Hi, my name is Do Xuan Huy (Huy Do). I came to Japan in 2009, when I received a scholarship and transferred to Ritsumeikan University from Hanoi University of Technology as a third-year student. After graduation, I came back to my home country for a while and returned to the same university later to start my Master's degree. Two years later, I joined CyberAgent as a new grad, worked there for 2 years. After that, I joined LINE as a senior software engineer and stayed there for roughly 5 years. Recently, I decided to move to my next challenge with a US company called Square, Inc. Square isn't super famous in Japan but we’re known as a leading financial services company.

A meaningful college life

When I first came to Japan in 2009, I had only 2 years to complete my bachelor's degree. My focus at the time was to get high grades and to be able to finish the degree on time. Honestly, I didn’t have too many chances to explore beautiful Japan. Therefore, when I got the chance to come back as a Master's student later, I spent a lot of time traveling around, as well as doing many internships to know how Japanese companies work, to learn about different business models, and met lots of people. I also traveled to Europe, Singapore, and Australia to attend academic conferences, and to discover more about different countries and cultures.

Not result but the challenge makes changes

In 2013, my university (Ritsumeikan) organized a fun hackathon contest called ICT Challenge R+. I attended with 2 of my friends (who we’re still close friends until now) and got the first prize. This prize itself wasn't a big one, but the contest itself gave me a lot of unique experiences. I met many cool students (many of them now became very famous and awesome engineers). I also had a chance to meet companies who were the contest’s sponsors at the time, which gave me a much easier job-hunting experience later.

Try as many things as possible

I think different people have different goals in life so it’s hard to give 'one size fits all' advice. But if I were able to advise myself at the time, I would still tell myself to try as many things as possible. When you’re young, there's a high possibility that you don’t really know what you’re good at, so that trying as many things as possible will give you a better chance to find what you’re better than the majority. This can bring you a higher chance to make more money and to live an easier life.

Japanese is the key, but don't forget to master your communication skills.

I think Japanese is a very beneficial skill that most people need to advance their career in Japan. Many of my friends who don't know Japanese were still able to find a decent job, but they will find many obstacles in their daily work, as well as have less choice to move to another company that they may want to work at. Understanding Japanese also helps you enjoy life here better. Japan is an awesome country to explore, but only if you can speak Japanese. How could you go to enjoy Karaoke without knowing Japanese right?

Another important one is communication skills. I work as a software engineer, and many people think that people like us don’t need to communicate with those in other departments as long as we can do programming very well. However, communication skills helped me a lot to advance in my career. In fact, you can’t do big things alone, and if you want to obtain big achievements, you need lots of help from people around you, and that’s why you need to master your communication skills.

As a Software Engineer, my daily job is mostly software development. My team is in charge of building a Platform to manage workflow, risk… for operational members at Square. As a staff engineer, my role also includes driving some important projects of our team to deliver on time, mentor other members, as well as give decisions to technical problems of the team.

A big tech company with a flexible and startup-like model

Our company is quite a typical Silicon Valley company. We’re tech focus, very open, and very flexible. Our CEO Jack Dorsey (he’s also CEO of Twitter) is an exceedingly unique figure, and each of his decisions has helped me learn a lot about how to manage a big company.

Even though we're a pretty big company now (with a market cap of over $US100 Billion ), we still operate in a very flexible and startup-like model, which is the thing I like here.