SBS Vietnamese Career Interview 2026

SBS Vietnamese radio reached out to do an interview for their Chọn nghề gì? (Choosing Your Career) series. It went out on 11 Feb.

Doing it in Vietnamese was strange in a good way. I spend most of my working life in English now, so having to explain things like search systems, spatial data, and architecture decisions in Vietnamese meant finding different words for the same ideas. Some concepts translated fine. Others I had to talk around, which actually forced me to be clearer than I usually am.

The interview covered the whole arc: graphic design to IT, Vietnam to Australia, junior engineer to lead. Compressing 15 years into 17 minutes is an exercise in deciding what matters.

A few things I said that I still think are true:

The reason I left design wasn’t that I was bad at it. It was that when I hit a creative block, I had nothing to fall back on. In IT, the problem is always still there and so are a hundred different ways to approach it. That suits me better.

The two subjects from my RMIT undergrad that I’ve used the most are Data Structures and Algorithms, and Project Management. I still refer to notes from those. I still teach from those. I didn’t expect to be saying that 15 years later.

The hardest adjustment when I started working in Australia wasn’t the technical stuff. It was the expectation that you own your work completely. When something breaks, you don’t wait. You figure it out and communicate directly. Coming from a more hierarchical work environment, that took time to internalise.

The full episode is on SBS Vietnamese, also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.