alt Hacker News> In software, if you don't speak English, you don't really exist. Same for pilots and some other industries. Spanish programmers will need to learn English even for jobs in Spain. I have no idea what you are talking about.
I know from programmers from Russia that in this country, you can pretty much do software development without knowing any English, Russian suffices (to the surprise of programmers from other countries). This is also why it cannot taken for granted that a programmer who comes from Russia knows English (at least more than minimal, shallow knowledge from school).
I heard similar things about programmers in China.
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Dude, software itself is written in English, not just English but it is most often (but not always) encoded in a character set that is English specific (can't even do French). The docs for every single platform, API and language are in English. You can get translations for some stuff and auto-translate the rest. But you can't even file a bug without English. The people you know probably don't write software, they are probably using computers to scam people and deploy software written by others to aid in that.
Can confirm. Many a time my colleagues tried to write some comments in English, and the result was so broken I wished they hadn't even tried.