Meet Lenovo’s Product Engineer: Ashton Kutcher

Ashton Kutcher made some waves in the tech/geek scene when he was chosen to portray Steve Jobs in the movie Jobs. I don’t know what you think about the movie, and I can’t really give my opinion as I have not seen it myself, but judging by IMDB ratings, I probably should not waste time on it.

Mister Kutcher is not done with the scene, though. He was recently announced as a Lenovo Product Engineer. To be fair to the Hollywood actor, he is not a stranger to technology. He is a self-professed techie and has been involved in investing in the tech scene for some time. Perhaps he does have something going for him.

In an interview conducted by Joanna Stern, Kutcher says that he was “looking for a company that was willing to take risks and wasn’t making ‘me too’ devices.” That is supposedly how he and Lenovo got together.

This is not the first time that a celebrity has taken on such a role. Remember Alicia Keys and BlackBerry? While her role as Global Creative Director is not exactly the same as “Product Engineer”, I suppose it is understandable for people to have reservations at this kind of juxtaposition of Hollywood and technology companies.

When asked about this “issue”, Kutcher seemed to take it quite well, saying:

I am sure there will be people that have that speculation and think that’s what it is. Time will tell, people will see. I can say one of the big differences is that I went to school for engineering — albeit I didn’t graduate, but I learned to program when I was 19 years old. I work on a daily basis with engineers that are building some of the finest software products in the world today. I bet if you asked a lot of these people what a MySQL database is they would probably run the other way and not even know what that is.

“Name-dropping” notwithstanding, this guy actually went to engineering school. Who knows? This career pivot might just work out better for him.

What do you think?

[Image via ABCNews]