Ken Seniwongs was the best hire I made in the early days of Agoda. Ken single-handedly built our IT organization from only 4 in 2002 to over 40 in 2007, essentially acting as our CTO for these five years. Building a top-notch organization in Thailand is no easy task, and he was instrumental in the ultimate success of Agoda and its eventual purchase by Priceline Inc.

Ken has excellent programming and problem-solving skills which were essential in the fast-moving, challenging environment at Agoda. He also has the ability to work with or lead a large team of programmers. Finally, I always found Ken to be a person of the highest integrity and someone whose opinion could be trusted. I would recommend him to any company looking to upgrade the caliber of their IT organization.

"In order to get a good web developer in today’s market you need to look at a lot of candidates" Pat Boyle, Development Manager, Vital Link Business Systems

Kanawit ( Ken ) Seniwongs was hired as a Web Developer after an extensive recruitment process. I personally interviewed twenty-seven candidates before I chose him. I believe our internal recruiter had reviewed at least twice that many resumes.

None of the other candidates I had interviewed up until that time were sufficiently technically qualified. I had a series of questions that I asked each candidate about common development problems. These problems were ones that we were currently facing. Virtually all the candidates I had interviewed had given very superficial solutions. Kanawit had good technical ideas.

After I hired Kanawit I continued interviewing. Only three interviews later I found another qualified candidate who also gave good answers to the standard questions.

I have not hired for that exact position since but I searched for a very similar position. I reviewed over ninety resumes. I held eight interviews. I had to hire the next person or lose the position. I estimate I would have had to interview another half dozen or so candidates before I was likely to find an technically adequate person.

In order to get a good web developer in today’s market you need to look at a lot of candidates. Web Developers need to be application developers who also have specific web technologies. There are at least a half dozen languages or technologies that must be mastered in order to be able to create a business solution. There are many candidates that have serious holes in their technical armamentarium. Most candidates also lack the problem solving capacity to utilize those skills in a manner that will add value to a business.

Pat Boyle
Development Manager
Vital Link Business Systems

Kanawit Seniwongs in San Francisco: Kanawit is a programmer and was nominated by three separate people both on his team and not on his team and is the clear winner this month.

Kanawit has lead the effort to upgrade our archiving product to allow our customers to both Fast Forward and Rewind (this has been a problem that has stymied some very talented people and a feature which competitive products do not have-Kanawit solved it in less than 1 week). He is has also dedicated his creativity to helping with our cash register data streaming product and has been instrumental in helping solve many of our web related problems as well. Kanawit does not sacrifice quality for speed and takes pride in his work product. On top of that, Kanawit is always gracious and humble and is always willing to help on other projects."