So Yahoo's CEO is out. Scott Thompson resigned today after less than five months on the job, and the reason is almost too dumb to believe: his official bio said he had a degree in computer science. He didn't. He had an accounting degree from Stonehill College, a perfectly fine degree, and somewhere along the way in his career someone (him? a PR person? who knows) tacked "computer science" onto it. That line sat in filings and press bios for years. Nobody checked. Then an activist investor named Dan Loeb, who's been trying to get board seats at Yahoo for months, did the five minutes of digging that apparently no one at Yahoo bothered to do before hiring the guy, and the whole thing unraveled in about ten days.
I want to be clear about the timeline because it's kind of wild when you lay it out. Loeb's fund, Third Point, put the degree discrepancy in an SEC filing on May 3rd. Thompson didn't say much. Then he went on medical leave for thyroid cancer surgery. And today, May 13th, Yahoo announced he's gone for good. Ross Levinsohn is running things on an interim basis now. Less than five months as CEO of one of the biggest names on the internet, and it ends because of a line item on a resume that nobody fact-checked.
Here's the part that actually bugs me though, more than the lie itself. A fake CS degree doesn't make you a better executive. It's not like Thompson was writing code at Yahoo, or ever would be. If he'd claimed he could bench press 400 pounds it would've been about as relevant to the job. The whole thing is a lie that served zero functional purpose except to sound slightly more impressive at a company whose entire identity is built on being a tech company. Which, honestly, might be exactly why it happened. There's a specific kind of insecurity that shows up when a business guy runs a tech company and feels like he needs to prove he's "one of us." I've seen a milder version of this at basically every startup I've been near, some VP who suddenly starts dropping terms like "the stack" in meetings even though his actual job has nothing to do with any stack.
I fudged my own resume once, for what it's worth, back before I had anything real to put on it. Not a fake degree, nothing that dramatic, just a project I'd contributed maybe 10% of that I described like I'd built the whole thing solo. Got the interview. Got asked one follow-up question I couldn't really answer and spent the rest of the call sweating through my shirt. Never did that again. It's a small, stupid, low-stakes version of what just happened to Thompson, and I think about it every time one of these stories comes up, which is more often than you'd expect, honestly.
What gets me is how long this specific lie survived. Thompson was president of PayPal before this. He'd been at eBay for years before that. Somebody, somewhere, in one of those hiring processes, should have called Stonehill College and asked "hey, what did this guy actually study." It's not hard. It's the kind of background check any decent-sized company claims to do as a matter of policy. And yet it took an activist investor with a grudge and a legal team, someone whose entire motivation was unrelated to academic honesty, to be the one who finally looked it up.
There's a bigger conversation happening right now about who should run Yahoo and whether the company can be saved at all, and I don't have much to add to that, other than the fact that they've now burned through several CEOs in a few years and each transition seems to eat months of momentum the company doesn't have to spare. But the degree thing is the part I keep coming back to, probably because it's so needlessly avoidable. You don't get fired for having an accounting degree. You get fired for lying about having a different one, badly, in a way anyone could check.
Anyway. If your resume has anything on it you wouldn't want an activist hedge fund manager reading out loud in a press release, now's probably a decent time to go fix that.