Why I’d recommend working with Vietnamese developers

Many people have asked me, “How good are Vietnamese developers?”

Before I answer this, here’s a bit of background on what I do: I run a tech hiring and offshoring firm in Vietnam and Indonesia, with clients all over Asia. In addition, I’m the product lead and project manager for our internal innovation lab, which means I manage close to 16 developers of various nationalities, skill sets, and genders on a daily basis.

Judging from my own experience and without any intention on discriminating other nationalities, I would argue that Vietnamese developers are one of the best in Southeast Asia, if not the best.

I say this is because they’re often:

• Technically sound
• Humble and work hard for the organization
• Go all the way to solve a particular issue/bug

Technically sound

Most Vietnamese developers I’ve encountered are good in coding and programming. Even those we hired for our clients have nothing but positive reviews from their superiors. I believe this is because of the strong math and science foundations that these engineers have built from a young age.

According to a study carried out by the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA), Vietnam ranks eighth in the world for science and 22nd in the world for mathematics. Not bad, given that they beat more than 75% of the countries in the world.

Though these are the test scores of 15-years-old kids, I would say it’s a good first look at people’s strong logic fundamentals.

From what I’ve observed, Vietnamese developers are strong in the coding languages of PHP, Ruby, React, Vue, Angular, Swift, Android, React Native, etc. This is also partly due to the huge number of outsourcing firms in the country that specialize in general programming languages.

That said, I’ve often noticed that there’s a gap in knowledge when it comes to deep-tech languages such as Python, Tensorflow, Keras, or other data science libraries. For deep-tech languages, I’ve noticed Indonesian developers excel at this.

Humble and hardworking

It’s detrimental to a startup or company if your staff are all glory hunters or are solely working for themselves rather than for the organization. The Vietnamese developers I’ve come to know so far shun fame and glory, preferring to work behind the scenes to ensure the smooth continuity of our tech products.

Given my low sample size, it’s presumptive to conclude on this, but I do have one good example: Uber’s former chief technology officer, Thuan Pham. Not many people know of him outside of Uber and Vietnam. (Heck, I’m not even sure most people in Vietnam know of him except those in the startup and tech communities). However, I am pretty sure most people have heard of Uber founder and ex-CEO Travis Kalanick.

The last thing you want is a CTO that sues you after they leave the company, much like what a former Grab executive did to the ride-hailing firm in 2016.

All out when solving problems