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Comment by Newgy | Hacker News Reader

The man is most likely an incompetent bureaucrat, rewarded by a unionized education system that values seniority and paper degrees.

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It says in the second paragraph he's an elected official.

Is that better or worse?

I believe that sentence was in reference to his school board elections. Later in the article he says "I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities."

Which is quite meaningless. Organizations of that size will have at least a few data analysts, data mining specialists either in-house or on contract, and tons of tools created to help C-level management understand the complex data the organization generates. My cursory understanding of this man's profession is to make friends, maintain relationships, and occasionally "understand" the pretty charts that the data analysts produce for him. It's no wonder he doesn't need much in the way of intellectual horsepower to execute his responsibilities.

Obviously they should fire him and hire you.

Life lesson: If it sounds too easy for the money he's making, it's probably not.

Would a guy like that even know how many zeros come after the 3 in $3 billion?

Depends how its written. In your example, the answer would be there are no zeros after the 3. ;-)

Also depends which version of "billion" you're using, it could be either: 1,000,000,000 (short version) or 1,000,000,000,000 (long version).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

edit: add link & proper version titles.

In dollars, its almost universally assumed billion is "short billion". (Although, occasionally you still hear people saying it)

It would be a fabulous retort if you were this fellow and you actually did happen to know. "Short or long" would be almost as good a come-back as "African or European" when asked about unladen swallows.

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