
CS in VN (2013) - Tomte
https://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/
======
quangio
> There is no question that half of the students in that grade 11 class could
> pass the Google interview process.

I am quite sure this is not an average case. He likely visited a high school
olympiad team. Tbh, CS in Vietnam educational system is still treated like
"third class citizen."

(I am Vietnamese, went to a gifted high school and had exposure with
competitive programming)

~~~
nangtrongvuon
I'm Vietnamese too and what he (the author) wrote here in this blog post seems
very much the exception rather than the norm.

He most likely visited an Olympiad team, where they solve problems like these
to compete. Most other schools, such as the ones I went to, had IT/CS as a
side class (meaning they don't get that much attention from both students and
teachers alike) rather than a main class (think Math, English, Vietnamese
etc).

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dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5388535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5388535)

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blauditore
> By grade 3 they are learning to how to use Microsoft Windows. Vietnam is a
> 100% Windows XP monoculture. Probably all with the same serial number.
> However, given that a copy of Windows costs one month's salary, it's easy to
> understand.

I wonder why Linux is not becoming more widespread in such places. Something
like Xubuntu runs well on mediocre hardware and is completely free. Compared
to such an old Windows like XP it also wins in terms of usability and software
availability, not to mention security.

My guess is that it's simply a lack of awareness that this FOSS ecosystem
exists.

~~~
coconut_crab
Office suite is the biggest obstacle, all documents are in .doc or .docx, for
both governments and businesses. Oh and the occasional breakage of Linux on
desktop really hurts too. In early 2010 I volunteered to migrate IT system of
a rural school to Ubuntu, it took us the whole morning to fix the KMS bug with
Intel card, couldn't get resolution better than 640x480, before that 8.04 was
famous with pulseaudio, 9.04 was IME's memory leak etc... yeah I know it's the
driver's fault, not Linux, but it still hurts nonetheless.

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aboutruby
Linked page is available on archive.org:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160310023438/http://bevandan.v...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160310023438/http://bevandan.vnn.vn/vi/TintucChitiet.aspx?Id=d2c33d94-978a-4951-b6e0-35b659c25012)

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norswap
Curious to hear what the consequences of the CS push were.

~~~
wdutch
I was looking for a job in Vietnam in 2016. My impression was that there were
a lot of big codeshops in Hanoi and Saigon writing outsourced code. There was
also a not insignificant startup ecosystem, mostly using PHP.

