A group of Vietnamese information technology engineers are playing the leading role in projects at Samsung’s Hanoi research and development center, the company’s largest in Southeast Asia, while assisting their international counterparts.

A few years ago a team of young Vietnamese IT engineers at the South Korean technology giant’s Samsung Vietnam Mobile R&D Center in Hanoi was assigned to work on software localization, the process of tailoring given software to the language and culture of the target market.

They were later able to advance to the other end of the process, which is more challenging, and this involves creating software apps so that they can be variously localized by engineers in Samsung’s other R&D centers worldwide.

“It’s a time when we unceasingly learned to prove that the ability and technical skills of Vietnamese people are as good as those of other countries around the world,” said Vu Tien Dung, a 31-year-old member of the team.

The story began with him around two years ago, when he left his overseas job to return to Vietnam and was employed by Samsung to develop its Galaxy J1.

The J1 project, headed by Vietnamese staff members in Hanoi, is one of the first pieces of work to be led by Vietnamese people at the company.

In this undertaking, the Vietnamese engineers wrote programs and created new mobile phone features before sending their product to other development centers in the Samsung network.

“Up to 80 percent of the project’s work such as coding was done by Vietnamese employees. The outcomes exceeded our expectations,” Dung said.

The same Vietnamese engineers were then given a crucial part in tasks of developing lines of mobile phones for global commercial use and the job became increasingly difficult, with the workload no less heavy than that for Samsung’s experienced engineers in South Korea, India and New Zealand.

Employees are seen at Samsung Vietnam Mobile R&D Center in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Vietnamese trainers in Samsung global networks

Now the Vietnamese engineers’ level of expertise is on par with that of their international counterparts, and with superior experience and skillfulness, they have travelled abroad to assist the latter, Dung said.

A notable example is Pham Huu Duc, 27, who worked with IT engineers in South Korea and India for a long time.

He and 12 Vietnamese coworkers once arrived in South Korea to help Samsung’s engineers there.

“When it comes to using software to test a device’s hardware, I can say with confidence that we lead the Southeast Asian region,” Duc said.

Employees are seen at Samsung Vietnam Mobile R&D Center in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The Vietnamese engineers have latterly completed a 100-day project that testified to their collective talent: designing the software for Samsung’s first line of triple-camera smartphones, which were launched international markets in September.

The task was demanding as the products had been vastly changed in hardware, which requires a corresponding a great reinvention in programming.

The engineers also helped the conglomerate’s R&D centers in India and Brazil so that the project could be carried out.

Shim Won Hwan, Samsung Vietnam’s general director, said the new smartphone generation the Vietnamese engineers had developed could completely alter the world’s perception of technological skills of Vietnamese engineers in general.

“The country [of Vietnam] not only has Samsung’s largest smartphone factories, but it’s expected to also receive the key R&D center amongst the company’s worldwide facilities,” he said.

A female engineer at Samsung Vietnam Mobile R&D Center in Hanoi, Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre

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