Andrew Cocks has both a top level technical capability and an uncanny ability to effectively manage non-Australians.  His ability to lead a team was proven when the Asia Pacific branch of his previous Taiwanese employer grew from 3 initial employees in Taiwan to offices in Japan, Singapore and India with a total of 26 staff, 11 of whom Andrew  personally interviewed and hired. This was the entire engineering team.  Andrew's ability to rapidly learn and develop with changing circumstances meant that he was the natural choice for leading his previous employer’s engineering team at each step along the way.  He eventually became the Professional Services Manager for the Asia Pacific region and managing the engineering teams in all four offices.  He recently did a 12 month contract in Perth, Australia and his exceptional ability to screen candidates was utilised on interview panels despite the fact that he was a short-term contractor.

John Stewien has an amazing technical capability. He has been writing software since he was in primary school. He understands all the things that can go wrong and he understands how to put things right. When interviewing people he can pick instantly where they sit on the scale of “learnt some programming” to “Master Coder”. He has deep experience in driving projects from inception to delivery, and understands the importance of meeting customer expectations and deadlines. He has spent 4.5 years as a contractor delivering completed projects for the Australian defence industry, including 12 months as a Software Team Leader on a team of 4. His prior experience to that includes developing applications for the medical industry and large defence projects at BAE Systems. John now has over 10 years of experience as a professional software engineer user his belt.

John first moved to Taiwan at the beginning of 2007 with an eye towards starting a company there. For his first 3 months in Taiwan he attended as many job interviews as he could. For each company he found out their working conditions, salary offerings, and what kind of work they could offer so he knows what to offer good people. He accepted a position in technical support for a company that dealt with customers from other countries in the Asia Pacific region. In this position he learnt how to effectively run an operation that crosses international borders.

You can view John Stewien's LinkedIn profile here http://www.linkedin.com/pub/6/63b/b17

This page was last modified on Sunday, May 31, 2009 07:09:14 PM