Yahoo CEO Wrongly Claimed To Have Degree In Computer Science 363
jmcbain writes "Scott Thompson, Yahoo!'s CEO who was hired on January 4 of this year, was found to have lied about his CS degree from Stone Hill College. Investigation from an activist shareholder revealed that his degree was actually in accounting, and apparently Thompson had been going with this lie since the time he served as president of PayPal's payments unit."
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
Was he able to do the job well? Does it REALLY matter? If he got away with it that long I say good for him, if his employers aren't smart enough or care enough to verify they weren't really that concerned about his credentials.
Maybe this is an indication that degrees are over-rated. Or to be charitable, that it isn't particularly important exactly what you learn.
Perhaps. Though it's not obvious that a CS degree would contribute much to your skills as a CEO.
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One should be proud *not* to have a CS degree (Score:4, Interesting)
true story.
Re:CEO's (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the CEO of one company is on the board for another company whose CEO is on their board. There is a site called theyrule tht tracks these connections to demonstrate the complex collusion/extortion going on among corporate leadership and their siphoning of wealth from the small guys that actually invest in their businesses. Decades ago, those milions went to the owners (stockholders), but as the coup has entrenched, the excess has become standardized and regularly increased.
Re:So? (Score:5, Interesting)
Was he able to do the job well? Does it REALLY matter? If he got away with it that long I say good for him, if his employers aren't smart enough or care enough
They are now saying (in TFA) that this does not diminish his wonderful abilities to lead the company. They are not firing him! Is Yahoo HR informed that a relevant degree is now optional when they filter resumes?
I am happy with either direction:
a) Fire him and apologize for oversight
b) Keep him and announce that Yahoo believes that degrees don't mean much
But you can't have it both ways.
Re:So? (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on the job. If you start into project management rather than being a product developer or programmer it's easier to hide that you don't have a CS degree, or even demonstrate that it doesn't. He's also from an agegroup where a lot of people migrated into computer science work from other completely unrelated fields. One of our profs here who is a CS instructor has all of his formal training in business, but that was as close as his school came to CS in the 1980's. Seriously.
A degree doesn't just show you posses basic group skills, nor are those skills necessarily useful in business. In fact, to the contrary, a lot of degrees don't teach you useful skills to business, and that's why they are paid less than college/tradeschool diplomas. A degree makes you an inexperienced professional in your area. If you need to work in a different area (for example of you have a degree in psychology, english or art history, which are the most oversupplied graduates around here) you haven't demonstrated an aptitude in computer science or any of the more technical programmes.
Remember, this is a guy born in 58. That means he probably went to school around 76 -80. Back then a LOT of places didn't have CS degrees, and what they did offer grew out of another department. Technically my MSc which in practice was CS (thesis on GPU ray tracing) is the same degree as people in geology, physics, chemistry, maths, and psychology from my school, because some idiot put them all in the same programme and degree name. In 1980 your degree and your ability to do CS means a lot less than a degree in CS would represent today. It's not that the training is necessarily a whole lot better, just that you simply couldn't supply enough, so someone who took the only 2 CS courses offered would be the most CS trained person available. Which is why we had two decades of clusterfucks in technology of security problems left and right, massively inefficient implementations that hung around long past their lifetimes etc.
Re:So? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Reminds me of Disney (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, my experience with actual CPA's has been that they're a pleasure to work with. For one thing they file kick-ass bug reports. A good accountant knows how difficult it is to track a problem down, because a lot of what they do amounts to financial debugging.
The *really* good accountants I've known also understand something important, which is the limitations of their discipline. That's probably a prerequisite for being really good at any profession, but accountants generally are more aware of the limitations of their profession than, say, lawyers are. So I think the problem is more likely managers thinking they're accountants than vice versa.
It's understandable, because management is an interdisciplinary field in which the only guarantee of success would be a working time machine. Managers out of their depth tend to grasp at straws (like anyone would); sometimes its accounting, other times it is marketing, other times it is quality control. I think a great manager would know the limits of the management discipline, and focus on hiring great people and keeping them working together.
Anyhow, the accountants I've worked with have been terrific, and I've learned a lot from them; so whenever I hear "accountant" casually used as a pejorative, I like to speak up.
Re:One should be proud *not* to have a CS degree (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I would've went with accounting (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly that is the problem with Corporate America today.
You laugh it off, but why do you think corporate America still prefers IE 6 & XP and only looks at IT as a cost center and sales as profit centers and everything else as a un necessary cost?
The reason why is accountants run the show and follow GAAP rules and know little about the business. Wall Street just wants someone to fudge numbers so they can pump and then short the stock within a 6 - 9 week window.
Accountants make the claim I made x amount of money therefore I can raise your stock price etc.
Is there any CEOs who were former engineers or designers left? A CEO with an IT background would be actually nice for an IT company! Who would ahve thought!
Re:I would've went with accounting (Score:4, Interesting)
Aren't people supposed to provide a copy of their degrees when they get a job in USA?
Not sure about the USA, but I've only ever been asked to prove my qualifications once, and that was when I got a short-term job at my old university. Apparently the data protection act means that they need my explicit permission for the HR department to ask academic records for a copy of my degree certificate. Everywhere else has just accepted it without any evidence. Presumably if I lied and then couldn't do the job, they'd check and prosecute me for fraud and then use that as an excuse for firing me.
Re:Doesn't that make him a better CEO? (Score:4, Interesting)
If that Manager can show min/max, inventory levels, turns, and value for it then the bean counters are less likely to blindly cut it. How many IT departments have a budget? Most, out of them how many of them have a signed a up a Budget for maintaining vs operating vs improving? Very Few.
We're at the point now where the "IT department" is 1 or 2 guys where it was previously 5-6, in many cases, or many IT groups have been outsourced to managed services. "Virtualization makes it easy", to a degree. At least that's the mindset.
Sorry, but when you're one person maintaining a fleet of aging equipment (say, for 200 users) which will maybe or maybe not need a new $15 video card, a $10 ethernet card, $50 in RAM, or a $30 power supply, the cost justification isn't there. We're basically talking about someone getting anal about how many legal pads and pencils a person has on their desk. And in this sort of organization, my experience is that no amount of justification and explanation of cost/benefit analysis will cause the powers-that-be realize "yes, it's a good idea to have spare parts" (aside from fully-functional systems sitting around).
This is a concept quite easily understood in other industries. Surveying companies, road crews, etc. which need a fleet of vehicles keep spare filters, oil, and other commonly worn out parts/pieces (assuming they do their own work); very few actually account for these things short of "we're running out" because it's not worth the time, and they realize they need those parts to keep things running.
Granted, with a larger shop I can see this not being the case, but by "larger" I think you'd need an IT staff of at least 15 people to justify it (or, say, around 1500 employees).
Re:So? (Score:4, Interesting)
House is right but its not the "rule".
I suspect if your recorded all of your personal interactions for a week, and verified the truthfulness of each statement made by those where were strangers to you when the statement was made; you'd see most people are honest. The number would probably even be more favorable toward honesty if you include statements made by people you know.
At least here in American *most* of what people tell me is either true or correct to the best of their understanding. I am not naive, I know *much* of what I hear does contain lies and omissions. Still most of us are able to safely navigate day to day life using the "unless I have some reason to think otherwise, or the risk is high, default trust" algorithm.
When someone tells you the road is closed three miles ahead, I'd like to be able to take them at their word rather than do a 6 mile round trip to confirm for myself.