I've hired and worked with many dozens of devs around the world. Some I worked with for 10 days, others for years.
The only downside that I haven't found a solution for is communication. Even with brilliant people who had been speaking English for decades, a lot gets lost because of language.
It's hard enough to talk to other Americans about technical issues. It's harder when the other person is losing small, important distinctions in each sentence.
It's obviously not a dealbreaker. The benefits of hiring internationally outweigh the drawbacks. In fact, no company I've ever helped build could have succeeded hiring only Americans.
Weird. Half Europe (IT industry) speaks broken English and everyone understands each other just fine mainly because the English used is simple, without fancy words and direct to the point.
everyone understands each other just fine mainly because the English used is simple, without fancy words and direct to the point
Fine. So what? Just because it works doesn't mean it's perfect or frictionless.
Lots of software and business concepts are not simple. They take a long time to explain, and they're hard to express with a language (English) that was not designed to express them.
Like I said, it's a problem between two native English speakers, too. It's just more of a problem when one of those people is missing chunks of vocabulary or doesn't understand some of the small, impactful differences in wording in English.
My business partner is Israeli and speaks excellent English, and we still run into these problems sometimes.
Damn near caused an outage because the offshore team didn't know that idiom, and I didn't think about how they might not understand that. Told the not to get into the nitty-gritty of the upgrade until we knew more about how the customer was going to build -- but they didn't know what that meant and kept trying to finalize router configs.
Even with fluency little stuff like this can kill. There is a reason NATO makes everyone learn the same phonetic alphabet and radio transmission patters.
I would say that it's actually one of Europe's disadvantages. While people in management positions usually do very well with English, technical people often have problem expressing their intention and speak awkwardly and/or simplify their message by necessity. The difference can be felt especially when the same team is allowed to speak in its native language (assuming everyone is a native in a given country).
Would you have the same problem working with non native English speaker immigrant programmers in the US? They’ve spoken English for decades but not native speakers.
Where they live is irrelevant, except that there's a correlation between speaking English natively and living in the US. The only real variable is their fluency, so an American living in Tibet would be easier to work with than an immigrant in Ohio who has only been speaking English for a year.
My anecdotal experience with this is minimal because immigrants often work with larger companies than mine, but I have had a few.
One coworker was from Ukraine, and communication was very hard. He'd been in the US for more than 10 years, but he sounded like his only experience speaking English was from formal classrooms. As someone who is awful at learning and pronouncing foreign languages, I can definitely sympathize with him. I'm sure it was not an issue of effort at all.
The others were Indian, and there was no noticeable communication barrier. They knew (and used) American idioms, and they never seemed to have trouble keeping up with the mumbly way that tech people often talk. These were CTO-level, went to top colleges, and probably had a lot of English immersion in India before they moved.
Comments
I've hired and worked with many dozens of devs around the world. Some I worked with for 10 days, others for years.
The only downside that I haven't found a solution for is communication. Even with brilliant people who had been speaking English for decades, a lot gets lost because of language.
It's hard enough to talk to other Americans about technical issues. It's harder when the other person is losing small, important distinctions in each sentence.
It's obviously not a dealbreaker. The benefits of hiring internationally outweigh the drawbacks. In fact, no company I've ever helped build could have succeeded hiring only Americans.
Weird. Half Europe (IT industry) speaks broken English and everyone understands each other just fine mainly because the English used is simple, without fancy words and direct to the point.
Fine. So what? Just because it works doesn't mean it's perfect or frictionless.
Lots of software and business concepts are not simple. They take a long time to explain, and they're hard to express with a language (English) that was not designed to express them.
Like I said, it's a problem between two native English speakers, too. It's just more of a problem when one of those people is missing chunks of vocabulary or doesn't understand some of the small, impactful differences in wording in English.
My business partner is Israeli and speaks excellent English, and we still run into these problems sometimes.
"Nitty-gritty"
Damn near caused an outage because the offshore team didn't know that idiom, and I didn't think about how they might not understand that. Told the not to get into the nitty-gritty of the upgrade until we knew more about how the customer was going to build -- but they didn't know what that meant and kept trying to finalize router configs.
Even with fluency little stuff like this can kill. There is a reason NATO makes everyone learn the same phonetic alphabet and radio transmission patters.
I would say that it's actually one of Europe's disadvantages. While people in management positions usually do very well with English, technical people often have problem expressing their intention and speak awkwardly and/or simplify their message by necessity. The difference can be felt especially when the same team is allowed to speak in its native language (assuming everyone is a native in a given country).
Would you have the same problem working with non native English speaker immigrant programmers in the US? They’ve spoken English for decades but not native speakers.
Where they live is irrelevant, except that there's a correlation between speaking English natively and living in the US. The only real variable is their fluency, so an American living in Tibet would be easier to work with than an immigrant in Ohio who has only been speaking English for a year.
My anecdotal experience with this is minimal because immigrants often work with larger companies than mine, but I have had a few.
One coworker was from Ukraine, and communication was very hard. He'd been in the US for more than 10 years, but he sounded like his only experience speaking English was from formal classrooms. As someone who is awful at learning and pronouncing foreign languages, I can definitely sympathize with him. I'm sure it was not an issue of effort at all.
The others were Indian, and there was no noticeable communication barrier. They knew (and used) American idioms, and they never seemed to have trouble keeping up with the mumbly way that tech people often talk. These were CTO-level, went to top colleges, and probably had a lot of English immersion in India before they moved.