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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.
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.
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
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.
"slight exaggeration" is already dishonest and means you are lying scum. Claiming a multi-year degree is not "slightly exaggerating" though. I do not know about the US, but in Europe, this is criminal and can get you fined. There are some multiple offenders (on PhD-level though) that have been sent to prison. In any case, this is grounds for immediate termination.
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.
"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.
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"
This is a nice idea, but it flies directly into the extremely strongly held cultural / sociological belief that there is no difference between education and training and they're just synonyms for the same thing. You'd have better luck convincing people God does not exist thru logical argument. "College is training for a good job" is as closely held a belief as "god exists" In some ways, more closely held.
We have badges, they're called certifications, and decades of handing them out like crackerjack prizes means they're mostly useless. Certs with an industry wide accreditation board would work, and to the best of my knowledge has never been tried because of the excuse that developing classes, books, and tests means the cert designers would need to be involved in early blue sky development (as if that were not a pile of B.S. and as if NDAs didn't exist and as if the accreditation board needs to be involved at the earliest level of certification)
Back in 1998 a CCNA meant instant job offer. In 2012 I heard some guys at work talking about getting one because they're a ticket to success. It becomes a belief system, like people who still think getting a law degree means instant millions despite 50% unemployment for law grads for years and years now. If you ever get a badge/cert program in, people will believe in it for decades after it closes down, so maybe a high barrier to entry makes sense after all.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
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.
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.
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.
You forgot to mention your mad Multiplan skillz0rs.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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
Missing mod option: -1 blatant lies
Missing mod option: -1 astro-turfing.
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.
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.