He traveled to Vietnam and observed a high quality Computer Science education in primary / secondary school. Talking about grade 11 scholars, he wrote:
After returning to the US, I asked a senior engineer how he'd rank this question on a Google interview. Without knowing the source of the question, he judged that this would be in the top third. The class had 45 minutes to design a solution and implement it in Pascal. Most of them finished, a few just needed another five minutes. There is no question that half of the students in that grade 11 class could pass the Google interview process.
I have seen university students in my German CS classes struggle to implement breadth-first search; I would by highly surprised if an average grade 11 student could write a program to compute the connected components of a maze in less than 45 minutes.
I'm from Vietnam and working on IT sections, thank you very much for the interested in. Yes, we are the developing country, lack a lot of conditions like developed countries, but we are on going ahead to cover and catching up with you, especial in internet, robotic, saas, e-comercial, social intranet and maybe AI too. Our company working as technology transfer company (Web Company). We are the partner of Bitrix24 in Asia for 10 years and on working as distribute and develope custom features base on Bitrix24 Platform (Social Intranet 2.0 for enterprises). Hoping have a lot of help from you, especial the support from the mature in working method (management, quality, refined, etc..)
A bit unrelated but perhaps a marker for a healthy Vietnamese tech infrastructure, Vietnam has produced a couple of relatively high caliber e-sports teams in the Saigon Jokers and more recently The GigaByte Marines who are currently giving American team TSM a hard time at Riot Games mid season invitational.
While I realize this isn't exactly related to start ups it is interesting because in order to produce and support esports teams, and especially true if the team is any good, a couple of things must be true.
1) Large population of adolescents/young adults with regular access to internet.
2) Large player base to produce quality players.
3) Money from sponsors who see it as a viable marketing venture.
The fact that Vietnam has been able to do this bodes well for them.
I think it has a lot to do with its government having laid out a plan since the 90s to develop its IT industry.
Results are:
1) Lots of IT grads 2) Lots of funding 3) Okay-ish infrastructure
If we add this to the interests in entrepreneurship among Vietnamese people, it results in a strong tech scene.