Why does Vietnam produce so many top programmers compared to its neighbors in South East Asia?
Speaking about the 4.0 revolution, many people say that Vietnam has the advantage of high technology human resources in the region. This may come from an educational environment that is geared toward natural subjects such as math and science that many generations of Vietnamese students have experienced over the years. This is the platform from which coders, developers … are able to catch up quickly with new technology trends.
A Google software engineer has revealed how a group of grade 11 students studying in Vietnam could pass parts of the notoriously difficult Google interview process without a problem.
“There is no question that half of the students in that grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process,” Neil Fraser wrote on his blog.
To understand the context surrounding that statement, we need to back up a little bit. In a recent trip to the country, Fraser walked into a number of classrooms, ranging from grade 2 to grade 11, to get a better grasp of the computer science curriculum.
What he discovered, needless to say, was both shocking and impressive.
By grade 3, every child is learning how to use Windows. Fraser suggests, without humour, that the country has a “100 percent Windows XP and Windows 7 monoculture” due to the high cost of software for most families.
That doesn’t stop the students from learning to touch-type, in English, using Microsoft Word though.
By grade 4, they’re coding in Logo, a multi-paradigm computer programming language commonly used in the education system. By grade 5, they’re writing procedures containing loops, which in turn, are calling procedures containing loops.
That is simply staggering, and far outstrips the skill level and curriculum offered in many Western nations, including the US. Fraser was keen to see just how fast these children could develop though, and asked how he could be of greater assistance.
What followed was a custom piece of software, designed by Fraser while he was still on vacation called Blockly Maze, as well as a series of self-teaching tutorials. He also hired a second teacher, so that the entire school could learn computer science.
Fast forward to grade 11, and the class is working on a task where they were “given a data file describing a maze with diagonal walls” and asked to “count the number of enclosed areas, and measure the size of the largest one.”
You can take a look at it below:
Fraser then returned to the US and asked another senior engineer at Google how he would rate the question in comparison to Google’s own, spectacularly hard interview process.
“Without knowing the source of the question, he judged that this would be in the top third,” Fraser said.
Now, this task wasn’t set just for the top five percent of the class. Here’s the kicker — in 45 minutes, “most finished” and just “a few” needed another five minutes to complete it.
And so we come back to Fraser’s initial statement:
“There is no question that half of the students in that grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process.”
All of this is an approximation though. There’s no way of knowing if such a question would ever occur on the Google examination, or if the students could indeed pass the other sections of the exam. This is also a snapshot of just one class, who could have a skill level either below or above the average student in Vietnam.
Regardless, it doesn’t really matter. The revelation, which is a little scary but also inspiring and incredibly impressive, is that the Vietnam education system is producing world-class programmers with very little resources.
Another example is in 2017, PwC wrote about the promising outsourcing industry in Vietnam. “It is not surprising that Vietnam is being referred to as a global scale alternative, in the context of traditional locations such as China and India that have a cost overrun. higher “. Overall, seeing Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City as major software outsourcing areas, PwC has made a lot of praise for Vietnam.
The reports also indicate that the technology giants such as Samsung, Microsoft, LG, Intel are also investing heavily in Vietnam. Along with that, another good point is that the Vietnamese nature is also constantly learning to improve themselves. This country has been transformed over a generation because young people are now working hard and dedicated.
Vietnamese programmers work six days a week while in the West, the working time per week is only five days. In the previous generation of human resources in Vietnam, working 12 hours a day and 6–7 days a week is even normal.
In general, although In general, although Vietnam’s Software Outsourcing Development is still in its infancy, all these signs point to a bright future.
Coming to the destination of outsourcing world, competing China and India
Gradually, the following answers all point to one thing in common: ‘Vietnamese students plow’ a lot in math and science at a young age, which is why Vietnamese dedicated development teams are highly appreciated in the area.
One Singaporean, Say Keng Lee, said that the students in South East Asian countries are very respectful of Vietnamese students in mathematics and science: “I have lived in Vietnam as a foreigner since 2010. As an English teacher, I regularly interact with many Vietnamese high school students, including my two adopted children now attending college.
Speaking of Mathematics and Physics, I dare say that teaching these subjects here is as good as Singapore, if not better. This belief is reinforced by the fact that high school students in Vietnam often achieve very high results in the Mathematical Olympiads and International Physics.
“The education system in Vietnam is focused on mathematics and science.” Vietnam has really gained many positions in the PISA rankings and in some international Olympic competitions, “Khanh Luu wrote. a Vietnamese.
Of course, the fact that on the world map of technology, Vietnam is still at the ‘potential star’ and not the superpower, so the comments are somewhat ‘winged’ of Mr. Pontus B or Google Neil Fraser may be just a glimpse of the two.
In Vietnam, the BPO industry has grown considerably. According to figures from the Vietnam Software and IT Services Association (VINASA), IT outsourcing has grown 20–35% annually over the past decade, with last year’s industry revenue reaching $2.2 billion. Based in Hanoi, Adamo Software — a software company is a growing, forward-thinking software company with a well-deserved position in Vietnam’s IT landscape.
Vietnam is one of the most competitive options in the world for software outsourcing, according to Gartner. Vietnam’s big advantage is that labor costs in Vietnam are only about half that of India, with Vietnam still entering the gold population.
