Resumegate Continues At Yahoo: Thompson Out As CEO, Levinsohn In

Google85 writes with this news from All Things D: "Yahoo's embattled CEO Scott Thompson is set to step down from his job at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, in what will be a dramatic end to a controversy over a fake computer science degree that he had on his bio, according to multiple sources close to the situation. The company will apparently say he is leaving for 'personal reasons.' Thompson's likely replacement on an interim basis will be Yahoo's global media head, Ross Levinsohn, who most recently also ran its Americas unit, including its advertising sales."

Comments

Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus Christ people. Watergate was not about water.

Stop this hackneyed, lazy labeling of scandals now!

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS JUST IN: Reporters reporting news use the word "gate" too much to describe scandals!
Our reporter reports: "News of GateGate are just starting to-"
and that's all the time we have, now, CATS!
more at 11

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[vlm]

The funny part is that this is a "tech" scandal... Supposedly anyone older than 25 is "over the hill" WRT tech and is already obsolete, yet to have lived thru the original watergate scandal you'd have to be at least 50. I mean, yeah, technically I was alive when nixon resigned, but I was only a couple months old so I didn't care too much. I figure you'd have to be at least 50 to have been paying attention.

I guess the tech connection is if you're "in tech" then ask your grandfather about putting -gate at the end of every scandal.

It could be worse, we could be going thru history reporting on water-contra, water-resume or water-yahoo or whatever.

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[InfiniteZero]

Chill dude. Languages are dynamic and evolving, and "-gate" is a perfect example in English. Not unlike "-ism", "-ology", etc, it's concise, immediately recognisiable, and perfectly convey the essence and nuance of the whole situation.

Languages are not laws of physics. They are more like technological standards -- when something gets used by a lot of people, it often becomes the de facto standard.

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[JustOK]

so, you'll be stuck at the -gate post, while the rest of us move on.

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[zhrike]

Watergategate?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB9JgxhXW5w

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[RavenousBlack]

I think the feeble mind is the one that ignores an argument, attacks the one making the argument, and repeats the original line of thinking being argued against. The suffix adds plenty to the base word. If the title was just "Resume Continues at Yahoo: Thompson Out as CEO, Levinsohn In" then it wouldn't be clear what was meant. Adding -gate makes it apparent that there was some sort of scandal involving something about a resume. While it's not the only way to express that information it's one that has been adopted as understandable by a large enough population. Also, while it isn't true to what Watergate originally was: It. Doesn't. Matter. Meaning is not static. I would say that it takes a good mind to accept and adapt to the constant changes of language. And even further, you can't nitpick such a thing because you're guilty of it yourself! You used the word "orchestrated" in your post. The earliest origin of the word orchestra was used to refer to the area in a theater where the chorus was positioned. It has nothing to do with your use of it. You still used it fairly successfully though.

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[djlowe]

it's concise, immediately recognisiable [sic], and perfectly convey the essence and nuance of the whole situation.

No, it doesn't. Watergate was about criminal political misdeeds at the Federal level in the US, and the attempt to cover up the same: This is not.

when something gets used by a lot of people, it often becomes the de facto standard.

And in so doing, distorts not only the original, but also alters that to which it is applied, in an attempt to create "sound bite" representations, simplifications of complex issues.

Regards,

dj

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[MightyMartian]

There are two constants to language: 1. languages evolve and take on new words and idioms and 2. some pedantic asshole is always there shouting "get off my lawn!"

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[gman003]

Okay, so -gate has been genericized. Happens to almost every word given enough time.

First, it was used for one specific instance: Watergate. Then we had Koreagate, Billygate, Monicagate - any Federal-level political scandal.

Then it went international: Dunagate, Mabelgate, Petrogate - any political scandal

Then it went non-political: Closetgate, Climategate, Cablegate, Crashgate, and those are just the ones that give me an alliteration bonus. Oh, and Bonusgate.

Wikipedia counts one hundred and nineteen distinct -gates beyond the original Watergate (and also excluding fictional -gates). This includes two distinct Memogates, Nannygates, Grannygates, Spygates, Strippergates and three Troopergates. And those are just the ones meeting Wikipedia notability guidelines.

Languages *change*. The news media uses meaningless sound-bite catchphrases. History gets distorted. Get over it.

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[rrohbeck]

Meh. I though this is a tech site.
What about metal gate, silicon gate, high-k gate?

Re:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals'

[__aaltlg1547]

Maybe you can explain how Watergate is relevant to lying about your education. If somebody could make that connection, I wouldn't object too much to the application of the -gate.

Re:Yahoo are irrelevant

[Penguinisto]

Not yet, but give them time.

Now that ThirdPoint (the investment firm that made the stink in the first place) got what they wanted (a guy on the board), I wonder how long it will take before Yahoo suddenly and unexpectedly sells off its patent portfolio to Microsoft at fire-sale prices.

Re:Eyeballs and pageviews

[mihai.todor85]

I find it rather odd that they have the required traffic to keep going. Just look at Yahoo Answers for example. Or the trending topics featured on Yahoo Mail. Or... They're lucky that my main email address is @yahoo.com, because otherwise I would have ditched them a long time ago.

Who's Running Corporations?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Man, I think there are a lot of Slashdotters with degrees shaking their heads right about now. Turns out, you don't even need one to rise all the way to the top of a major multinational corporation.

Sure, you might get caught eventually, but think of all the millions you'd have raked in in bonuses, whether or not you trashing the company.

But I was especially struck by the umpteen media executive being brought in to run the company instead. So we have a man at the helm of an internet company with no CS degree, being replaced by more men with no CS degrees. It's pretty clear that CS will never, ever get you as far as advanced skills in professional bullshitting. Sometimes, the world saddens me.

Re:Who's Running Corporations?

[myurr]

I agree with most of what you say but equally how sad is it that the world judges someone's suitability to run a multinational based on their qualifications rather than the many years of experience they have had since then and / or how good they are at their job. That bit of paper doesn't make someone better suited to run a company than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates etc. just because they didn't complete their courses.

Re:Who's Running Corporations?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they were willing to lie to get the job, then just how compromised are there ethics. This is the heart of the issue. The degree or lack there of is not important, only the implications of changing a CV. By the way it also looks like he only go found out because he stopped lying on FCC filings.

Re:Who's Running Corporations?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I agree with most of what you say but equally how sad is it that the world judges someone's suitability to run a multinational based on their qualifications rather than the many years of experience they have had since then and / or how good they are at their job.

He is being judged on how good he is at his job. He proved himself incompetent by making such an easily disprovable lie. The place he claimed to have a CS degree didn't even have a CS program when he claimed to have graduated. We didn't even need to get his transcripts to catch him. It is hard to imagine someone more incompetent than that.

Re:Who's Running Corporations?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that a willingness to lie(and the people skills to pull it off) have long been recognized as common credentials for executive positions(remember, he was some big guy at paypal(who presumably didn't detect him) and possibly some other gigs before that, before the current mess.

Honestly, that's the bit that I find most baffling and displeasing: I have the greatest respect for the rigor required to get a good CS degree; but I can also imagine why distant-from-the-code-mines management types might not be selected primarily on the basis of the depth of their technical skill in specific areas.

However, the apparent years-long success in floating around the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose world of executive compensation on the basis of a resume that contained bald, verifiably impossible, assertions, is pretty dire.

Re:Who's Running Corporations?

[bcrowell]

Turns out, you don't even need [a degree] to rise all the way to the top of a major multinational corporation.

It's pretty clear that CS will never, ever get you as far as advanced skills in professional bullshitting.

I'm going to have to advocate what will surely be an unpopular position among slashdotters. You make two statements here, and interpret them as evidence that something is terribly wrong in the business world. I would argue that both are exactly as they should be in a healthy, competitive capitalist environment.

Re your first statement: It makes sense if you don't necessarily need a college degree to become CEO of a big corporation (although in fact I suspect that the vast majority do have one). Typically when you're hiring someone for their first job out of college, you hire them based heavily on their college record, because you have nothing else to go on. As the person moves into more responsible and senior positions, this starts to matter less and less, because now you have something much more meaningful to judge them on: their record of success in previous positions.

Re your second statement: It's true that much of management consists of professional bullshitting. However, much of it does not. Management requires certain skills that most people don't have. Some of these skills are technical in nature (knowing how corporate finance works, understanding labor laws, ...) and some are "soft" people skills, but just because they're soft that doesn't mean that they're easy. Shakespeare and Charlemagne both had soft skills, and they had them at an extremely high level.

If you want to focus your ire on something, a more appropriate target might be undergraduate business degrees, which do help people land entry-level management jobs -- and they shouldn't, because the coursework is ridiculously dumbed down. An undergraduate diploma in business is even more worthy of being used as toilet paper than one in education or area studies.

Re:Who's Running Corporations?

[uncqual]

Indeed, even if it went down exactly as Thompson claims, the most charitable conclusion I can come up with is that he is not competent for the job.

Yahoo! filed, over his signature, SEC documents that included the phantom degree. It was his job to make sure that those filings were correct -- either because he personally knew they were or because he selected people to check them who were trusted. In this case, he had personal knowledge of the facts and, at best, didn't even read what he signed. I actually give a CEO a break if there is some arcane thing in such filings that is wrong if they have no personal direct knowledge of the area (for example swapping the currency exchange rates for Feb and March when they are within 0.01% of each other) and the people he delegated the task of checking to screwed up -- but that's not the case here.

I can't believe the guy lasted more than 24 hours after the revelation -- that says something very bad about Yahoo!

Re:Who's Running Corporations?

[zzatz]

Not only did he lie about something easy to check, he lied about something he didn't need to. No one hires a CEO based on academic credentials. Executives are hired for their business experience.

I'm still trying to sort out whether Yahoo is dropping him because he lied, or because he's bad at lying.

Irony

[owlnation]

The company will apparently say he is leaving for "personal reasons."

So he's essentially being canned for lying. And they cover this by lying about the reason he's being canned. Well, that makes sense.

Corporations and the people who work for them, deserve each other.

Re:Irony

[marcosdumay]

If everybody tells the same lie using the same words, it becomes "jargon". Like "no, you don't look fat on those clothes", it's not even a lie anymore.

Is Yahoo the other HP?

[MrEricSir]

Seems like both Silicon Valley companies have had a recent rash of childish, unprofessional behavior in the boardroom. Don't they realize that this shit scares investors away?

Re:Is Yahoo the other HP?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Authoritative sources in snappy suits tell us that only wearing a hoodie 'disrespects' investors.

Indulging in childish, unprofessional, and deeply ethically compromised behavior is a form of culturally accepted hospitality. In order to put institutional investors at ease, the board and upper level executives wish to reassure them that they can expect to be dealing with their peers, should they choose to invest in the Yahoo family...

Re:Eyeballs and pageviews

[mihai.todor85]

They're going to get buried into history if they don't stop this cheap soap-opera with the CEO(s)... The internet changes much faster than the real world. One day you're at the top, tomorrow you're nobody: there once was a site called myspace, and the rest is history :)

"Personal Reasons?"

[guttentag]

The company will apparently say he is leaving for 'personal reasons.'

Generally when there is any doubt about why an executive is leaving their position, this is the ambiguous statement the company makes. The point is to allow the company to save face, to allow the individual to save face, and to avoid allegations of libel by either side.

In this case, I don't think there's anyone in the industry who isn't familiar with the actual reason Thompson is leaving: he lied about his credentials in the hiring process, and the person ultimately responsible for vetting the information looked the other way because she had lied about her own credentials. At the end of the day, they determined that Yahoo could not maintain the necessary credibility or focus to conduct business if he stayed.

It's public knowledge and it's not debatable, so who are they trying to hide this information from? They're sweeping it under the rug in broad daylight, when they should be owning up to it with a mea culpa":

• Thompson should say he messed up, he apologizes and he's moving on.
• Yahoo should say it messed up, it apologizes and it's moving on.

Maybe that's part of Yahoo's problem: it doesn't move on. It needs to move on, figure out what its role is going to be this decade and focus on that role, or it's going to follow AltaVista into oblivion.

Re:"Personal Reasons?"

[JamesP]

"Personal reasons" could be anything

I'd like to imagine something like: He's not being too fond of YHOO redecorating his office with smoked cod.

Re:Eyeballs and pageviews

[Dogtanian]

They're going to get buried into history if they don't stop this cheap soap-opera with the CEO(s)... The internet changes much faster than the real world. One day you're at the top, tomorrow you're nobody: there once was a site called myspace, and the rest is history :)

Yeah, but bear in mind that Yahoo aren't really a "flavour of the month" company... and haven't been for *well over a decade* now. I always had the perception that (despite having tried some new stuff) fundamentally they hadn't really moved on or gone anywhere since their portal-fad dotcom-era incarnation. To me, they have the air of a "legacy" company still stuck in the late 90s, a long-stagnant dinosaur that didn't seem to go anywhere much after Google stole their thunder in the aftermath of the dotcom era.

And my point is that despite this .... they're still worth loads. They've been yesterday's men, once-leaders who were overtaken, for over a decade now, and yet they're still way up there... so I wouldn't write them off, or at least assume that they're going to do a MySpace within 18 months or whatever.

I'm guessing a lot of Yahoo's success is down to existing (i.e. "legacy") users- AFAIK Yahoo Mail still has a surprisingly large and established user base. Probably *not* "fashionable" computer users, but more conservative, less tech-savvy types who stick with them out of momentum and lack of interest in changing- but that of course is a good thing for Yahoo in many respects!

Re:What are they selling these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

URL shortening services for spammers, with no easy way to report abuse.