IT developers in Thailand & working mentality in general

[KungfuPanda]

Got 3 more questions :

a) Whats the best online resource for posting job-ads and getting staff ( IT developers ) in bangkok ?

anyone care to elaborate on the biggest differences in working-mentality when dealing with thai-staff ? im thinking about if there are any issues (in general ) with loyality, work-effort, reliabilty - difficulties in general in thailand ?

c) anywhere i can get some idea of salary level in certain IT fields ?

I know that is very dependant on who you work with etc., what im thinking is the rules of thumb doing business in thailand.

[FarangFarang]

Got 3 more questions :

a) Whats the best online resource for posting job-ads and getting staff ( IT developers ) in bangkok ?

anyone care to elaborate on the biggest differences in working-mentality when dealing with thai-staff ? im thinking about if there are any issues (in general ) with loyality, work-effort, reliabilty - difficulties in general in thailand ?

c) anywhere i can get some idea of salary level in certain IT fields ?

I know that is very dependant on who you work with etc., what im thinking is the rules of thumb doing business in thailand.

There's a TF member who has commented in the past that when hiring Thais in IT you don't hope for the best candidate. You hope for the least incompetent candidate.

Those are his words, not mine. He's hired tons of IT people.

I think a lot of his complaints come from hiring people straight out of university. Going to a prestigious school and having a high grade point average translate into absolutely nothing when it comes to hiring. Many students have influential parents who make sure they get into the right schools and are given good grades. So you could hire someone who looks like the perfect candidate on paper but can't turn on a computer.

Other complaints I've heard about Thai staff (not just IT, all kinds of staff):

Start time is viewed as a suggestion and any reason is a good reason for not being at work on time (traffic, rain, too hot, too cold, too windy, too Monday, etc).

Tendency not to take any sort of initiative. In other words, people will do what they're told but don't do much more than that.

Tendency to tell you what you want to hear rather than the truth. That IT project is 10,000% guaranteed to be delivered Friday by your IT staff. That is until Friday at 5pm and you find out it's still 3 months away from being ready.

Like I said, these are just general groans I've heard from various business owners and managers in Thailand.

Just out of curiosity, why are you opening an IT company in Thailand? I'm assuming that if you saw a need for IT services in Thailand some of your market research would have uncovered answers to some of the questions you ask here and in this other thread.

If you are thinking of outsourcing to other countries (i.e. Thai workers, European clients) you're probably in the worst part of Asia for that. I would outsource to Vietnam long before I would outsource to Thailand. Vietnam has a better reputation for having good engineering talent. And obviously, China, India, The Philippines, and Malaysia all have pretty decent software and IT engineering capabilities already.

If you're doing it because you need a way of staying in Thailand . . . well, I'm going to guess that IT is the number one former occupation of people living in Thailand. Not exactly a unique idea and the fact that those folks are "former" IT workers should tell you about the prospects of landing work in Thailand.

Thailand has a good reputation for outsourcing manufacturing but the educational system doesn't really spit out enough IT workers of international quality.