So this is going to sound like I'm picking on a guy who's probably having the worst week of his professional life, and maybe I am a little, but I can't stop thinking about the Scott Thompson thing.
Quick catch-up if you missed it: Thompson took over as Yahoo's CEO back in January, poached from PayPal where he'd been president. Big hire, at least on paper. Yahoo's been through what, four CEOs in five years at this point, so getting someone with actual operating experience felt like a signal they were serious. Then last week Dan Loeb, the hedge fund guy who runs Third Point and has been in a nasty proxy fight with Yahoo's board for months, sends a letter pointing out that Thompson's official bio, the one in SEC filings, on Yahoo's own site, going back years to his PayPal days, says he has a degree in "accounting and computer science" from Stonehill College. Except Stonehill didn't have a computer science major until years after he graduated. He has an accounting degree. Full stop.
Now, is this the biggest deal in the world? On one level, no. The guy can presumably still run a company without a CS degree; plenty of tech executives don't have one and do fine. Marissa Mayer notwithstanding, you don't actually need a computer science background to make good calls about ad products and org charts. But that's not really what bugs me about it. What bugs me is that this sat on his official bio, unchallenged, through an IPO (PayPal's parent eBay, multiple board appointments, and now a Fortune 500 CEO job, and nobody at any of those companies apparently thought "hey, let's just call the registrar's office and check." That's not a small thing. That's a due diligence process that doesn't exist, at basically every level of a company that is, again, currently trying to convince Wall Street it has its act together.
As of this week Yahoo's put together some kind of board committee to look into it, and Thompson hasn't gone anywhere yet, so who knows how this actually shakes out. Maybe he keeps his job. Maybe he doesn't. I genuinely don't know and I'm not going to pretend I do. But the optics are rough no matter what: a guy hired specifically to be the credible, competent alternative to Yahoo's revolving door of leadership gets caught with a fabricated credential within his first four months. You couldn't write a more on-the-nose metaphor for how the company's been run for the last half decade if you tried.
(Small tangent, because I can't help myself: I once put "familiar with Perl" on a resume around 2004 because I'd copy-pasted a CGI script off a forum and gotten it to run once. Nobody ever checked that either. I'm not saying resume padding is fine, I'm saying it is extremely, depressingly common, and the interesting question isn't "did someone lie a little" — it's "why did an organization with this much money and this many lawyers never verify it." That's the actual failure here, not the lie itself.)
There's also just something very 2012 about the mechanism by which this came out — not a journalist digging through archives, but an activist investor's opposition research team going line by line through a proxy fight looking for anything they could use as leverage, and finding a diploma discrepancy instead of, like, a financial irregularity. Loeb wasn't trying to expose academic fraud as a public service. He wants board seats and he wants Yahoo to either fix itself or get sold off in pieces, and this was a convenient stick. Doesn't make the underlying fact less true, but it's worth remembering these things rarely surface out of pure civic concern for the integrity of executive bios.
Anyway. I don't have a tidy takeaway here other than: if you're building a bio for LinkedIn or wherever, maybe don't claim a major your school didn't offer yet. Somebody with a grudge and a law firm might notice eventually, and apparently it can take a decade.