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

It's the hypocricy

[crow]

The assumption is that an employee who lied on his resume would likely be fired, but a CEO is too important to fire.

Re:It's the hypocricy

[WrongSizeGlass]

The assumption is that an employee who lied on his resume would likely be fired, but a CEO is too important to fire.

The assumption is that an employee who lied on his/her resume would likely lie about other things as well. A CEO can lie about the most important information about their company. Lie to the board, the stockholders, the SEC, etc.

His CS degree isn't relevant to his current position, but the fact that he lied about it is relevant.

Re:It's the hypocricy

[Anonymous Coward]

I may be an old fashioned relic but my word is my bond. It is important from a practical level I cannot do business with you if you are lying unless I mean to simply screw you over.

  I have no way of negotating with you in good faith. if I want repeat busness I cannot pursue a strategy of wringing ever last drop from a deal simply achieve what I need at a profitable arrangement for both parties. If you lie to me I cannot do this.

Re:It's the hypocricy

[gweihir]

The standard here is that everybody is expected to respect common decency and have a reasonable level of personal integrity, regardless of CEO or the common worker. Claiming a degree violates both to the extreme. Degrees are things people trust. Claiming one without having one it a violation of the order of society. It also reflects massively and negatively on the character of the person doing it.

Hence lying about a degree disqualifies you as a member of decent society, must get you ass fired and your career to be over.

Or you can go the way of, for example, Northern Korea, where a nil-whit is called the "Genius of the Geniuses". Of course, _that_ guy is a figurehead.

Re:It's the hypocricy

[turbidostato]

"Yes, the CEO is far more important to the company than the sandwich guy."

Therefore is far more important to get the facts right *prior* to hire somebody for that role, isn't it?

Well, by lying about his CV in order to get his position, his lie is far more important than the sandwich guy doing the same, isn't it?

Now, what was your point, again?

Re:It's the hypocricy

[V-similitude]

Honestly, I truly doubt his supposed CS degree from 1979 ever ONCE came up in the board's discussion to hire him. It's entirely irrelevant to the job at hand. In all likelihood it was either taken straight from his bio on e-bay (which may or may not have come from him) or the 5th page of his resume that hadn't been updated in 20 years. It's not about him being CEO, it's about whether a degree even matters for a 50+ year old employee with a strong employment background. It doesn't.

Yes, a junior programmer who explicitly lied about his degree should get fired, because that would be a critical part of the decision to hire him. But an older employee gets hired based on a solid work history and his degree may never come into question. In that case, CEO or not, the employee would probably not get fired just for having a lie 5 pages deep in his resume.

Now if there was a background check form that had him write in his education history anew and sign a "this is true to my knowledge" statement, and he still put the degree on there, perhaps there's some basis for termination just for the explicit lie. But it's not at all clear that that exists. Personally, I think it's just as likely that e-bay doctored the bio at some point to make itself feel better about him, and yahoo simply copied that without much thought.

Re:It's the hypocricy

[khallow]

Yes, a junior programmer who explicitly lied about his degree should get fired, because that would be a critical part of the decision to hire him.

Same goes for the CEO. A critical part of the decision to hire him was that he made the best effort to give correct information to the Board of Directors. Even if it were truly irrelevant that the CEO had a technical degree (which I doubt), you still have the issue of lying to your employer which is routinely grounds for dismissal.

But let's suppose your view of things is correct, that the CEO didn't lie to the Board, and that this person merely uses a fraudulent biography for their public face at the company. It's still a remarkable lack of professionalism and display of poor judgment.

Re:It's the hypocricy

[shentino]

More like by lying he's secured himself an opportunity that never would have been given him otherwise.

It's a messed up society when you can get further by lying and cheating than you can by playing it straight.

Re:It's the hypocricy

[shentino]

Acceptance my ass.

Getting away with things that one of lower social status would get the book thrown at him for is simply one of the perks of being part of the elite.

We don't embrace it, we just grudgingly tolerate it because we have no choice.

Re:It's the hypocricy

[Just Some Guy]

Honestly, I truly doubt his supposed CS degree from 1979 ever ONCE came up in the board's discussion to hire him.

I bet it did, albeit in passing: "oh, look: he has a degree in CompSci. That'd give us a little cred with other tech companies."

It's not about him being CEO, it's about whether a degree even matters for a 50+ year old employee with a strong employment background.

It doesn't. Therefore, he shouldn't have included it as a reason why they should hire him.

But on a practical level, I despise that I'm competing for jobs with liars. My resume is probably a lot shorter than his, but it's completely accurate. I did the things I listed. I earned the degree I put on there. I'd hate to think that my resume - my summary description of why a company would want to hire me - is competing with another guy's which is sprinkled with lies that make him look like a better candidate.

I guess I see it the same way as professional athlete who doesn't want to compete with steroid-fueled monstrosities. I want to get ahead by my own merits, but how am I supposed to go up against people who don't play by the rules? Given the choice between outing them to level the playing field or having to stoop to their level, I'd much rather start enforcing those rules.

So fire him. He lied to get to where he is. Maybe that particular lie wasn't the make-or-break that got him the job over someone else who wanted it, but it was important enough to him that he included it.

Unethical Culture, Bah

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the "everyone else is doing it" excuse. How quaint.

I guess this means...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Do you want a leader who lies?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Lying's okay... as long as you're punished for it

[Broofa]

Paraphrasing the article:

"Google lied ... and paid $500M when they got caught"
"Facebook lied ... and settled with the FTC when they got caught"
"Scott Thompson lied ... so just leave him alone, people!"

Lying about accomplishments disqualifies him

[gweihir]

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.

Summary hole

[FrootLoops]

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.

Re:Summary hole

[tverbeek]

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.

Re:Engineers depend on truth

[gweihir]

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.

Re:1979 was pre-PC era

[Eponymous Coward]

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?

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.

Re:1979 was pre-PC era

[ceoyoyo]

"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.

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.