Leave Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson Alone! 319
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.'"
Engineers depend on truth (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Summary hole (Score:5, Informative)
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:1979 was pre-PC era (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:1979 was pre-PC era (Score:4, Informative)
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.