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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.
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.
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.
It also offends us greatly when somebody is claiming to be an engineer that really is not. It demeans us and means our skills are arbitrary and that anybody can claim them without verification and consequences. This cannot be allowed to stand.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
A little reality check I occasionally give to students: Outside of academia, the only people who will ever sincerely care what your major was in college (and especially your minor) are the people who hire you for your first job. At that point in your career, your major and the grades you got in those classes are all you have going for you, so it's the only basis they have for judging you. But when you apply for your second job, all they will care about was your performance at your current/previous job, and maybe what kind of grades you got in college. "You've got a BA in English Literature, but you've spent the last two years writing binary control code for moisture vaporators? Welcome to Hutt Engineering." Third job and onward: it's 100% about your work experience. So it isn't worth lying about, and it isn't worth the petty outrage over it.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
"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.