Resumegate Continues At Yahoo: Thompson Out As CEO, Levinsohn In 107
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."
Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals' (Score:5, Insightful)
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' (Score:5, Insightful)
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' (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Yahoo are irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Irony (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Who's Running Corporations? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
"Personal Reasons?" (Score:5, Insightful)
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" [wikipedia.org]:
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:Who's Running Corporations? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Stop using gate at the end of 'scandals' (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. I though this is a tech site.
What about metal gate, silicon gate, high-k gate?
Re:Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
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.