Re:Is US Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra a Phony?
by plinkplonk on Wednesday August 12, 2009 @01:36PM
(#758654)
"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 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.