(3) Vietnam IT Developers: Comprehensive Analysis

We live in a digital world based on the Internet. The internet allows businesses to expand with a small number of skilled individuals, and in this rapidly changing environment, we experience a world where businesses expand or disappear at an unprecedented speed, and business boundaries have disappeared in a globalized world. The keywords are digital and internet, and at the core of this is software, which is created by developers. Emphasizing the importance of developers cannot be overstated. Vietnam is known to have approximately 430,000 software developers, with an estimated number of over 1 million ICT industry professionals. Among Southeast Asian countries, it has the largest number of software developers, surpassing Singapore (180,000), Malaysia (250,000), and Thailand (150,000). Moreover, looking at the age distribution makes these numbers even more vivid. The higher the proportion of the population aged 25-49, the higher the potential for development. Additionally, if education levels are high, it adds more significance. A country that meets these conditions was South Korea in the late 1980s, and currently, it is Vietnam.

Vietnam has seen around 1.4 to 1.5 million newborns every year for the past 15 years, with around 1.3 million born in 2021. In contrast, South Korea had only 272,000 births. The population structure of Vietnam consists of 29.8% in the 20-24 age group and 26.2% in the 25-29 age group. This means that Generation Z (20-29 years old) makes up 56% of the total population. With a significant young population, 52% of developers have less than 3 years of experience, and 69% have less than 5 years. The gender distribution is predominantly male at 90.5%. Looking at the developer levels, 47% are junior, 28% are intermediate, and 18% are senior developers. The ratio of leaders or higher is around 7%, making it relatively challenging to hire senior or higher-level developers. Geographically, 56.7% of developers reside in Ho Chi Minh City, 33.8% in Hanoi, and 5.7% in Da Nang. This indicates that over 90% of developers are concentrated in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. This can be seen as the reason why many companies choose to establish and start a corporation in Ho Chi Minh City when creating a development center.

In Vietnam, 149 universities and educational institutions produce about 50,000 developers and 12,000 ICT professionals every year. A logical way of thinking is needed to develop software, and since middle and high schools in Vietnam focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), outstanding students with a foundation for programming can jump into software development. In most countries, doctors are highly paid occupations, but in Vietnam, software developers are paid higher salaries than doctors, so outstanding students are entering the workforce as highly paid developers, and developers with excellent skills are producing good results and gaining a good reputation. I think a virtuous cycle has been created, with more work flowing in, increasing jobs and salaries, and attracting more outstanding students. Considering that Vietnam ranked 23rd out of 50 countries in HackerRank's “Which Country has the best programmers” survey conducted in 2016, and Korea ranked 22nd, we can make an objective judgment on the skills of Vietnamese developers.

Vietnam has a high passion for education. Along with Korea, China, and Japan, it is a Confucian cultural sphere, a Chinese character cultural sphere, and a chopsticks cultural sphere. It is a country where people learn everything quickly and like to acquire new things. One of the things that surprises me while living in Vietnam is that there are many people who can communicate in English. During interviews, I often ask to introduce themselves in English, and most developers are surprised to see them introduce themselves in English without hesitation. Although his pronunciation is not excellent, he has no hesitation in using English as a means of communication to say what he wants to say. In fact, there are many developers in their 20s to early to mid-30s who can communicate in English and have no aversion to learning and adopting new technologies. If you teach them something new, they quickly learn, come up with improved methods, and accurately carry out the tasks instructed. It goes without saying, but if you give unclear instructions thinking that they will do it on their own, they tend to understand it based on their own standards and handle it as they wish, so you need to check it several times before proceeding and keep checking until mutual trust is built.

You can gauge the capabilities of Vietnamese developers through the global coding challenge conducted by Hacker Rank. Hacker Rank is a platform used to evaluate developer capabilities when interviewing and hiring developers and is also used by Goldman Sachs when hiring developers/engineers.

The number of registered developers is approximately 1.5 million, and hundreds of thousands of people participated in the 2016 Coding Challenge and competed for their skills. It was conducted in 15 domains, including algorithms, Java, data structures, Mathematics, C++, Python, SQL, Ruby, and AI, etc. As a result, the country ranked first was China, Russia was second, Poland was third, Korea was 22nd, Vietnam was 23rd, the United States was 28th, and India was 31st. Among the participants, the proportion of developers from the United States and India was the highest, and although it was analyzed that the average score was lowered by ordinary developers and the United States and India suffered a relative loss, the results were different from what was expected. Algorithms accounted for about 40% of all tests, and Chinese and Russian developers ranked high in the algorithm area and also stood out in the Java, data structure, and C++ fields. Poland's progress is notable, with good results achieved in algorithms, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. The results of countries with STEM-oriented education were relatively high, and Vietnam can also be evaluated as having achieved excellent results considering the period in which IT was introduced. Github is also an important basis for determining how active developers are. Looking at the countries contributing to Github in 2021, the United States contributed 24.6%, Korea contributed 1.9%, and Vietnam contributed 0.6%, the same as Finland and Austria. entered the country for the first time.

The technologies that make up the internet can be broadly categorized into Front-end and Back-end technologies. JavaScript is a core technology for Front-end development, and open-source frameworks and libraries like Angular, React, and Vue are commonly used for development and maintenance convenience. In Vietnam, there is a rich pool of developers with expertise in Angular (33.5%), React (28.4%), and Vue (19.9%) for Front-end development. Back-end technologies are dominated by Spring Boot (45.9%), followed by Node.js, Hibernate, and Go. Databases commonly used include MySQL, MS SQL, MongoDB, PostgresSQL, and Redis. Other technologies present in Vietnam include Python frameworks like Django and Falcon, mobile developers for iOS and Android, and cross-platform development using Flutter and React Native. While Vietnam does not have regions for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud within the country, many companies use cloud services in Singapore and Hong Kong, enabling developers to handle various cloud service providers.

The salaries of developers are not mentioned separately because each company has different policies and varies greatly depending on whether IT outsourcing is chosen or whether to establish and operate a software development center directly. Briefly explain the difference between outsourcing and software development centers. Outsourcing refers to requesting the development of a specific service or product from a specific software development company, and the location of the business is independent of whether it is domestic or overseas. Rather than hiring developers directly, the process involves paying for 10 developers needed to develop a specific product for 6 months, and even operating tasks after development is completed are provided by an outsourcing company. Even if a developer under contract leaves the company, the outsourcing company has the obligation to hire another developer and provide the promised results within a set period. Salary according to developer grade and seniority is somewhat standardized. In contrast, a software development center develops services or products in its own software development office and directly hires developers. Follow headquarters policies, have control over the engineering process, protect the company's intellectual property, and directly manage the team. It is possible to recruit core personnel by maintaining a sense of belonging, and it is possible to secure passionate engineers. Additionally, excellent local developers prefer companies that create products and services, so a win-win structure is formed and good developers can be secured. However, it requires management burden and initial investment costs to establish, recruit, operate, and maintain a corporation. The choice will likely vary depending on the needs of each company.

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