In the Thai market, I find it truly challenging to find the right place for me. As a systems-thinker, I evaluate every order and reject the ones that don’t make sense. I focus on doing what is right for long-term maintainability.

However, what I’ve found in Low Maturity Software Culture is that most stakeholders don’t want systems-thinkers. Even though we actively prevent “the shit hitting the fan” so they never have to feel the pain, egos and corporate culture often get in the way. They ignore us, prioritizing optics and relationships over working systems.

Once the system is shipped and the KPI checkbox is green, the Business moves on. The app is in production. But when the cracks inevitably show, the failure is blamed on the implementers, not the flawed logic that forced it.

They want order takers. not me, never will be able to fit in to that role. And when shit happens according to their order being followed to the letter (otherwise they would label you as difficult) they blame you.

Weird of all things, most if not all world top software such as Google, Facebook, Apple and I’d argue many products that are able to hit mass adoption are this scalable because they listen to the doers. recently, i’ve been into a HBO MAX Series named “Sillicon Valley”, I feel like technological advancement, usable and working longterm products can not and will not magically appear because a group of dev listen and execute based on business stakeholder word by words, character by characters.

The main character in Silicon Valley had two offers to choose from. He built a world-class, efficient compression and search algorithm. He was offered $10M USD to instantly buy his algorithm, but he chose to accept$200,000 and support for the business to grow his own app instead. That’s what I’m talking about.

As far as thai tech market is heading, I only see disappointment, demo driven development. what these people do is replaced their own software once in a while with an external vendor (who doesn’t even own the platform if they aren’t buying MA support).

It is architecturally difficult to make a great software product in Thailand.

3-5 years ago, we were talking “hey, kids should go to computer science”. But when the kids went to computer science and came out. You don’t listen to them but instead listen to MBA people.

One of the tolls of working in this sort of environment and culture is that your engineering skills will vanish within years. You won’t know what is logically or architecturally right anymore because you’re forced to do what “someone important” wants to happen.

Maybe it’s just the culture of tech as supporting, not business value center but as a cost center.
Maybe one day it would be better.