On Saturday morning on the top floor of a hotel on Han River in Da Nang, tens of young people met each other in a bar to attend.

Saigon Code Tour, organized to hunt for IT talent. VNG, the organizer of the program, wanted to create a COMPETITIVE environment different from other coders’ competitions.

Freelance coders are viewed as talented coders, confident enough to work independently. They negotiate prices when taking jobs, work in groups, and enjoy the freedom of freelancers.

They sit at coffee shops, working day and night at co-working spaces before deadlines, and sometimes code at the seaside.

SCT welcomes everyone, with no limitations on age, gender and education. In the first year, the competition attracted over 200 competitors. They were from universities and high schools, and also included developers with 1-2 years of experience.

The war for coders

A report says Vietnam will need an additional 400,000 information technology (IT) personnel by 2020. 37.5 per cent of universities and junior colleges in Vietnam offer ICT majors. Each year, there are about 50,000 IT graduates.

 Salaries and allowances offered by technology firms are on a sharp rise.

The Q4 2018 report on the IT market released by TopDev said that Vietnam would lack 70,000-90,000 IT workers in 2019-2020.

A hot topic for discussion among IT firms’ bosses is the battle for IT workers. Large IT firms scramble for workers from smaller ones. Small firms have to increase pay to retain workers.

Meanwhile, international firms take over entire groups of workers who have been working as teams for years.

A new graduate can receive pay of up to$500. The pay for developers in hot fields such as Cloud Computing, Big Data and AI is up to $1,400-1,700.

In 2019, with cooperation with Google Develop Group MienTrung, the event moved from HCMC to Da Nang. The champion was Le Phuoc Dinh, 20, a student at Southern Methodist University in the US. The second-year student had registered to attend the event when he was in Vietnam during a summer holiday.

The event also found two other special talents – Tran Le Nguyen Vu, 25 and Doan Phu Duc, 20, a second year student at the HCMC University of Natural Sciences.

A report says Vietnam will need an additional 400,000 information technology (IT) personnel by 2020. 37.5 per cent of universities and junior colleges in Vietnam offer ICT majors. Each year, there are about 50,000 IT graduates.

Thanh Lich

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