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Connecting with Vietnam's Tech Community

Opening

In recent years, the tech landscape has witnessed the establishment of many social enthusiast groups, a proof of the increasing public attention and appreciation for the tech sector, and the ever-higher demand for IT talents. Be it formal organizations or spontaneous social gatherings, these groups have depicted a lively and youthful portrait of Vietnamese tech community.

Going with the flow of the market, and also as the first step on our journey to build LINE Technology Vietnam a desirable employer brand, we aspire to increase our share of voice and presence, and connection to IT talents via varied activities. The community's positive and widespread reception will send ripples across the society, propelling us on our way to contribute to Vietnam's tech sector, and become the top-of-mind brand in both employees' and candidates' heart alike.

With the new year 2021 on our doorsteps, we invite you to reflect with us on what we did throughout the past year.

What we have done

Different activities and formats were created for each group, based on what spikes their interest.

  • For those at senior level, we want to engage them using LINE's wealth of knowledge and experiences with large systems. We call these sharings TECHTALK series.
  • For the potential candidates at senior level, those who are already look into applying to LINE, we held a livestreaming event called Career Chat.
  • For the fresh to junior group, we thought a fun and engaging event, such as a coding contest, was most suitable. We call it LINE Code WOW.

TECHTALK

TECHTALK is our top activity to connect with Vietnam's skilled developers. With the aim to provide the community with LINE's best practices with large-scale applications and services, we hope that the audience gains beneficial takeaways to apply to their own jobs and build on ready-made knowledge. Therefore, TECHTALK's topics should meet the current tech trends of local community, while also reflect truthfully our strengths to external audience.

TECHTALK #1, May 30, 2020

For the first TECHTALK on May 30, 2020, we took it as a way of self-introduction as it is the first time our event was open for public registration. Each topic took about 20-30 minutes, and featured a slice of our tech stack, as well as project management and people development. There were ample time for guests to interact with LINE team: during the mid-time tea-break, Q&A session, or the networking session at the end of the event.

  • Session 1: LINE Technology Vietnam's Development Cycle & How We Leverage It to Build an Exceptional Team (Nguyen Xuan Hung)
  • Session 2: How We Build a Large Scale Application: LINE Official Account Manager (Ha Duy Anh)
  • Session 3: LINE CHAT System Architecture (Truong Dinh Ngoc)
  • Session 4: LINE Delivery Infrastructure (Nguyen Tien Dat)
  • Session 5: LINE BOT Service Introduction (Do Anh Tuan)
  • Session 6: What Engineers could Do to Increase their Value as Employees (Kamada Daisuke)
For more details, please visit TECHTALK #1's landing page and photo album

Both post-event survey and informal check confirmed that the event was successful in content delivery and organization. Many guests asked to know the schedule of the next TECHTALK, and stayed late after the event concluded to discuss in-depth with LINE speakers. Even though the Q&A session took nearly an hour, speakers were very busy during the mid-time tea-break to satisfy many inquisitive guests.

Heartened by these good signs, we decided to hold the next event much sooner than originally planned.

TECHTALK #2, Sep 26, 2020

From the second event in TECHTALK series, the topics are deep-dive and would range from 30-75 minutes, depending on its role in the event theme. For TECHTALK #2, the key topic was High-performance Systems, and we partnered with Grokking Vietnam to bring in a more diverse point of view.

  • Session 1: Designing & Programming High-performance Systems (Do Minh Hien)
  • Session 2: Redis: Best Practices (Dinh Manh Dau)
  • Session 3: Escape Analysis in Go Compiler (Le Manh Cuong, guest speaker from Grokking Vietnam)
For more details, please visit TECHTALK #2's landing page and photo album

Despite being offline format in the suspense of coronavirus-affected world, the TECHTALK series enjoyed enthusiastic welcome from the local tech community.

  • We reached the full capacity for both events. Several people even traveled from other cities to Hanoi to join the event.
  • Positive feedback from audience for the quality of both presentation content & organization.
  • Many participants especially expressed their interest in applying for LINE!

They all demonstrated the thirst for knowledge and also the community spirit in Vietnamese engineers, especially in Hanoi where these events are scarce. We're so eager to announce that TECHTALK will return in April, 2021! Please stay tuned for our next announcements on fanpage and website.

Career Chat

An important Recruitment target group of LINE Technology Vietnam is the candidates at senior level. They are selective about their career move, they want to know about the company and the job thoroughly before considering applying for it. While the candidates may well do the research on their own, they might come across off-record news, so it is crucial that LINE team proactively reaches out and acts as a reliable information source. This approach is best done in person to give the candidates a feeling of personalized touch, however they are usually very busy, so Recruitment team has had a hard time setting up in-person meetings.

When remote working mode became the new norm in mid 2020, we thought maybe now was a time to try a virtual event format. Career Chat was brought into play.

  • The event participants were the potential candidates for senior positions, therefore the invitation was sent to a curated guest list. Our Recruitment team was also in contact with some of them, and had had a certain grasp of the audience's expectations for the event.
  • The content shared by the hosts covered the broad scope: introduction about LINE, what LINE Technology Vietnam does, our current vacancies, what interested candidates should know before applying, and also highlights about our attractive benefit scheme.
  • We especially chose to livestream this event during the weekend, at an optimal time window while most people are free from work or family duties.
  • As the purpose was for Recruitment, we wanted to encourage candid interactions. Therefore, the hosts intentionally conducted the session in a casual, friendly, and straight-forward manner, and handled all questions no matter how frank they were.

As expected, the virtual format saved the effort of direct communications. Moreover, we retained about 60% of the participants until the end of the livestream, and also received dozens of questions from outspoken participants. All of these questions were recorded and will also be posted publicly on our fanpage in the future, when the situation is relevant.

LINE Code WOW

LINE Code WOW is an online coding competition, taking place from Jan 11-24, 2021.

Considering that no budget was spent on promotion, LINE CODE WOW received very good organic results.

  • Regarding the public interest: we received over 700 registrations, the majority are university students or fresh graduates. Many registered their university from other countries, such as South Korea, the USA, the EU. Most interestingly, 34 are still in secondary or high schools. This is a very good sign that algorithmic problems are well received by the youths.
  • Regarding the submission quality: the top-ranking participants finished the test earlier than expected. Their submissions show good grasp of data structure and code reusability.
For more details, please visit LINE Code WOW's landing page and photo album

What's in store for 2021?

We gained certain constructive initial results, especially for first-time self-hosted and organic activities (most interestingly, no paid advertisement was spent at all!). Needless to say we encountered many difficulties, but with great can-do attitude from a tight-knitted team, we managed to pull them off and learned many lessons as well.

So what's next? We plan to build on top of these initial successes:

  • Keep up the TECHTALK series. This requires serious effort from the Engineering team, however we have confidence after the previous runs.
  • Career Chat is certainly a good way to boost human interaction in this social-distancing world. We're looking into making it a more frequent event, and the topics might be more loosely related to tech.
  • The coding contest LINE Code WOW received immense popularity in academic community, and we'd love to do the next season. But maybe with a twist? We'll see.
  • Try out other informal offline format. We're thinking a workshop or meet-up would be a great fun, to participants and organizers alike.

 It's still early yet, and the future is bright with ideas. Please keep out an eye for even more activities, to be announce on LINE Technology Vietnam's website and fanpage.