With no family dependents or debt to speak of, the Ho Chi Minh City programmer has nevertheless driven himself to total exhaustion for nearly two years.
Beyond regular business hours, he works as a freelancer, taking on web design and software outsourcing contracts for clients across various time zones, leaving his desk strewn with half-eaten takeout containers and empty soda cans.
“Every time a tech firm announces layoffs driven by automation, a chill runs down my spine,” he says.
Vietnamese tech workers are facing growing anxiety and burnout as layoffs, artificial intelligence and the industry’s “age 35 curse” intensify pressure to keep working and upgrading their skills.
Programmer The Vinh regularly works until dawn to write software for overseas clients. Photo courtesy of Vinh
Facing that same fear of obsolescence, Hoang Nam, a 34-year-old security engineer based in the southern province of Tay Ninh, also has a mortgage of over VND1 billion (US$40,000) and two young children.
His company recently restructured, cutting nearly 20% of junior programming roles and replacing humans with automated coding tools.
To safeguard his job, Nam took on extra in-house responsibilities while staying up late for freelance projects and teaching himself new machine learning tools.
But after spending 15 hours a day staring at screens, his blood pressure consistently hovers above 140/90 mmHg.
“Catching my reflection in the mirror at 3:00 a.m., with sunken eyes and a pounding heart, I know full well I’m destroying my body,” Nam says.
“But stopping now means losing my income and being replaced overnight by fresh graduates and younger coders.”
Terrified by the looming threat of a stroke, he checked into a hospital and was diagnosed with dyslipidemia, hypertension, prediabetes, and mild depression, all requiring long-term medical treatment.
While nationwide figures remain unrecorded, the ordeal shared by Vinh and Nam dominates conversations across Vietnamese online tech communities.
A persistent wave of layoffs in the industry, compounded by a desperate race to master emerging tools like AI is pushing software developers into chronic burnout.
Clinicians are seeing the fallout firsthand. Medical professionals caution that the cohort of tech workers seeking treatment for chronic insomnia, physical collapse, and metabolic disorders is skewing dramatically younger.
In its International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), the World Health Organization defines burnout as an occupational syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. The condition is marked by three core dimensions: energy depletion, growing mental detachment or cynicism toward one’s job, and a steep decline in professional efficacy.
Hoang Tien Trong Nghia, head of the neurology department at Ho Chi Minh City-based Military Hospital 175, says relentless stress triggers systemic inflammation and autonomic nervous dysfunction, significantly elevating the risk of cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis, and strokes among younger adults.
“Clinical practice has recently seen a surge in cases of hypertension, cardiac arrhythmia, and nervous breakdowns in patients under 35.
“Nearly all of them have the same habits: hours of sedentary screen time, heavy reliance on stimulants like caffeine to pull all-nighters, and working under constant anxiety.”
Compounding this physical toll is a longstanding industry dread across Asian tech markets known as the “age 35 curse,” or older professionals being stereotyped as slow to adapt, overly expensive due to seniority, and unable to keep pace with brutal overtime hours accepted by their younger colleagues.
A 2024 tech recruitment survey by platform TopDev found that nearly 70% of Vietnamese tech companies prefer hiring engineers under 30 for frontline development roles to rein in payroll costs and maintain operational agility.
That has only intensified as generative AI sweeps the tech landscape.
Global layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi counted over 150,000 tech job cuts worldwide over the past year, heavily hitting baseline programming and quality assurance testing, tasks that automated algorithms can easily perform.
Yet, from an employer’s perspective, this weeding-out process is not merely about a number on a birth certificate.
Nguyen Tuan Anh, chief technology officer at a Ho Chi Minh City software firm, argues that companies do not let people go simply because they turned 35, but rather because they “stopped delivering new value.”
Many professionals confuse a decade of growth with a single year of experience repeated 10 times over.
As AI slashes the time needed to churn out routine code, businesses are trimming those who work mechanically, while holding on to talent that can untangle complex problems, design system architecture, and lead project delivery.
“If a senior engineer cannot deliver markedly more value than a junior developer equipped with AI, they will inevitably face replacement,” Anh points out.
From a mental health standpoint, Vuong Nguyen Toan Thien, clinical director at Lumos Counseling and Psychotherapy Center, says many young developers are trapped in a cycle of anticipatory anxiety, dreading falling behind, which turns work into compulsive behavior, leaving them wracked with guilt the moment they step away from the keyboard.
“Many view burning through their physical reserves before 35 as a necessary short-term investment to buy career security, but it is a dangerous gamble.”
Health and cognitive bandwidth are not bank accounts that can be drained dry and reimbursed later, and cellular nerve damage and memory impairment wrought by chronic burnout are often irreversible, undermining the exact skills workers need to sustain their later careers.
To avoid total collapse, Thien recommends that tech professionals build a discipline around rest rather than merely obsessing over work productivity—such as setting a hard cutoff time each evening to shut down computers, letting the brain recharge, and strictly banning work devices from the bedroom.
A software engineer working in Vietnam. Photo from Funix
Whenever persistent sleeplessness, severe headaches, heart palpitations, or an inability to focus sets in, workers need to consult medical and psychological specialists immediately rather than guzzling extra coffee to prop up a facade of alertness, Thien concludes.