Buddy Duty, Week Two New post Back then, I was still liquid

I’m feeling old – not literally, contextually. Last week, during one of those random chitchats that happen when you’re a designated friendly face, I mentioned a game from the mid-2000s, and one of our new interns looked at me with something close to sympathy and said: “Back then, I was still liquid”.

Well, um – okay.

Some context: my company started an internship academy this year, for final-year students and fresh graduates, and for most of them it’s the first professional environment they’ve ever set foot in. They didn’t just wander in, either. 711 applications, 335 English video screenings, 175 group interviews plus technical assignments, 36 final interviews with the track leaders – and 18 who made it: an acceptance rate of ≈2.53%, lower than any Ivy League school’s.

They joined us at the beginning of last week, for six months of working and learning alongside my colleagues and me. Each track (engineering is the big one) has a track leader, a supervisor, and buddies, and I’m one of the buddies: the person you go to when you don’t know who to go to. I answer questions, show them how things actually work and do not work here as opposed to how the onboarding slides say they work, and try to make them feel at home. Cake included – one already joined the company last week, a second one is scheduled for this week, and that’s not company policy; that’s me.

And they’re young, really young, somewhere between 18 and 22-ish, which means that while I was collecting certain memories in Frankfurt, they were in elementary or secondary school, and while I was playing the games I keep bringing up, they weren’t born yet. I was already working in design and engineering when they were – see above – still liquid.

Haizz.

Grandpa tells war stories

It started with horror games. A few of them were talking about atmosphere, the kind of dread so thick you can chew it, with Resident Evil Requiem from this year as the obvious benchmark – and “atmosphere” hit me right in the soft spot, so I recommended Prey from 2017: a space station that very much wants you dead, a setting and art direction like nothing else, a genuinely good story, and a handful of proper goosebump moments. They’d heard of it, briefly, the way you’ve heard of a cousin’s ex.

Which reminded me of the other Prey, the one from 2006 that turned twenty this summer and shares nothing with the 2017 one apart from its title and “something with aliens”. Portals you could look and walk through, walls you could walk up, gravity flipping on you mid-room, a spirit walk that let you leave your own body to solve puzzles – physics puzzles that were years ahead of their time and, in my humble and completely correct opinion, outdid everything Half-Life 2 had established two years earlier. Never heard of it, not one of them.

Half-Life they did know – from TikTok, from reels of Half-Life: Alyx chopped into 15 seconds of headcrab panic. So there I was, explaining a twenty-year-old physics engine to people who met Gordon Freeman as a meme, like a grandpa telling stories from the war (except my war was fought with a gravity gun, and I won it).

The second moment hit closer to home, literally. One of the interns grew up in Germany, near a place where I had lived before Sài Gòn. So we got talking about this strange coincidence; the exact location and its best places to turn night into day, and when I got to certain escalations from around 2015 to 2017, the math caught up with me: this guy was eight, maybe ten. We might well have crossed paths back then, him walking to school in the morning, me walking home from the club, wasted but happy – and then, ten-ish years later, met again in an office in the middle of Sài Gòn. Who knows. But even the bare fact that a company in this city hired someone who is from near a familiar place of mine and can speak German, English, and Vietnamese without blinking feels incredibly unreal.

Same lockdown, different planet

Then Covid came up, with two of the interns, and we realized we’d faced completely similar yet completely different challenges. I worked from home; they did home schooling. For me it was business as usual, for them an uncertain future and the nagging sense that the cohorts before them had gotten a fairer shot. I missed after-work drinks and long talks with my coworkers – and they missed their classmates and their school crushes, which hits quite differently at that age.

I followed the whole thing from Sài Gòn through German and international news, so what I mostly saw was the social and political side: parts of the world going fucking mad. Donald Trump wondering out loud whether disinfectant could be injected into people, anti-mask marches through German cities, formerly respectable German celebrities like Xavier Naidoo and Attila Hildmann sliding down conspiracy rabbit holes in real time, a mob pushing its way up the steps of the Reichstag in Berlin, and then the storming of the US Capitol. Every country had its own cast of characters back then; I just happened to watch mine in German. A wild time, and definitely a branch of history that was never meant to be released on production.

My interns, barely teenagers back then, watched the same months from the other side, the social and cultural one: TikTok, reels, Twitch, YouTube, quarantine culture and bored-at-home vibes, home-cooked food and lifestyle content for lives that suddenly happened entirely indoors, viral songs and dances (Vietnam even exported one, a hand-washing song half the planet danced to). For me, it was a temporary situation, even on day 109 of the Sài Gòn lockdown. For them, it was contemporary life.

Where there’s light

Which brings me to the future, or at least to the parts of it we’ve touched so far; there’ll be plenty more of these talks over the next six months.

The big one is AI, obviously. They just joined an AI-first company where pretty much every part of daily work runs on AI or at least right next to it, and from what they tell me, getting here from university is its own boss fight. Most of their lecturers don’t really know how to use AI tools, only a handful have bothered to train themselves up, and meanwhile the industry expects graduates to show up experienced and confident with exactly those tools. Universities offer little access and little support, professional accounts cost money, and money is still a big thing here – every đồng matters. So they get their own accounts and teach themselves, after class, in their free time.

And they use it for everything: research, learning, homework, large parts of it happening through ChatGPT or at least with it. They’re mostly positive about that, and refreshingly unsentimental about the downsides. They know it hallucinates and sometimes hands them confidently wrong answers, and they’ve noticed something sharper than most of the think pieces I read: what they learn together with AI is harder to actually remember afterward, because the AI took over exactly the part of learning that makes things stick.

Then there was the gray zone. For a few years, while their teachers were still catching up, AI made it remarkably easy to, um, improve one’s chances at university. Nobody said “cheating”, and nobody had to. That window is closing now that the teachers are catching up, but it was a wild couple of years.

What really got me is where they think all this goes. Sure, it’ll shake up the job market; it already has, and landing a first job as a beginner is noticeably harder, especially in tech. But there’ll be new jobs, they say, as with every technology before, and AI will mostly be used for the good of everyone: breakthroughs in science, medicine and technology, discoveries nobody can imagine yet, prosperity for all (especially for Vietnam, quote), new industries and careers, people and societies growing further – dangers and misuse included, the balance comes out positive.

I see that light too. But where there’s light, there’s shadow, and from where I stand the shadow is long: warfare with the humans quietly taken out of the loop, mass surveillance, unequal chances getting more unequal, money and power pooling in fewer and fewer hands, a global labor market rearranged without anyone asking the people in it, and human art and culture forced to argue for their own value against an infinite content machine. They see more light than shadow. Naive? I’d have filed it that way ten years ago – except they see the risks just fine; they’ve simply decided the light is bigger. Sitting across from them, I find that fascinating, and more inspiring than I expected.

Empty and hungry

To get where that comes from, look at the country they grew up in. Vietnam is young, way younger than Germany: the median age here sits at ≈33.4 years, Germany’s at ≈45.5 years, and in 1990, when most of the interns’ parents were still kids, it was ≈19.5 years – a country where the typical person was a teenager. It’s aging fast now (≈40.2 years by 2050), but the mood hasn’t caught up with the statistics yet. Meanwhile the economy has been among the fastest-growing in the world for years; in 2025 alone, GDP grew by ≈8.02%, second only to 2022 in the whole stretch since 2011.

Many of them grew up in much simpler circumstances than the glass-and-air-conditioning ones they’re working in now, and they know the stories of the before from their own parents. They’ve watched the difference happen in real time, and they want more of it: to grow, to build something, to improve their lives. They’re proud, too – of what this country has achieved, and of doing development their own way. I’ve felt that spark with my Vietnamese friends and colleagues ever since I got here, and I rarely, if ever, felt it in this form back in Germany.

A Vietnamese friend, not one of the interns, once put it in two sentences:

Germans are full and satisfied – literally and figuratively. Vietnamese are empty and hungry – literally and figuratively.

There’s a lot of truth in that, and it explains a lot about the 18 people I’m buddying this half year. Plenty of young people – plenty, not all! – in certain Western countries are frustrated, tired, demotivated; these ones are hungry, and it rubs off. Different vibes, different energies, different philosophies all around me – always have been, with my Vietnamese friends and colleagues, but now more than ever – and it has been charging me up in a way I didn’t see coming.

So, am I old? Well… I don’t see myself as old, and I don’t feel old either (yet). But I can see, very clearly, that I’m from another generation: the one that was already building things while this one was still, um, liquid.

Cake number two lands this week. Somebody has to feed the hungry ones – literally, at least 🎂