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US CTO Choice Down To a Two-Horse Race
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Jan 19, 2009 01:05 PM
from the i-swear-i'm-qualified dept.
from the i-swear-i'm-qualified dept.
theodp writes "Barack Obama apparently didn't return CmdrTaco's call. BusinessWeek reports that the choices for the first US CTO have narrowed, and it's now a two-horse race between Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's CTO, and Vivek Kundra, who holds the same title for the Government of the District of Columbia. Two very different resumes — which would you advise Obama to pick?" I just know I was #3 on the list.
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Politics: Bill Joy For New National CTO Post? 393 comments
jddeluxe writes "In an article in today's NY Times, John Doerr of Kleiner-Perkins proffered up Bill Joy's name when queried by Barack Obama for a recommendation for the position of Chief Technology Officer of the Unites States which Obama has promised to create and that the country is overdue to have.
I think that's a brilliant idea, and while you're at it, have the FCC report to him as well, why don't you?" If Bill is unavailable, I'll throw my hat in the ring, although I'm holding out for Secretary of Tubes.
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Cisco vs. Wash DC? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, Cisco sucks. And the government of D.C. sucks. So if I had to choose, I'd go by whoever was wearing the longest tie last time I met them.
Re:Cisco vs. Wash DC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, the government sucks, so by no means should you consider working for the government, even if the point of the particular job they're offering you is to make the government less sucky. I guess the suckiness of government is somebody else's problem.
You know, your attitude sucks.
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Re:Cisco vs. Wash DC? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, Cisco sucks. And the government of D.C. sucks.
Right, the government sucks, so by no means should you consider working for the government
I won't defend the guy's attitude, but if you RTFS (S = summary), one of the candidates worked for the Government of DC. So he wasn't saying "All governments suck so I wouldn't work for one," he was saying "the DC government sucks so I wouldn't promote one of their C?Os."
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Re:Cisco vs. Wash DC? (Score:5, Funny)
The problem is that replacing one person, even at the top, never seems to mitigate the suckiness.
The suck is spread wide and deeply entrenched, which is not nearly as fun as it sounds.
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Re:Cisco vs. Wash DC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up. Never understood this particular American obsession with tearing down the government and then proudly claiming it sucks. Sounds insane to me.
Blame Ronnie Raygun. He popularized the idea that "government is the problem" [reaganlibrary.com], while blowing enormous quantities of money on militarization, possibly in hopes of bankrupting the federal government [thenation.com]. Never trust someone to run something when they believe it's a stupid idea to begin with, they'll usually just mess it up [nytimes.com].
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Re:Cisco vs. Wash DC? (Score:5, Informative)
an interesting aside to this aside...I googled that phrase to see when it first started to be used. There seems to be some sentiment that it used to mean 'work of the highest quality' but got changed to mean shoddy work somewhere along the way. Either way, it's had the negative connotation since at least the '60's.
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Option 6 (Score:5, Funny)
How about... (Score:5, Funny)
The Iraqi Information Minister? He'd at least be entertaining..
Re:How about... (Score:5, Funny)
There's no Iraqi information minister here. There are no Iraqi information ministers within a hundred miles of this post.
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Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Either way, the position is going to be mostly a figurehead. Unless Obama delegates some serious executive power over the federal bureaucracy, this will just be a cushy job for the next several years.
The CTO needs to be able to override agency decisions, put mandates on them and punish them for non-compliance. I seriously doubt that Obama is going to go that far. One of the first ones should be to stop the Oracle lovefest, and make it federal policy to stop using Oracle on most federal systems that have less than a few hundred users.
is this the best they can do? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:is this the best they can do? (Score:5, Informative)
I'll second that. I also worked for Moto during that time also and the only impressive thing that came out of the office of the CTO was the lack of innovation coming out of the office.
The CTO of the country doesn't need to be someone with an impressive resume who's never actually done anything or created anything substantial, it needs to be someone who has actual experience innovating and growing innovation.
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Humm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Two Indian born CTOs are the two top runners. Is this a statment about.
1. Diversity?
2. The lack of US citizens going into the tech sector.
3. Stereotyping?
Me I would vote for Vivek Kundra. I think he would see things from a customers point of view vs a vendors point of view.
True. Neither went from India straight into IT. (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's just a sign that the latent racism which assumes that just because someone was born in India they can't be a US citizen is coming to an end.
Heh. True.
Padmasree Warrior grew up in India and went to IIT, but she majored in Chemical Engineering and later got a masters in the same subject at Cornell. She started at one of Motorola's fabs and went on to management later. As far as I can tell, she's never been part of the software and systems side of the IT industry outside of management, instead working her way up through the fab side. (Much like I wouldn't consider John Sculley of Apple fame to have been an "IT guy" having an architecture major who went into marketing and management at PepsiCo before becoming an infamous Apple CEO.)
Vivek Kundra, while ethnically Indian, grew up in Tanzania not India, speaking Swahili. He came to the US at age 11, and I'd bet a dollar that he was a US citizen by the time he went to college. He has a BS in psychology and a MS in information technology from the University of Maryland. He also has private sector experience.
So, to sum up: One Indian-American never went into IT so much as into plant design and later management, and the other was not only probably a US citizen at the time, but was more African than Indian in cultural upbringing.
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Vivek (Score:5, Informative)
Is a big advocate of Google -- he transitioned the entire city government to Google Apps.
Kobayashi Maru (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you want to die by way of eaten by sharks, or would you rather have wolves?
I honestly don't think either candidate is qualified for the position. We already know that Cisco is willfully ignorant, even hostile, towards FOSS and I imagine quite a lot of that mindset is endorsed by the CTO's office.
Is it too late to clean the slate and start over?
Warrior == Poor (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Was a poor leader
2. Did not consider opinions other than her own on making decisions.
3. Was really not very knowledgeable
4. Was only out for her own advancement
Perhaps these are the attributes of many successful executives, but don't strike me as qualities you want in a civil servant.
Did you ever have contact with a person of real power/wealth/influence and come away thinking "How did they EVER get to where they are?" The older I get, the more I think success requires some work + many connections + a lot of luck.
It looks like the last might strike Ms. Warrior here again pretty soon.
Re:Answer is obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
the dude from cisco is a woman.
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Re:Answer is obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, that's totally bogus. Chicks can't be warriors.
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Re:Answer is obvious? (Score:5, Funny)
Dwight, is that you? Get off Slashdot and sell some paper.
- Jim
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Ungrateful twat (Score:5, Insightful)
You leeches, you scrimp on your taxes, never thank the government, and then have the gall to tar all public servents - people who spend their best years serving YOU - with the same, tired accusations. Tell me, how to you square the 'public service = cushy' claim with the 'US = most powerful country' circle? Do you think the infrastructure, social safety net, military, judiciary, etc., all just run on automatic?
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Re:Answer is obvious? (Score:5, Informative)
Padmasree Warrior is a woman.
Still, I don't trust most people from Cisco any further than I can throw a 6509. A few exceptions aside, their best people seem to leave to form other, more interesting (and ethical) companies. I know that sales people in general are not to be trusted, but Cisco reps seem to have carved their own special niche on that point.
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Re:Answer is obvious? (Score:5, Interesting)
The "dude from Cisco" is a woman. But she's not really "from" Cisco, she came there in the past year from Motorola. And my impression is that she didn't do that great a job at Motorola, and I haven't really heard anything worthwhile out of her while she's been at Cisco. So, I'd go with the other dude.
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Re:Answer is obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Cisco Guvmint (Score:5, Informative)
On the basis that Cisco functions and makes money, while DC is a disaster, Cisco_guy++.
Have you ever worked with Cisco? I have and it was a nightmare. They are a horribly inefficient bureaucracy that makes money by leveraging their existing client base and giving purchasers all the hookers and blow they need to get them to sign. They owned 10% of a company I worked for, then decided to buy one of our failed competitors and try to compete against us. Said competitor failed for a reason, so when that flopped they tried to strong arm us into canceling our product in that market. When that failed they spent millions more to buy two more firms we had driven out of business because their products were so much worse than ours.
Their main problem is that they can make okay hardware, but they suck at software and they really, really, really suck at user interfaces and integration of products. Their corporate ethics are in the toilet with their standing layoffs policy and they're more than happy to push crappy solutions on all their "partners" and big customers while forgetting to mention that they won't touch the same solution with a ten foot pole for use on their own network.
So yeah they're terrible, which is still probably not as bad as Washington DC.
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