Recently, Tech In Asia released a Salary Guide of web developers in Singapore. This piques our interest to investigate the salary differences between Singapore Developers and Vietnam Developers. As many would have known by now, Vietnam is a major software development hub in Asia, with companies such as Fossil, Carousell, Ninjavan, Honestbee, Shopback and Grab, etc., having their tech development hub in the vibrant Ho Chi Minh City.

While a full “apple-to-apple” comparison is not possible, we try as much to match our developers’ expected salary in our database to the data shown on Tech In Asia.

A look at the chart shows that the developer jobs’ salary level in Singapore far surpass that of Vietnam. Despite the recent increase in demand for developers in Vietnam, the wages of Vietnamese Developers remain suppressed (relatively to that of Singapore developers). This could be due to country economics factors such as housing rental and transport cost (which are lower in Vietnam than in Singapore), skill level (Singaporean developers are arguably higher skilled in terms of proficiency in deep technologies than Vietnamese developers), amongst others. A separate study to identify key factors leading to this wage differential would be useful.

The important point from this short study is there are tremendous cost savings to hire Vietnamese Developers. The differences in salary for each experience level are:

• 0 – 1 Year (Junior): 2,580 SGD
• 1 – 4 Years (Mid-Level): 2,556 SGD
• 4 – 7 Years (Senior): 2,362 SGD

Given this, in a year, the cost savings would be

• 0 – 1 Year (Junior): 30,960 SGD
• 1 – 4 Years (Mid-Level): 30,672 SGD
• 4 – 7 Years (Senior): 28,344 SGD

Imagine what these cost savings can do, i.e., be reallocated more to Digital Marketing or to be spend on training and internal operation activities.

By hiring Vietnamese Developers, there are tremendous cost savings to be gained. It’s no wonder startups and companies such as Honestbee, Carousell, Ninjavan, Grab, Lazada, Sea (Garena), Shopback, and most Blockchain Companies, i.e., Coinhako have hired Vietnamese developers to power their tech product development.

If you’re keen to hire and build an offshore tech team in Vietnam, email hello@9cv9offshoring.tech now and our hiring consultant will get in touch with you shortly.

Disclaimers and Caveats

• The study is comparing Tech In Asia’s Job Salary Data and 9cv9 Developers’ Expected Salary
• The conversion rate used in converting 9cv9 Developers’ Expected Salary is 1 USD to 1.35 SGD
• Tech in Asia’s Job Salary Data was based on web developers but 9cv9 Developers’ Expected Salary was based on developers in general.
• The median salary was taken from Tech In Asia’s Job Salary Data but the average salary was taken from 9cv9 Developers’ Expected Salary

Source:

Tech in Asia, “How much does it cost to hire a web developer in Singapore”. Taken from https://www.techinasia.com/cost-hire-web-developer-singapore on 31st August 2018.