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US CTO Choice Down To a Two-Horse Race
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.
SMARTnet contracts in perpetuity for everyone provided by the US Government!
Does not matter who is chosen: the industry guy will tire of the endless petty bureaucrats and quit in 18 months. Then we get the government lacky anyway; and, we get free technology for everyone.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You think Obama is going to bring about change? How's 4 more years of Clinton/Kennedy for you?
Mod parent up. Never understood this particular American obsession with tearing down the government and then proudly claiming it sucks. Sounds insane to me.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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.
Given that Cisco is the company that provided China with most of its network solutions for the so-called "Great Firewall", I should hope that tips the scales slightly in Kundra's favor.
No, they're just hiring a fall guy.
Twinstiq, game news
Leo Laporte!
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.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I can't say anything about the other person, but Ms. Warrior would be a disastrous pick, IMHO. I had some contact with her when she was CTO at Motorola and I came away from that experience thinking she was:
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.
So yeah they're terrible, which is still probably not as bad as Washington DC.
I'd like to point out that the guy from Washington DC also has private sector experience if you're worried about icky public sector cooties getting all over your new public sector employee. He's also very big on open and transparent government. His resume's a bit light to figure out how good he'll be, but he's probably got a huge leg-up on working with people in Washington.
The lady from Cisco, however, managed a doomed subsidiary of Motorola based on an uneconomical GaAs-on-Si technology before eventually presiding as CTO over the continued slow decline of a company that hasn't had an exciting product since the RAZR years ago before moving on to fill a position at Cisco which had been vacant for two years. While she does want to see more funding for fundamental research and development (not surprising given her fabrication background), the association with Motorola and Cisco does not scream the best and brightest of the private sector to me. Given her academic credentials, she's probably very brilliant, but I don't see how that's translated into success for her companies.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Kundra replaced all of D.C. gov's word and exchange infrastructure with google apps.
Wonder if he would push that for the whole federal government?
"Uh-huh. You do realize that one of the first actions of our founding fathers was to buy up state debt to establish national credit, right?"
And what was done with that credit... oh yea they were building up a national defense...
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
Not to quibble, but isn't this really a Chief Information Officer position, rather than a CTO position? I would expect a Chief Technical Officer to know much more than just information technology.
That's just a start.
Then I hope it starts to get better soon, because there's nothing particularly interesting here.
So the AG is from the Clinton admin. So he isn't a gun nut. Cry me a river.
Wake me when they're championing torture, bribing commentators, and making shady business deals in secret.
I hate to break this to you, but neither one of those initiatives is unique to Cisco. Both of those were corporate initiatives at Motorola while she was there, and they weren't even novel then -- most companies had them, the green initiative due to EU regulations and public relations in general, and the breaking down of silos because it was the latest wave in management self-help books. (Motorola, in particular, had a severe silo problem, known as the "warring tribes.")
After watching her career for the last ten years, this is par for the course. She is absolutely not a "forward thinking technologist" -- her career over this time has been a series of steps in which she took her "vision" from her superiors, trashed her own organization, then moved on before the mess became apparent to those above her. Just look at the organizations she's left: Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector (now spun out as Freescale Semiconductor) and Motorola itself (in which Motorola labs, the corporate research arm of the company she once led, is now down to less than 300 individuals, less than ten percent of which are engaged in wireless research). Not to mention the company's centralized software group (over 3000 individuals) which she also led, that was disbanded upon her departure.
Does that sound like the work of a forward thinking technologist?
Yeah, check out Grover Norquist. He (and one of his proteges, Jack Abramoff) were instrumental in the early movement to end liberalism in government by simply bankrupting the taxpayers, as well as promoting the hiring of ideologues for key federal administrative positions rather than screening for qualification.
Check out The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank... it's certainly not unbiased, but it's well-sourced, follows the history of neo-conservatism fairly accurately, and nails down all the major sticking points. In fact, he really only editorializes in his opinion of the overall damage caused by the various political attacks our governmental structure has sustained.
Anyway, it's definitely a worthwhile read for anyone striving to understand this past Bush presidency. It casts the past eight years in a different light than that which is portrayed by the mainstream media.
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
Actually that idea was popularized by the founding fathers who ...
....wanted to instil the idea that Government sucked so bad into the minds of the uninformed masses, so that they'd happily accept corporate rule instead.
The English government at the time was one of the most modern, democratic and capitalist in the world.
The American Founding Fathers were essentially just Englishmen that decided they'd rather be collecting their own taxes than paying someone else. They founded the country on English mercantile ideals.
George III had less say in the running of England during the time of the American declaration of independence than Bush had over the running of the USA in the last 8 years.