RE:RE:Pumping the Muppetsmississauga1: I agree.
Yes, I am glad you brought up Kevin Gordon, the VP of Tech at NXO. As part of my due diligence, I read his profile on LinkedIn and I too was shocked that he is a VP. He has only a B.Sc. in Computer Science, no experience, or credibility. He is another major red flag for me.
Other companies have research departments with armies of researchers with Ph.D., experience, and credibility (publications and achievements). NXO’s research consists of a couple of young guys straight out of university with just a bachelor degree and no experience. Also, VP is supposed to be an executive position. This guy has absolutely no business training and zero experience in managing people or projects. Most of his experience is being a technician or other low-level jobs.
Kevin Gordon put “Computer Vision Researcher” at University of Alberta under experience. Note that the start date of this is BEFORE he received his B.Sc. degree. In other words, he only had a high school diploma when he started. Anyone who ever went to university will know that you can’t be a “researcher” at a university without graduate studies, let alone not even having a basic Bachelor’s degree. This “job” was obviously an assistant to a professor or something like that. This is a common arrangement at universities. Professors, who actually do research, often hire students to do the grunt work for them, such as design web pages, create demos, or basic number crunching and other low-level work. This is common, and a good arrangement for both professor and student, but not a serious researcher position. If anyone disagrees, I challenge them to find any publications from this work with Kevin Gordon as even a co-author. Publications are the main product of University research, so if he did any actual research his name should be listed as at least as co-author. Also, note that this job continued for a year after he completed his B.Sc. Again, often professors help some students who can’t find a job after graduation to do some work around the lab until they find something better.
Now to be fair, Kevin seems like a bright guy…and probably is a nice guy too…so I don’t want to criticize him personally. I expect he will do well in his long-term career, but only at NXO can someone without experience walk into a Vice President job.