So this Yahoo thing. If you havent been following it, the short version is that an activist investor named Daniel Loeb, who runs a hedge fund called Third Point and has been trying to shake up Yahoo's board for months, sent a letter out earlier this week pointing out that CEO Scott Thompson's official bio says he has a bachelor's degree in computer science from Stonehill College. He does not. He has a degree in accounting. The computer science line has apparently been sitting in his official bio since at least his PayPal days, which means it survived years of press releases, SEC filings, and who knows how many conference introductions before anyone bothered to check.
I want to be clear about what bugs me here, because its not really the lying part, or not only that.
It's that nobody checked. Not once, across two major public companies, for however many years. Thompson didnt sneak this past some overworked HR coordinator doing a background check on a Tuesday afternoon. This is a Fortune 500 CEO's biography, the kind of document that gets proofread by comms people and lawyers and probably a couple of consultants before it goes out. And it just sat there. Wrong. For years.
I did resume screening for a while at a job I had before this whole freelance-writing-and-blogging thing became my actual income, and Ill admit something: I never once called a university to confirm a degree. Not once. You call references, maybe, if you're feeling thorough, and even then everyone knows references are handpicked to say nice things. But the degree itself? You just believe the piece of paper. Everyone does. Its one of those things where the system only works because almost nobody tests it.
Which is sort of the uncomfortable point the Thompson story is poking at. A computer science degree is one of the easiest credentials in the world to check and also one of the least checked, because who's going to lie about something so verifiable? Turns out: plenty of people, and it works fine right up until an activist investor with a grudge and a research team decides you're worth digging into.
Kara Swisher's been all over this on AllThingsD the last couple days and its worth reading if you want the granular timeline, because the details keep getting worse for Yahoo, not better. Whether Thompson survives this I genuinely dont know. My hunch, and its just a hunch, is that a board already under pressure from an activist investor is not going to want its CEO's integrity to be the story every single week, and integrity stories have a way of not going away once theyve started. But Ive been wrong about corporate survival predictions before (I was sure Groupon's stock would recover faster than it has, so, grain of salt).
Separately and not really related at all: I saw The Avengers this weekend, opening night, and the theater was packed in a way I havent seen since maybe the last Harry Potter. Sat through the credits scene twice because I went again Saturday with a friend who missed the first showing. Not tech news exactly but it felt like a moment, the kind of thing where you notice everyone in line is checking the same three review aggregator scores on their phones before deciding which showtime to pick. That's the actual technology story buried in a superhero movie weekend, if you squint: how much collective decision-making now runs through a number on a screen before anyone commits to two and a half hours in a theater seat.
Anyway. Back to Yahoo — the whole résumé thing has me half-tempted to go back through my own LinkedIn and scrub anything that's aged into a slight exaggeration. Not a fabrication, nothing like that, just the normal résumé inflation everyone does where "helped with" becomes "led." I dont think Im going to. But I thought about it, which is more than I expected going into a Saturday afternoon of scrolling tech news instead of doing literally anything else productive with a weekend.