Five Thais Are Making Their Presence Felt At Facebook And Twitter

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RUBBING SHOULDERS WITH THE BEST

Five Thais are making their presence felt at Facebook and Twitter

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation

BANGKOK: -- Facebook and Twitter have emerged as the most popular social network in Thailand with Facebook becoming the first online destination for many Thais while Twitter is becoming the fastest news channel.

Thais have adopted them as communication channels, news channels, marketing channels, while Thai software engineers and scientists are playing a crucial part in making the social network services available and run smoothly for users.

As of now, there are three Thai software engineers working for Facebook. Two Thai software engineers and a software scientist will start working at Twitter in October this year. Though their career paths might be different they have one thing in common - all five are graduates from the Faculty of Computer Engineering, Chulalongkorn University.

Kittipat Virochsiri, 26, is the first Thai to join Facebook. He has been working as a software engineer since October last year. Currently, he works at Facebook's headquarters in California. His life at Facebook began early last year when he joined the Facebook Hacker Cup, an annual worldwide programming competition started in 2011, where hackers compete against each other for fame, fortune, glory and a shot at the coveted Hacker Cup.

In the Hacker Cup, programmers from around the world are judged on accuracy and speed as they race to solve algorithmic problems to advance through up to five rounds of programming challenges.

At that time, he was doing his masters in informatics at the University of Edinburgh. When he reached round one of the Facebook Hacker Cup, he was asked if he was interested in joining Facebook. He said yes and sent his resume to Facebook. After successfully going through the recruitment process that involved 5 to 6 phone interviews, test and examination, about a week after the last interview he was offered the job at Facebook. He immediately grabbed the opportunity.

"When I was offered by Facebook to work as software engineer, I was keen to work there. Facebook is still a small company when compared to Google and Microsoft, and that means it has a lot of room to grow and a lot of things to do and importantly I use it every day," said Kittipat.

He is a part of Facebook's search team. His duty is to make search features at Facebook friendly and available as well as get the best result for users.

"My job is to facilitate Facebook users to get everything they are searching for throughout Facebook.com," said Kittipat.

He is happy at Facebook , his first employers. Even though he was a newcomer, he has the freedom to create and try new things.

"Our passion at Facebook is to be a part of and to learn about the world's most popular social network. Here, the challenge is how the company prioritises the stuff and there are a lot of tasks to be accomplished. The job priority management at Facebook is the thing I want to learn about. Our job is in between Facebook's front-end and back-end system," said Kittipat.

Siriwong Wongthongserm, 29, is also a software engineer at Facebook. Before joining Facebook, he was senior software development lead at Microsoft. He started his career as senior software developer at Settrade.com and served there for two years before moving to join Microsoft in Redmond where he worked for six years. Early this year, he joined Facebook as software engineer at California. His duty at Facebook is to support the Facebook News Feed.

"My job is to provide programming software to help people enjoy Facebook with the News Feed feature. I am focusing on News Feed's retrieve and share functions," said Siriwong.

He added that at Facebook, every engineer can push features that they want to have. They can do the prototype and then let colleagues test it out. Every two months at Facebook, it has Hackathons where software engineers can bring their own prototype to share with colleagues. Many official Facebook products and features result from Hackathons.

Hackathons are a big tradition at Facebook. They serve as the foundation for some great (and not so great) ideas. It gives Facebook employees the opportunity to try out new ideas and collaborate with other people in a fun environment.

"Facebook is one of the most interesting companies, a destination for software engineers. It is a flat organisation that offers opportunity to all employees to have an equal chance to make a big impact for the company," said Siriwong.

He said at Facebook, he can try new features and get it into the internal and closed group of users instantly as Facebook has a good system to release news features and products every day. If the new features are ready they can be released immediately.

"Here, there is not a job we do not want to do," said Siriwong.

Every software engineer has equal chance to create, to get their development tested, and finally to get it released. The lifecycle of product development is pretty short when compared to other companies that have code deployment on a monthly basis. At Facebook, it deploys code every day. It practises this and gets its system to be automatic. Once the system detects the code's bug, it will immediately issue an alert.

"My own passion for working at Facebook is to be a part of the large computing system that can be scalable to serve many million users around the world. It is very challenging. I choose to respond to News Feed because it is the main feature that every Facebook user has to use. It now serves almost a billion users. It is a very challenging job," said Siriwong.

Thawan Kooburat, 28, also works as a software engineer at Facebook. He experienced Facebook as an intern student, when he was studying for his masters in computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the time, Facebook came to the university for its campus recruitment. He applied to be an intern and was chosen. He served as an intern at Facebook for three months. His responsibility was programming software to support Facebook's infrastructure.

"The internship life at Facebook made me change my mind about pursuing my PhD. I was so happy working here. My boss at the time was so nice and gave me the chance to learn many things. I had been in the team to develop two projects for Facebook. On my last day as an intern, I got an offer to be a full-time software engineer. I was so glad but I gave myself a couple of weeks before saying yes. Since my previous plan was to study PhD, I had already applied to be a PhD candidate and had been assigned an adviser, said Thawan.

Eventually, he chose to follow his dream to join one of the world's fastest-growing companies, Facebook. He said that he changed his plan from doing his PhD to work at Facebook because he was very happy and enjoyed his stint there as an intern for three months. His job at Facebook also gives him a chance to be engaged in his area of interest, which is cloud computing and infrastructure of large scale Web services.

"My own passion as software engineer is to support the large system to be scalable to serve massive users. Facebook is the right place for my dream. The goal of the company is to be the communication platform for people around the world and it is also my goal to be a part of it," said Thawan.

Facebook is his second company. Before doing his masters at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he had worked for Accenture in Thailand for a year.

In addition to these three Thais, there are a couple of Thai-Americans, who are also working at Facebook.

Meanwhile, the world's most famous micro-blog 'Twitter' has welcomed a Thai software engineer and scientist to join its team.

Krist Wongsuphasawat will officially join Twitter as data visualisation scientist in October this year. He did his PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland. He applied for a job involving data visualisation at Twitter because he finds it an interesting company that matches his interest and love.

"I was informed that Twitter is developing a team for data visualisation. I applied for the job and got picked," said Krist.

He added that he is interested in human-computer interaction (HCI), especially in information visualisation, visual analytics and graphical user interfaces.

After going through six interviews, he was offered a job.

Krist said Twitter has huge unstructured data that is very challenging for visualising. It is his passion to turn the huge amount of data into easy-to-understand information using the visualisation format.

"I have the passion to visualise the terabyte data of Twitter into easy-to-capture and understand info. It is a very challenging job and I love it," said Krist.

He added that social network has now become a part of people's daily life.

Before joining Twitter, last year he had been a research intern at IBM TJ Watson Research Centre in New York, and was a research intern at Microsoft Research in Redmond in the year before that.

He is a computer engineering graduate from Chulalongkorn University and then worked as systems analyst at IT One, the joint-venture IT service between SCG and Accenture. He was also a software developer intern at the Stock Exchange of Thailand when he was an undergraduate student at Chulalongkorn University. After that, he went to study his masters in computer science at the University of Maryland.

He has a long list of honours in his growth as a software developer - University of Maryland Graduate Fellowship for outstanding academic record; winner of RoboCup Thailand Championship 2006; second runner-up in World RoboCup 2006 hosted in Germany, Thailand representative at the World RoboCup 2005 in Japan; winner of "Information" Awards from DTAC and Nokia iAwards 2004 in the national mobile applications contest.

Tanin Na Nakorn, 28, is also a software engineer. He will start his career at Twitter in its international team based in San Francisco in October this year. Tanin had been chief technology officer at Whowish, his own company. He is the first Thai to be offered a job with Twitter as a software engineer. (He was offered the job at Twitter before Krist.)

Tanin said he had a passion to work for Twitter and decided to apply after his own tech start-up collapsed last year. He admitted that although he is skilled in programming, he has no experience in running a business and decided Twitter was the answer.

He started to apply for working at Twitter since late last year when he totally failed with his own business. He realised that he needed a lot of management skills to run a company. Hence he decided to apply for a job at Twitter without any recommendation, directly to Twitter.com.

He searched and applied for jobs at 17 tech companies in California's Silicon Valley.

"I was interviewed by 11 of these companies on phone and I demonstrated my programming skills over their websites. Each company interviewed me four times, 45 minutes for each interview. During this time, I had to answer three questions on my programming skills. [Eventually] I got the chance for face-to-face interviews from three companies - Facebook, Expensify and Twitter," said Tanin.

After the interviews, he received job offers from Expensify and Twitter, and decided to take up Twitter.

He said his challenge at Twitter would be to create and develop new features for Twitter users, especially for those in Thailand and in Asia.

"As a member of an international team, I will be responsible for the overseas market of Twitter, that means Asia and Thailand," said Tanin.

These are five young-generation Thais, who are using their skills for the world's fastest-growing and attractive companies and being a part of technology history. They have proved that Thai developers have the ability to join global companies like Facebook and Twitter like other foreign developers. They said Thai developers have to be skillful in programming and the English language, and importantly have the passion to drive themselves to reach their dreams.

-- The Nation 2012-07-10