My work expreience in Thailand

I had worked in this company after I graduated in April 2002 as a content producer and programmer. As a content producer, my primary duty was to produce and manage contents for mobile phones download service and as a programmer later, my duty switched to updating and maintaining the service website. I am going to briefly present the problems that I observed as a content provider and programmer in this company respectively.
As a content producer, specifically, my job was to create a mobile phone greeting, which is called star-tone. To create a greeting, I need to write a script and sent out for editing, which usually takes several rounds of revision. The major difficulty in creating a greeting was not from creating the script but came from the subsequent steps. After I had completed the editing process of the script, I need to choose the talent to record the greeting, who would be the popular singers at around that time. One problem in this stage of production came from matching the talent’s schedule with the recording studio. GMMD was still a just-found company at that time and most of the equipments for recording were not yet available, we need to use other recording studios for recording. Since these talents usually have a very tight schedule everyday and they always late for the scheduled recording time due to other works, it requires several rounds of rescheduling between the talents and the studio and made a huge delay with respect to the original projected production schedule. The other problem that I faced in this position was cost-controlling. As the talent and the studio are paid hourly, if there is any problem during the recording process and need to record again, the production cost would go up easily and exceed the budget. I remember that one day in the first month that I worked there, a talent suddenly called to me and told me that he needed to go out of town for other jobs suddenly and can only do the recording in the afternoon on that day. Because of the sudden change of his schedule, we could not even find a studio and so we decided to do the recording in our meeting rooms with a DVD recorder, which is very difficult to control for the sound quality. As a result, it took a much longer time (than what we projected) with a more than double payment to the talent to record a barely-acceptable greeting for final production.

I switched to work as a programmer after the first six months of working as a content producer. Working as a programmer, I need to work in team with different departments in the company, such as the product development and testing department, quality control department, marketing department and etc, in project-based manner. Typically, the management of the company would initiate different projects and assign a project manager to oversee those projects. As a programmer, I would be one of the team members who work under the supervision of the project manager. Generally, the manager would hold several meetings to brief the team about the detail of the project that he got from the business director. Let me present some problems that I observed based on a project that I used to work on. Since different mobile phone producers would have different requirements on the format of the ring-tone file and the music-playing capability of mobile phones is keep expanding and getting more and more complicated, in order to extent the coverage of the company’s mobile phone ring-tone download service, I was assigned to a project to convert the ring-tone into different formats with different features. Through out the project, we need to meet with the market department constant to get up-to-date information about the market demand, such as, which songs should we convert and whether our competitors already posted the product on the market, the number of user of different kinds of mobile phones. Based on the information we get from the marketing department, we need to design the number of format of the ring-tone that we would convert. Since some of the mobile phones are technically difficult to convert the music into the workable format for them and if they do not have an enough amount of user to support the demand, we would usually give up the market for these mobile phones. One the other hand, our project need to keep up with the expanding music-playing capability of mobile phone to ensure the market leadership. In particular, we need to constantly participate in the new-product announcement meetings hold by mobile device manufacturers to obtain the latest technical specification of the new model. For example, before the first mobile phone that can use polyphonic ring-tone came into market, we need to implant some of our most popular monophonic ring-tone to polyphonic ring-tone. We usually have a short-period time to finish the prototype of our product. The product testing department would carry out different tests on these prototypes and then communicate with us to fix the problems they faced during the testing stage. Once the prototypes passed the testing stage, we need to communicate with the marketing department again for scheduling the launching date for the new product and also make a forecast on the demand of the new product to ensure that we have build enough server capacity to cover the demand and prevent the system from collapsing due to overloading.
On average, our server faces one hundred thousands of download per minutes. Thus, my duty also includes providing immediate technical support the system. Based on this particular project, I think as a developer of new product, we are competing with time directly.