Over the last six months, I’ve been talking to a lot of people across the tech and startup industries in Vietnam, and after a while, you start to hear the same things. You start to hear a signal in all the noise. And two resounding complaints I’ve heard in the last few months is that computer engineering is going down, and design sucks.
This all may come as a shock to many who view Vietnam as a rising engineering hub and an outsourcing leader, but what we see today are the seeds of a growing trend in Vietnam: bad design and lazy engineering.
Engineers in Vietnam are getting increasingly lazy
When some people compare computer engineering in Vietnam five to ten years ago to now, things have changed. And they’ve changed for the worse. But the biggest change people see is that younger engineers are lazier than the older generation. And the key problem has been that there are way more resources online than there were a decade ago. There are way more libraries, repositories of code from past engineers. This has created a generation of engineers who are more knowledgeable but are weaker coders.
In the past, engineers were forced to figure out the code themselves, and they would have to write it themselves too. This forced engineers to become better thinkers about how the code works and how the software fits together. Now, engineers can just cut and paste code whenever they need it.
This trend is even more so reflected in the products being produced by this generation. The products now aren’t as technically strong. I’ve talked to several leaders in the startup industry off the record, and they’ve said that when you look at websites these days – like e-commerce, online products, etc. – you can see that the products aren’t that deep. They’re easy to make.
All in all, this means innovation is impacted heavily. If engineers don’t know how to tinker, how can they innovate? Now, I’m not sure if this is just the usual older generation looking down on the green and fresh younger generation, but I’ve talked to a handful of companies, and this is a trend that CTOs have mentioned to me as well.
Vietnamese websites are fucking ugly
Another hurdle that faces Vietnamese online startups is design. And it’s a completely different beast from engineering because it has to do more with aesthetics and ethos than with the laziness of engineers. It’s also my personal opinion. But, I won’t point any fingers here, if you look at all of the startups that I’ve written about from Vietnam in the past six months, you’ll find that many of their sites are just plain ugly. And that doesn’t even include the big news sites that everyone frequents.
Take a quick click through Alexa’s top sites in Vietnam, and you’ll see a bunch of ugly sites. This is bad for two reasons: 1) without a strong design aesthetic it’s very difficult to compete globally where, in some cases, a beautiful design makes or breaks user acquisition, and 2) it means entrepreneurs and web developers are not thinking about user experience and user interface. It’s not good for Vietnam, and a design revolution is desperately needed.
Dealing with the two hurdles
So far, the only solution I’ve seen to this problem is education, something that Vietnam is struggling in, but something leaders in the community are working to address in workshops and events. In fact, those issues are two key reasons why people are getting so involved in doing events. But the wheels are in motion and it’s going to take a serious and widespread addressing of the problem – and that doesn’t look to be coming anytime soon. The issues are systemic.
On the other hand, this could signal a shift in focus. If libraries and code are easier to do, this means entrepreneurs can focus more on business and solving problems. The trouble with this argument is that engineering and design are inextricably connected to create an excellent product for the consumer market.
Is this happening across Asia? Or is this just specific to Vietnam? Let us know in the comments!