"), then it's OK for you to do it, too.
Lying is lying---it doesn't matter if it's a recent college grad or a CEO. Justice has nothing to do with how much you make or how high you've climbed in life.
The only difference here is that someone got lucky and no one caught him sooner. Just because you get away with a crime doesn't mean that it suddenly isn't a crime. This guy deserves the flak he is receiving on all fronts and I have no sympathy for him any more than I would have had he been caught when he first lied about his education.
If you don't want to get strung up as a liar, cheater, and thief, then don't do those things in the first place. It's so simple, and some people never learn.
Really simple:
Do the corporate policies state that any deception on resumes constitutes ground for immediate termination?
Are there cases in the corporate records where resume misstatements have resulted in terminations?
If so, then Scott has to go.
(If the board wants to hire him back with an updated resume that is 'all correct', then that would be fine... perhaps with better terms...)
No. I'm arguing that the old stuff is still relevant.
You call it hypocrisy. They call it lobbying.
Casteism
This is bull.
The problem with this is anyone who gets up in the world -- even if they got off from a false basis... if they worked for 30 years, post degree -- it doesn't make a difference.
If you don't want to get strung up? Be perfect. If you are not perfect, in all ways, then you have no right to call other people on their crap (except as self defense!)...
No one is or was a saint -- not Mother Teresa (lots of stories of her misdeeds surfaced after her death -- she was a bit over the top...), and most (can't prove 'all'), and no recent presidents...(if any?)....
It's hypocrisy of the 1st degree and it stinks!
Stop holding people to unrealistic standards...
Has he murder anyone?
No? Has he liked under presidential oath to congress? How can people even think of harassing him, when our country's leadership in the past few presidential terms has set an example far lower than most anyone could match!
Hold the leaders accountable first.
... of the time I applied for a position in 1996 as a Java programmer. The advert asked for someone with 5+ years commercial experience programming in Java. In my cover letter I pointed out to the company that Java had only been released in 1995, so it would be impossible to find someone with 5+ years experience (unless they had in fact worked at Sun Microsystems on the Java project). They didn't even give me an interview, but wrote back to tell me that I was incorrect as they had in fact found someone with 5+ years of commercial experience programming in Java. Some people just don't fact check. Maybe they are lazy, or maybe they just don't want to know the truth. I would have loved to have sat in at that interview to see what the '5+ years experience' guy had to say.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
No one's saying that anyone has to be perfect, or even close to perfect---but people are still accountable for their actions.
As soon as you toss that away, and as soon as you allow the "everyone is doing it" mentality, you open the door for people to "make mistakes" but not care if they're right or wrong---in other words, you take a society that is (by nature) imperfect, and make it even more flawed. The worst crimes and acts of group stupidity in history were because people were allowed to follow each other off of a cliff without thinking twice about their actions and what they mean.
No one is perfect, but at the same time, people can do the best they can and avoid making as many mistakes as possible (and then learn from those they do make). Lying about your job or education experience is blatantly wrong, everyone knows it, NOT everyone does it, and many people that do will get caught, just like any other crime.
And for those that do not get caught, then I suppose good for them for getting away with it, huh? Maybe by not learning the lesson the first time around they'll get caught doing other (or worse things) later in life, or maybe they'll never have to do it again.
***Beyond the speculation, though, is that the simple fact that crimes are not justified by the fact that others do them. Being imperfect is not an excuse for making mistakes. It may be a fact of life, but it isn't a defense, an excuse, or any way to justify poor judgement. When mistakes are made, people are responsible & accountable for them, and I can care less of it's an average guy or a CEO***
Generally, I agree with you, but when the degree is 30 years in the past, its not very relevant to whether or not you can do the current job. If's more important to look at whether or not he is able to do the job AT THIS POINT, than what story he made up to get their.
Second, and I can't let you get away with this... You are lying.
You said: "Lying about your job or education experience is blatantly wrong, everyone knows it, NOT everyone does it, and many people that do will get caught, just like any other crime", but the thing is lying on a job application isn't a **CRIME**, it's immoral, and unethical, but not a crime. That's the line.
How many people never go over the speed limit? It's IS wrong I won't make assertions about EVERYONE doing it, but people do get caught. But it often ISN'T unethical or immoral.
I'm not saying what he did was right. But now that the information is 'out', it doesn't matter anymore. If stock holders and co-workers have no confidence in his ability to do the job -- he will be voted out -- he doesn't need to have any extra special penalties or harassment applied by the media or general public.
It's NOT a *legal* issue, it's an issue between him and those who employ him to decide if it makes a difference, NOT you.
So stop LYING to support your arguments. I know everyone does it, and it's not illegal (it's a free country -- and people are allowed freedom of expression -- even when it includes lying -- except under oath or police (specific laws apply)). But from my perspective, you are just as guilty as he is of lying to convince people of your 'truth' -- and this was what I meant when I wrote about no one being perfect, and unless he has done something serious that society has thought was serious enough to pass a law against, you have no business as a 3rd party harassing him -- especially when you are guilty of the same type of action.
If you are a direct party who is affected by his actions, then you can seek redress by outing him from office at the next stockholder meeting or a civil suit if you can prove it has done you harm.
Holier than thou, hypocrisy SHOULD be a crime. It would create alot less need for lying and address, IMO, the worse harm of of harming people who are guilty of no crime, but of being human.
I will be recommending neither of you for the "[Boy/Girl] Scout's honesty and integrity awards"... Consider yourself disciplined.
In fact, lying on a job application can, in fact, be a crime! When you apply for a job and are going through all of that paperwork---you sign at the bottom, and in most cases, what you're signing is to affirm the truth of what you have stated. This is true on the applicant history, your tax info, references, and so on.
You don't sign documents for nothing, nor does that signature exist solely to get you through a process of paperwork. Depending on the job and position, the degree of legality can be serious---lie on an application for the military, government, or a security agency, and you could be in serious hot water (beyond just being embarrassed)
I understand the (albeit dramatic) point you are trying to make, but what you've asked for a is a statute of limitations, after which one's crimes can be ignored. As you said, the company will decide in this specific case if 30 years was enough or not, but in general, there is no consistent precedent for what you are asking for.
I am sure if someone steals candy from a store and 30 years pass, that odds are no one will care, but more serious wrongdoings can easily be relevant, even years later. This happens all the time---getting away with something doesn't make it OK or absolve you of it. People are brought to justice (or at least brought public if it is too late) all the time to answer for what they thought they got away with.
I'm not condoning harassment or hypocrisy, simply stating the facts---and you certainly do not have to like them, but civilization doesn't survive through corruption & lying. People certainly make mistakes and we are all aware of that fact all the time, but that simple fact doesn't make our mistakes OK. We're still responsible---you, me, everyone, and if we mess up big time, then it's on us to answer for what we've done.
For what it's worth, think how it'd be if you applied for a job and lost out to someone that lied their way through and got away with it. That's a lot of changed history that could affect the rest of your life. Maybe many other lives. It's far from negligible and you do yourself a great disservice by using semantics to throw away a very valid point.
You said:
"In fact, lying on a job application can, in fact, be a crime! When you apply for a job and are going through all of that paperwork---you sign at the bottom, and in most cases, what you're signing is to affirm the truth of what you have stated. This is true on the applicant history, your tax info, references, and so on."
Either you are blatantly lying to support your specious case, or, you really are ignorant of the law. In the above, the only one of those that is criminal is lying about tax info, and THEN, only to federal or state tax authorities.
You have to lie to *authorities*. A job application to a private company is NOT a court-held legal document. It's an agreement between two or more *private* individuals. As such, lying in that context is albeit, unethical and/or immoral, but not it is not illegal and is not a crime.
<rhetorical_anger>As it stands you have lied MORE than the person in question that WE can prove. What does this say about your character? Should you be allowed to hold a job? </rhetorical_anger>
Do you really want to push for the idea that inter-personal fabrication is a crime? Should you be jailed for your actions? Should you now be harassed to the ends of the earth? [oh woe is me^h^hyou]
Almost everyone, has done what you did -- misspoken, or not thoroughly vetted their facts (how often we hear about that in the news, buried under the 'obit's, on p37....;^) -- virtually never on the front page and in the same font, where the initial deed was done!).
There is a difference between criminal activity and doing "civil" wrongs. The former, is a crime. The latter, exposes you to [possible] "civil" action: something that doesn't go on a criminal record.
See the difference? But even in such matters about private matters -- there are unfortunately side-effects of laws that were never meant to be applied in a given situation. If a president is asked about non-job related activities, by congress, it **shouldn't** be a crime for them to either not-answer or to give, even a false answer to an *inappropriate* questions about their personal life (applicable to a *sitting*, or past president where they are not being 'qualified' for the post).
As for lying before they get into office -- I think that's called campaigning [?] [*sigh*!] -- something I doubt we'll ever see laws passed to control -- heck, corporations just recently got ruled that they can do unlimited lying during campaigns (besides their normal advertising) -- something that had been previously controlled, but they asserted, that "Corporations" are legal people and therefore should receive full constitutional rights.
Yeah..right. Let's see guilty ones serve time behind bars...
Lying in a sworn declaration (which some job applications are, though not all) is 100% illegal---no questions about it. In addition, the benefits you receive via your job that you have lied to get may constitute insurance fraud, and are also illegal. There are also a number of laws/acts that make falsifying information (in writing, or sometimes verbally) about your past illegal--especially if it has to do with military service or honors.
In 11 states, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, North
Dakota, Oregon, Texas, Michigan, and Washington, misrepresenting parts of your experience---including college education---is a criminal offense. In 5 states, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Kentucky, and Washington, it is a felony that could be punishable with prison time. For completeness' sake, there are no generic federal laws that forbid lying about education - all are specific and address certain cases of lying, rather than saying that all lying is illegal, which would be over the top.
Lastly, many of the legal proceedings that occur after someone is fired for resume fraud can constitute perjury or violate state/federal laws if the person accused decides to take legal action against the company. This is also rare, but there are many cases where ex-employees have sued their former employer, lost, were counter-sued and also lost as a result of their legal actions. Not commonplace at that point, but still quite real.
Do employers sue over any of this? Rarely---usually they want the quickest way out with the least amount of fuss and money spent---but it has happened before. Either way, please check your facts before letting out your dramatic anger upon those you disagree with.
We were talking whether it was legal to lie to a private employer about past training -- more specifically, if you wish to be specific, about someone at Yahoo. Their offices are in California and they are incorporated in Delaware.
None of the information you supply has any bearing on the case. You are throwing out facts mindlessly in an attempt to misdirect the issue. I didn't check the laws in every state, because they don't apply to this discussion. That as many as 20% of states have such laws is still rather pathetic -- there's NO NEED for them. The person hasn't done harm against society -- they've **potentially** done harm against their employer -- BUT only if their employer judges they have done so. If they don't have issue with their performance, then it is not the place of 3rd parties (or the state) to say otherwise.
Where do you get the idea that I am at all letting out dramatic anger?
I did say, "rhetorical anger"... i.e. a "simulated anger" that is shown for purposes of "rhetoric", or for the sake of argument. It's similar telling someone they broke the law, and in mock anger, telling them they will pay the full price of their misdeeds: being whipped with a wet noodle!
I'm not sure, but it sorta looks like you are taking this a bit too seriously -- just like taking Yahoo's CEO's violation 'seriously'. I don't see them as big deals. There are alot more important things going on in the world and trivia like what so-and-so did on their job application or who had an affair with who, or who did what type of non-harmful, consensual activity in their spare time are just not that that should be considered newsworthy. It's invasive and petty -- and an obvious attempt to do harm to someone. Perhaps 3rd party negative gossip and backbiting is what should be made illegal.
They would be foolish to fire him if he was performing his duties well.