Alex St. John

Alex St. John, along with Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom, created the original Microsoft DirectX technology platform. Alex became the Microsoft Windows Game technology evangelist for DirectX through his early work at Microsoft (1992-1997) to advance Windows as a dominant graphics and media platform.

Formerly the Founder and Chairman of WildTangent software, an online video game developer and publisher, Alex was appointed in December, 2009 as the President and CTO of Hi5, a social networking site with an emphasis on on-line gaming. Alex is also a frequent contributor to Computer Power User magazine.[1][2]

He described himself on USENET as "Microsofts dually [sic] appointed DirectRepresentative for this technology." He is one of the main subjects of the book Renegades of the Empire and is mentioned in Masters of Doom.

In 2014, St. John published a presentation titled "Recruiting, training and retaining Giants" on his website for a group of tech company CEOs. It presented the ideal engineer as an employee who should be accepting towards working long hours and mainly male. In recruiting and retaining those engineers, firms should aim at ensuring that "wives and [girlfriends]"[3] are happy, as the paychecks go to them and they decide if their "husband and [boyfriend]"[3] work for the firm. The technical women are non-male engineers who are hard to find and would be promoted quickly as they have better social and communication skills. It describes different categories of possible employees such as the young "undiscovered Asperger's engineer" or some "Old Goats" as seasoned veterans.[3] The presentation raised the issue of the lack of diversity within the Silicon Valley culture.[4]

References

  1. ↑ "{title}". Archived from the original on 2002-06-25. Retrieved 2007-05-11.
  2. ↑ http://www.rmitz.org/stjohn.html
  3. 1 2 3 St. John, Alex (2014). "Recruiting, Training and Retaining Giants" (PDF). Retrieved April 20, 2016.
  4. ↑ Romano, Aja. "Everything wrong with Silicon Valley's bro culture in one gross presentation". Vox. Retrieved 2016-04-21.



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