Vietnam’s tech talent market is broken and most companies are still hiring the wrong way

Something strange is happening in Vietnam’s engineering hiring market right now. Companies report talent shortages. Candidates report rejection rates higher than ever.

Both are telling the truth. The gap between them isn’t a supply problem. It’s a definition problem, a fundamental mismatch between what companies say they need, what their hiring processes actually select for, and what the engineers who will matter most in the next three years actually look like.

I’ve spent a decade placing engineers across Southeast Asia. I’ve seen this kind of misalignment before. I haven’t seen it this structural.

The shift nobody fully prepared for Eighteen months ago, the hottest debate in engineering circles was whether “Vibe Coding”, the practice of generating code entirely through natural language prompts to AI, was a legitimate workflow or a shortcut for junior developers. That debate is now over. It turns out both sides were right, and both sides missed the point.

Yes, Vibe Coding accelerated output. A GitClear analysis of over 211 million lines of changed code found that AI-assisted workflows boosted boilerplate writing by 25–50 per cent. Yes, it also introduced a technical debt crisis: refactoring rates dropped from 25 per cent in 2021 to under 10 per cent in 2024, while duplicated code quadrupled.

Over 40 per cent of junior developers admitted to deploying AI-generated code they hadn’t read. By early 2026, Andrej Karpathy, one of the people who popularised the Vibe Coding concept, had already moved on. He began describing what comes next: Agentic Engineering.

Not writing code, not prompting AI to write code, but orchestrating autonomous AI agents: setting specifications, auditing outputs, managing feedback loops, and owning architectural decisions. The role of a software engineer is shifting from executor to decision-maker. That shift has a direct consequence for anyone responsible for hiring.

The talent gap is real, but it’s not the gap most people think Vietnam’s number