SBS Vietnamese IT in the AI Era Interview 2026
Reflections from a follow-up radio interview about working in tech during the AI shift, the junior job market, and what I look for when hiring.
18 Feb 2026
Second episode in the Chọn nghề gì? series, aired 18 Feb. This one was about AI and what it means for people working in or entering tech.
The framing I kept coming back to: IT people aren’t competing with AI, they’re working with it. The advantage isn’t that you know the tools. It’s that you already think in inputs, outputs, and steps. You already break problems down. That’s exactly what makes working with AI effective, and it’s a skill that takes time to develop.
The part about the junior market was honest but uncomfortable to say out loud. It’s genuinely harder to get a first job right now. AI handles a lot of the work that used to be a natural entry point. The answer isn’t to avoid the field. It’s to have a strong foundation and know how to use the tools rather than just know they exist.
On interviewing, two things I notice consistently when I do mock interviews and CV reviews:
The first is that people list what they did but not why it mattered. Saying you built a feature isn’t enough. What did it do for the user? What did it improve? Learning to tell that story is a skill, and most people don’t practise it.
The second is buzzwords without depth. If your CV says you worked with AI or machine learning, I’ll ask you to explain it from first principles. If you can’t, it works against you. I’d rather see someone say they’re learning something than claim fluency they don’t have.
The thing I look for most is genuine curiosity. Someone who asks good questions in the interview, who admits what they don’t know, who is interested in the problem rather than just getting the job. That’s harder to fake than technical skill, and it compounds over time.
The full episode is on SBS Vietnamese, also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
End of transmission. Beep boop.