Ask HN: Is English-only software development more effective?
I’m a mid-career dev working in the EU, where sometimes work happens in the local language and sometimes in english.
I can’t shake the feeling that we pay a toll for living in between language worlds, where you write task descriptions in English, and discuss the solution in the local language, switching languages mid-thought when a colleague who only speaks english joins a call.
The job of developing software has always made the most sense to me as a process rooted in language and analytical thought. That which you can talk about clearly, you can think about clearly and write good code concerning, especially when it comes to business software, where there is no mathematical notation to act as a lingua franca.
I feel like our day to day is spent not having a good conceptual grasp of what we do, and that the cost for this is confusion and poorer quality solutions.
On the stakeholder side, business terms are frequently unclear, with details being lost in translation or muddled because the local language has its own legal framework that almost but not quite matches the closest english term, causing trouble when trying to research prior work in the field.
When discussing technical details, we don’t have a set of clear labels for the code itself (block/scope, statement/expression) or the larger units (service, module, component, API etc.).
My feeling is that this puts a ceiling on the possible quality of the solution. Conceptual innovation can’t possibly stem from conceptual confusion.
Devs who have made the jump from mixed-language to English-only environments, do you find that the quality of thought is higher when everyone only works in english? Is there some other facet of this that I’m missing? Should I prioritise working for english-only companies if I value the ability to think and communicate clearly at work?
I recommend thinking about this exactly like the aviation industry. The language of the skies is English only. Thus all operational correspondence is in English, all training occurs in English, all logs are in English, all commands and instructions within the cockpit are in English, all preflight checks are in English. Pretty much everything that can be recorded and/or necessary to do the job is English only.
Despite that unrelated conversation among pilots can still be local language. Discussions among air traffic control off the radio can still be local language.
With regards to software all things related to work and product should be English only without exception. Things related to code theory outside of the product or personal education can be local language. That provides the flexibility to do what is most comfortable for self-learning but ensures there exists a fixed standard for work.
By the way, English became the language of the skies for safety reasons, not for communication purposes. Forcing English usage cuts through cultural dimensions that inhibit more honest expression by less senior people.
I'm a native English speaker. When I started at my company it was English-only (at least as far as I saw). Over the past several years we've been doing more work with Europe and around the globe. Even more recently, people in Europe have been given leadership position on various projects that impact the US. It could be my own English-bias talking, but I think things would be going more smoothly if everything was done in a single language, English being the logical choice. Everyone working on the projects and at the company speaks English (as a first or second language), and I have occasionally received emails in French. Some of these are automated system messages, and whoever set them up wasn't thinking about the global audience. A vast majority of employees don't speak French, so most people lose the context when this happens. That's a problem. Even in our offices in India, I'm told that they use English in the office, because that's the only common language they all share, since there are so many languages and dialects in India; there isn't one local languages they can count on. English does seem to be the lingua franca for the world, especially in technology, at this point. This seems to be the case online, as I've read from various people over the years, and I also see it when I travel. One person will speak German, another Korean, and they both switch to English so they can speak to each other to ask directions or whatever it may be.
I am working as a software developer and speak English, Danish (both non-native) and German on the job. I do not recognize the problem you describe at all. If there is confusion, it usually stems from the classics: missing or unclear requirements, bad or non-existent communication, implicit assumptions about what everyone should know and so on.
I think so.
I spend a year at a research institution in Germany where English was commonly used (lots of people worked there from all over the world but especially the E.U..) but I might have been the only native English speaker.
All the time at talks I saw people struggle to understand things because English was the second or third language of both the speaker and the listener.
It’s an unexamined phenomenon for many reasons not least the people involved think they are really smart and would have their feelings hurt if they knew how bad it was.
Non native English speaker here. Been working using English only for over a decade, to the point of using my own native language to discuss technical topics (either at the conceptual/product level or at the very low level) feels non-natural and uncomfortable. I haven’t worked in software engineering using my mother tongue ever (because I’ve always been an immigrant).
No. My experience is that English is a great language for hiding ignorance behind technobabble and buzzwords. You claim that "conceptual innovation can’t possibly stem from conceptual confusion." It sounds reasonable, but honestly, wtf does it mean? :) My experience is that bilingualism is advantageous because it forces you to think and reason in multiple languages. Simply put, if you can explain something in multiple languages then you probably know that subject better than someone who can only explain it in one language.