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.'"

Comments

Re:1979 was pre-PC era

[tverbeek]

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?

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.