David Liu, TIS Guangzhou office QA Director, was born on September 15, 1970, in Harbin, a well-known city in north China. He joined TIS in June 2008 and already feels part of the team.
In China he is considered to be one of the “70s”, the first generation after the big pains of China, which included the Three Bitter Years, 1959 to 1961, through which 15 million died from starvation; and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976. David grew up under the new China policy - reforming and opening-up to the world, which according to him has played a great part in who he is today.
After graduating from Harbin University in 1992, David joined Sinjones Group, a major Chinese POS (point of sales) systems producer. He initially joined the sales team but since he wanted his customers to be happy and had the technical skills, he fixed some bugs and created long-awaited features for them. His work was warmly adopted by the company and he was asked to join the R&D team, where he worked for the following three years, as the Software Manager. During those years, the software he was in charge of was installed in 60% of China’s universities and was used by over 1 million users on a daily basis.
Following, David received his Master in Computer Science from Harbin University of Science and Technology, and joined Daemon Information Technology, a Japan-based software house. He was involved in projects that involved an innovative web based technology while developing Handtalk World, a website for online board games. His website was ranked as top 3 by Software World Magazine, and he was interviewed and mentioned on the front page of Harbin Daily, the most popular newspaper in the city.
In 2001, David and his family were relocated to Shenzhen where he became the CTO of a small company that was selling toys and gifts over the web. However, the high-tech bubble soon exploded, and the company was sold.
David spent the following 4 years at Achievo, one of the largest software outsourcing companies in china. He started as a Project Manager, and was promoted to a Senior QA Manager and then Engineering Director. David looks back at this period fondly, seeing it as a wonderful journey through which he developed his managerial skills and improved upon his English. He worked with engineers and clients from all over the world, and consultants from HP, IBM and other major industrial players.
Before joining TIS, David worked for Excel Technology, a leading financial software company in Hong Kong, and for Claiborne, an apparel supply-chain company based out of New Jersey, US. His responsibility was to help these companies establish and manage a China-based software center.
It was a natural step for David to join an international company like TIS and become part of a developing Chinese operation, having the opportunity to influence its growth and success. The first thing David did when he joined TIS was visit the headquarters in Tel Aviv for two weeks, to meet the R&D and Support teams. He took all the knowledge he gained back to China and started developing a Chinese based QA team in Guangzhou. Besides eFLOW, TIS core solution, David is also in charge of QA for some Asia projects, with clients in Hong Kong and mainland China.
“To my surprise, TIS is not like other typical international companies I have worked for, companies that usually have big management hierarchies. People at TIS are very easy to work with. If you ask a question online, you will soon receive a detailed explanations from other employees all over the world, some you know and some you have never met.“ David said after working for TIS for only a few months.
David is married to Xiuwen Gu and has an 11 years old daughter, Jenny, who he calls “my angel”. The family lives in Guangzhou. His wife is an accountant (“and always knows how much money there is in my wallet…”) and daughter is a young writer and has already published several articles in books. “Jenny always knows when and which piano music to play to get me out of bad mood...“.
In his spare time, David enjoys swimming and playing Go, a board game popular in Asia, with friends. He also spends a lot of time on open-source development with Ruby on Rails and reading books. David concludes: “My wife said I should marry my desk, and I am trying to prove she is not always right.”
