I’m really surprised to hear this, almost to the point of fisking it out, but I trust Greg Linden. Marissa Mayer is the first person with an advanced CS degree hired into a Fortune 500 CEO position.
Marissa Mayer as CEO of Yahoo may be a test of a new style of executive leadership, the optimizing CEO.
She is not the first computer scientist to lead a major company, but she is the first computer scientist (MSCS or higher) hired in as CEO to a Fortune 500 company. Many computer scientists view everything as an optimization problem. People, work, politics, life, everything is a search (often of a dynamic space) to find a maximum near the global maximum.
On the other hand, I’m not that surprised in that there are only so many of those spots, they haven’t been open to everyone for much of history, and they typically skew towards MBAs. The qualifier, “hired in”, also makes a big difference. There have been a number of advanced CS degree CEOS that have grown companies into Fortune 500 members. This may be the first one that has to inject (reinject?) a CS culture into such a large corporation.
And I agree with Greg that a systems optimization perspective in a Fortune 500 CEO will be an interesting experiment.
Lastly, never really thought of Yahoo! as a Fortune 500 company.