I'm personally pretty indifferent to him, but I know Kundra is well respected here in DC. He did visibly good work with the DC government websites.

Check out the list of available data feeds: http://data.octo.dc.gov/ Most cities and states still keep this sort of public data in a filing cabinet in the basement.

I find it surprising that so many Hacker News readers are focusing on his (lack) of academic degrees rather than his real-world experience.

"I find it surprising that so many Hacker News readers are focusing on his (lack) of academic degrees rather than his real-world experience."

I think the question is more one of "Did he lie about his degrees?" (having a degree in psych vs having one in CS for example). The issue is with the lying/fudging (if the accusations are true, yet to be established) not having the degree or not. If Dvorak is making factual errors that is easy enough to disprove.

That said, for public posts (vs, say a startup), it may be difficult to justify (politically, and this is a political appointment) why someone occupies a CIO post without a degree in CS.

due disclosure: I say this as a non US citizen. I don't really care one way or another, but if true, this might be another incident where the manstream media didn't do its job and got trumped by a blogger even someone as, errr, quirky, as Dvorak. If not true Dvorak will take his lumps. I suspect that all it would take is a couple of phone calls by a real journalist to clear this up.

"I find it surprising that so many Hacker News readers are focusing on his (lack) of academic degrees"

The focus of the linked article is not his (lack) of academic degrees, but rather a pattern of lying about his degrees and achievements, later redacted. The article also tries to track his real-world experience, which appears similarly underwhelming based on the data dug up by the author.

You're right. I guess it just seems funny to me that a bunch of hackers and entrepreneurs are so focused on somebody's CV instead of whether or not they can do the job.

And as I mentioned below, it's amusing that John C. Dvorak is the one criticizing someone else's grasp of serious Computer Science concepts versus pop Web fads.

I'm sorry, but that web site looks absolutely horrible. Can the nation's CTO not be held to the same standards to which we hold "Review my startup" posters on HN every day? Certainly his budget is many orders of magnitude larger.

Of all the incredibly smart and successful technologists in the US, I find it very hard to understand why this guy was chosen.

What real-world experience? Wasn't that part of the point?

That website is about as ugly as a manatee in fishnet stockings...

If the worst thing you can say about a government site is that it looks ugly, that's one hell of a win.

I challenge you to find a site for a city, state, or municipal site with more accessible data or more interactive functionality.

I can find 100,000 in the private sector.

Why the double-standard?

I work for a defense contractor, so I have some experience here. There are at least two obstacles to making good looking software/sites paid for by the government:

1. Nobody wants to pay for "Looks pretty." You have a list of requirements to satisfy. Each feature costs a certain amount of money. If it comes down to a feature or a pretty UI, it's going to be pretty hard to justify to someone that you spend money making it look good when it otherwise works perfectly well.

2. "Looks pretty" is a testable requirement. Sure, you can have focus groups say what they like (but that costs money, see #1), and you can have requirements like "no functionality shall be more than 2 mouse clicks away from the main screen"--but then you get a screen with 300 buttons on it. There are heuristics you can use to do good design, sure--but there's very few ways to create general, testable requirements that reflect good design.

3. Sometimes there's the problem that the entity paying for the software is not the entity using the software. To clarify: this situation is usually the case, it's just that sometimes the people with the money care about the users, and sometimes they don't or have their own agenda.

underwhelming? By whose standards...yours? Sounds to me like professional envy. Why can't you accept the fact that it takes ALL kinds to make a world? In Vivek Kundra's case, he demonstrated that a UMUC graduate is very capable of rising to the top of his professional game. How 'bout you?

As for lying...? The only phonies in this story are people that gloss over Vivek Kundra's exceptional real-world work experience. Excuse me...but Kundra WAS the CIO in the DC Government and Virgina. Therefore, he has way more experience than anyone here attempting to "judge" his qualifications. You couldn't even come close to having that type of experience...degree or no degree.

Again...you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself.