Brain drain is no longer a national story, it has become a global problem. The story of brain drain with the term “brain drain” has been used since 1963, when the British Royal Society saw a decline in brain drain as scientists from the United Kingdom to the United States, endangering Britain’s economy. Later, the term was widely used to describe the movement of experts and scientists from third countries (also Carolina in XLI 156:775–796, 2004). Or as in Russia, brain drain is also called by different names such as brain theft or brain bait. In fact, this is not a new problem, especially in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when Peter the Great implemented a policy of attracting talented professionals to work in Russia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in a book named “Capital and the Worker”, V.I. Lenin concluded that “Russia is increasingly falling behind, giving foreign countries its best workers, while the United States is moving faster and faster, attracting the most dynamic and talented segments of the world’s population” (Iontsev et al. in RUDN Journal of Economics 4:510–517, 2017). Despite being written more than 100 years ago, that statement is still valid today. Through the ups and downs of history and the development of science and technology, the problem of brain drain still retains its current value. The author’s article will compare the perspective of brain drain, consider the manifestations of brain drain in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and raise some issues of brain drain in Vietnam today. The problem of brain drain needs to be seen in more multidimensional forms and approaches, even if there are views and forms of brain drain that differ from conventional views.