• (cs)

    Send him on a couple months of English course, and get a great worker. No problem at all. Much more preferable than a candidate with fluid English but needing years of programming courses, logical thinking courses or as the case may seem on some occasions, brain transplant.

  • MuTaTeD (unregistered)

    Lagta Hay Aaj baray dinnon baad mujhay Frist comment karnay ka mouqa mila hay.

    Above Commend in Urdu, my native language

  • DQ (unregistered)

    I was sure that if I looked up 'Elbonia' I would find nothing. Instead I got 78000 hits on google. Perhaps I'll go there for my next vacation :)

  • imgx64 (unregistered)

    Relevant: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/03/the-ugly-american-programmer.html

    CAPTCHA: decet. Obviously Akismet cannot communicate well in English.

  • OldCoder (unregistered) in reply to georgir
    georgir:
    Send him on a couple months of English course, and get a great worker. No problem at all. Much more preferable than a candidate with fluid English but needing years of programming courses, logical thinking courses or as the case may seem on some occasions, brain transplant.
    Er, no. Why should Sean's company pick up the tab because this guy couldn't be bothered to learn the language of the country he is trying to get a job in? Sean did.

    You can't expect to roll up in [Insert random country here] and get any job without being able to speak the local lingo.

    Captcha: appellatio. I'm afraid to ask...

  • (cs)

    I'm native Spanish speaker and I completely disregard any software/IT related professional who doesn't speaks/understands a minimum of English.

    Why? In code I hate to see stuff like:

    if is variableTemporal: # Esto va a imprimir algo print algo

    It's really annoying to be kept going in/out of English. I really hate localization of English words like hardware, software, cpu, etc.

    I'm specially hateful of people who say: encriptación (this word doesn't even exists) instead of "cifrado".

    And finally, any programming book worth reading probably won't be translated to Spanish. Hell, StackOverflow is all in English!

  • Andre (unregistered)

    To me, the real WTF is how it could possibly be considered discrimination to demand a candidate for any position is proficient in the primary language used by the existing team.

  • Pero perić (unregistered)

    I have a feeling I saw this article last week. Elbonian coders must be a real issue recently.

  • PR (unregistered) in reply to georgir
    georgir:
    Send him on a couple months of English course, and get a great worker. No problem at all. Much more preferable than a candidate with fluid English but needing years of programming courses, logical thinking courses or as the case may seem on some occasions, brain transplant.

    Technical skills are a lot easier to learn than a new language if the person already has a background in IT. Not to mention that the older you are, the harder it is to learn a new language.

    I've learned English as my second language around my fifteens and now closing to thirty I've learned Spanish and it was a lot harder. (Though I'll give you that since it's latin-rooted like Portuguese the similarities make it harder to learn too)

    Captcha: Abico?

  • epic (unregistered) in reply to Pero perić

    You probably did. Someone found links to unpublished articles by "screwing around with the comments article id"

  • Michael P (unregistered) in reply to Andre

    It is vastly cheaper to have an unofficial (and unwritten) policy about that than to deal with a lawsuit. Employment law and courts in effect almost start off with a presumption that the employer is in the wrong.

  • olaf (unregistered) in reply to epic
    epic:
    You probably did. Someone found links to unpublished articles by "screwing around with the comments article id"

    Well, it still works. Not the "end of the world" ;)

  • (cs) in reply to OldCoder
    OldCoder:
    You can't expect to roll up in [Insert random country here] and get any job without being able to speak the local lingo.
    That depends quite a lot on the type of work you do. For example, academics are (at least in Europe) expected to work at least a couple of years in a foreign country, and rarely learn the language unless they stay.

    For example, I am currently doing a research project in Sweden, at a Swedish university, and out of 8 people in team only 1 person is Swedish. No two of us are from the same country, and we use English exclusively.

    It depends of course on where you are (the smaller countries tend to more easily accept English as the workplace vernacular), but there are plenty of 'international' workplaces in bigger countries too.

    Having said that, English does seem to be the primary go-to language - especially for programmers. Strange that someone would not at least be functionally proficient in it.

  • jkupski (unregistered) in reply to OldCoder
    OldCoder:
    Er, no. Why should Sean's company pick up the tab because this guy couldn't be bothered to learn the language of the country he is trying to get a job in? Sean did.

    While I'd normally agree with you, in this case, I don't; the company hired the guy and, IMHO, it would be unethical to fire him based on the language issue, since it was known during the interview. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade--send the guy for some training and build a good employee.

  • Kyrall (unregistered) in reply to Andre

    It absolutely IS discrimination - which is of course an essential part of an interview (not to mention a normal, healthy life).

    I can't stand the daft demonisation of the word "discrimination". The phrase should be "unfair discrimination", and to be perfectly honest I'm not 100% sure about that either...

  • Kyrall (unregistered) in reply to Kyrall
    Kyrall:
    It absolutely IS discrimination - which is of course an essential part of an interview (not to mention a normal, healthy life).

    I can't stand the daft demonisation of the word "discrimination". The phrase should be "unfair discrimination", and to be perfectly honest I'm not 100% sure about that either...

    I forgot to include the post I replied to:

    Andre:
    To me, the real WTF is how it could possibly be considered discrimination to demand a candidate for any position is proficient in the primary language used by the existing team.
  • (cs)

    How is this a WTF? If you go to another country, you should be expected to know enough of the local language to communicate. The WTF is that Sean didn't mention when he recommended the guy that he said "But he can't speak English very well; I did the interview in Elbonian since he was more comfortable speaking that." that way at least management knew and could choose not to hire him.

    Seriously though, if you come to America speak English of some form so people can understand you. Yes, have pride in your original culture but speak it at home and with close friends, don't force everyone else to speak YOUR language in OUR country.

  • Mikael (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    How is this a WTF? If you go to another country, you should be expected to know enough of the local language to communicate.
    Well, at my workplace in Norway, it's certainly not expected that everyone speaks Norwegian. Though, everybody should be able to communicate in English. All code, documentation and written communication is in English, English should be used if someone in the conversation doesn't speak Norwegian. I guess that's how it is in a small country with it's own language.
  • bfandreas (unregistered)

    I hardly comment but this is indeed a story of organizational failure. but it is failure on many levels.

    First there is Sean who obviously didn't think this through. That's trivial so I won't elaborate on that.

    Secondly, there is HR. WHO DIDN'T DO THEIR FSCHCKING JOB. Carting the guy off to an elbonian team was a stupid move. Why does that team exist in the first place?

    If you find a great addition to your team but run into a snag then you bloody well should work on the snag! And the obvious solution to that is intensive language training. If your latest addition to the team seems to be the bees knees then sending him to intensive language courses doesn't cost you a thing. Well, ok, it will cost you the fees for the language course but hiring is such a painful process that it should really be worth it.

    So a two month corporate porduct training during the first half of the day(in a mixture of Elbonian/English) and English lessons during the second part of the day would go a long way.

    If you are unwilling to invest into your hires then expect to get what you pay for. This is HR's job and they aren't doing it.

  • (cs) in reply to Mikael
    Mikael:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    How is this a WTF? If you go to another country, you should be expected to know enough of the local language to communicate.
    Well, at my workplace in Norway, it's certainly not expected that everyone speaks Norwegian. Though, everybody should be able to communicate in English. All code, documentation and written communication is in English, English should be used if someone in the conversation doesn't speak Norwegian. I guess that's how it is in a small country with it's own language.
    This reminded me of a time back in the late 90s when a group of engineers, including me, was sent to Tel Aviv to visit the engineers in the offices of a company ours had recently bought over there. We, naturally, didn't speak Hebrew, and there were evidently directives to speak English around us.

    At one point, however, the locals decided to break into Hebrew to discuss something right in front of us. Their manager arrived in the middle of this discussion and reinforced the impression I had already formed that he was a pretty cool guy. He heard what was going on and chewed them out in English for being rude to their guests (us), seeing as how we didn't speak their language. The point is not so much a question of English versus other languages, but that we non-speakers had been sent without reference to our competence with their language, and therefore since they could accommodate us, they should. And the manager was prepared to make sure that we knew that he understood that point.

    (It's worth also noting that some of them weren't native Hebrew speakers either... A large fraction of Israel's population is made up of immigrants from countries that don't natively speak Hebrew.)

  • Anon (unregistered)

    This reminded me of a somewhat more scary situation here in the UK (if you believe the newspapers).

    Seems a lot of doctors were mis-diagnosing patients and/or prescribing incorrect medicines, because the health service was merrily hiring overseas doctors without even bothering to check they could speak or understand English. Meaning they couldn't communicate with their patients, a rather vital requirement.

    Only recently has a rule been put in place that says doctors must be reasonably fluent in English.

  • Jeff Dege (unregistered)

    Could have been worse.

    He might have been a Lisper...

  • (cs) in reply to DQ
    DQ:
    I was sure that if I looked up 'Elbonia' I would find nothing. Instead I got 78000 hits on google. Perhaps I'll go there for my next vacation :)

    It's a Dilbert reference. It's a stand-in name for a foreign country when the strip needs one.

  • Rookierookie (unregistered) in reply to OldCoder
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    How is this a WTF? If you go to another country, you should be expected to know enough of the local language to communicate. The WTF is that Sean didn't mention when he recommended the guy that he said "But he can't speak English very well; I did the interview in Elbonian since he was more comfortable speaking that." that way at least management knew and could choose not to hire him.

    Seriously though, if you come to America speak English of some form so people can understand you. Yes, have pride in your original culture but speak it at home and with close friends, don't force everyone else to speak YOUR language in OUR country.

    Actually that is completely untrue, the majority of American and British folks in most countries where the native language is not English never learn the slightest bit of the native language. Which is fine for them because in most of these countries English is spoken, with varying degrees of competence, and they tend to move in circles where people speak English quite well, but the fact remains that most people moving to English speaking countries are expected to be fluent in English, while the reverse is almost never true for English speakers.

  • D (unregistered)

    I've been interviewing the last 2 weeks.

    What I hate is doing interviews with thick-accented Elbonians, but then the job is either with native speakers or Tungorian accents.

    It kills your confidence to keep asking "what?" and then you realize it's a simple question.

  • (cs) in reply to ubersoldat
    ubersoldat:
    And finally, any programming book worth reading probably won't be translated to Spanish. Hell, StackOverflow is all in English!
    What about El Arte de Programar Ordenadores (vol. 1)? Yes, it's an old translation and it seems nobody bothered after that -- that's a bit sad. There's nothing wrong with good translations. I quite enjoyed reading a few of Knuth's fascicles published in Polish.

    I do agree that transliterated borrowings from English are tragic, especially when perfectly good native equivalents exist! Your example of made-up encriptación is perfect. I was horrified to learn that in Poland they use the word celebrytka, meaning "celebrity", when a Polish word sławna would do just fine. Sigh.

  • (cs) in reply to ubersoldat
    ubersoldat:
    In code I hate to see stuff like:

    if is variableTemporal: # Esto va a imprimir algo print algo

    Agreed. LibreOffice has the following listed as a job up for grabs: Easy Hack - Translate Comments from German to English. The german StarOffice division geniuses thought it a good idea to comment in German. Sigh.
  • (cs) in reply to Kuba
    Kuba:
    ubersoldat:
    And finally, any programming book worth reading probably won't be translated to Spanish. Hell, StackOverflow is all in English!
    What about El Arte de Programar Ordenadores (vol. 1)? Yes, it's an old translation and it seems nobody bothered after that -- that's a bit sad. There's nothing wrong with good translations. I quite enjoyed reading a few of Knuth's fascicles published in Polish.

    I do agree that transliterated borrowings from English are tragic, especially when perfectly good native equivalents exist! Your example of made-up encriptación is perfect. I was horrified to learn that in Poland they use the word celebrytka, meaning "celebrity", when a Polish word sławna would do just fine. Sigh.

    You might want to review that opinion. Maybe you should be glad they haven't contaminated the perfectly good Polish word with the sense "oxygen-stealing talentless idiot who is famous only for being famous". (Of course maybe sławna really does mean that, in which case I'll be glad to be corrected.)

  • bILL (unregistered) in reply to DQ

    And 150,000 on Bing. Case closed.

  • hh (unregistered)

    TRWTF is colleagues (or even worse, managers) who, perfectly equipped with native English, still utterly fail to communicate. When many foreigners, with their slightly odd constructions, or struggles to find the right word, still manage to make themselves understood.

    That reminds me, time to find another job...

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to georgir
    georgir:
    Send him on a couple months of English course, and get a great worker. No problem at all. Much more preferable than a candidate with fluid English but needing years of programming courses, logical thinking courses or as the case may seem on some occasions, brain transplant.

    I can pick up any programming language you want in a week or two, a foreign language? Not so much.

    Maybe you're one of those people who are really good with human languages, and if so, good for you, but don't assume everybody has that same skill. If this guy was looking for a job in an English-speaking country and didn't speak a lick of English, there's probably little hope that he's gonna pick it up in a "couple of months". If he could, he probably would have done it already.

  • (cs) in reply to Kuba
    Kuba:
    ubersoldat:
    In code I hate to see stuff like:

    if is variableTemporal: # Esto va a imprimir algo print algo

    Agreed. LibreOffice has the following listed as a job up for grabs: Easy Hack - Translate Comments from German to English. The german StarOffice division geniuses thought it a good idea to comment in German. Sigh.
    I work in France for a French company. The only time that English is routinely used when talking to each other is in company-wide stuff that includes the non-French employees in Spain / Italy / Germany / Britain / Holland / etc. Despite that, all variables are named in English (although pronunciation when they are read out is mostly as if they were in French), and comments are written in English as well. I sometimes (depending on the sort of capricious mood I'm in) make efforts to suppress in my comments the otherwise whimsically idiomatic hybrid(*) English I'd use in a full-on English-speaking environment. At other moments, I just let rip. In four years, nobody has dared / bothered to ask what exactly I mean in the more idiosyncratic comments.

    (*) It's a hybrid of mostly British spelling along with some American constructions and vocabulary. It's only "mostly" British spelling because I can't remember anymore which is the British spelling convention on certain things, like single or double ell when adding -ing or -ed to l-terminal verbs like travel. I only spent nine years in the US, and left there over twenty years ago, but I still don't remember which is which.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to bfandreas
    bfandreas:
    Secondly, there is HR. WHO DIDN'T DO THEIR FSCHCKING JOB.

    Absolutely this. Just about everywhere I've ever seen (except very small companies) start with a phone interview with HR or some kind of corporate recruiter. This should have revealed the lack of language skills straight away.

  • (cs) in reply to Rookierookie
    Rookierookie:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    How is this a WTF? If you go to another country, you should be expected to know enough of the local language to communicate. The WTF is that Sean didn't mention when he recommended the guy that he said "But he can't speak English very well; I did the interview in Elbonian since he was more comfortable speaking that." that way at least management knew and could choose not to hire him.

    Seriously though, if you come to America speak English of some form so people can understand you. Yes, have pride in your original culture but speak it at home and with close friends, don't force everyone else to speak YOUR language in OUR country.

    Actually that is completely untrue, the majority of American and British folks in most countries where the native language is not English never learn the slightest bit of the native language. Which is fine for them because in most of these countries English is spoken, with varying degrees of competence, and they tend to move in circles where people speak English quite well, but the fact remains that most people moving to English speaking countries are expected to be fluent in English, while the reverse is almost never true for English speakers.

    I guess I'm in a rare minority of Brits, then. I live in France and take a sort of utilitarian pride in not breaking into English when speaking to my colleagues, even if my French isn't quite good enough to easily express what I want to say. And this is *despite* being invited to do so.

    It's pride in that I don't want to descend into the sort of linguistico-cultural arrogance that the English are historically known for, that of speaking English slowly and loudly in the hopes that this will be better understood. I take pride in showing them that we can do better. It's utilitarian in that persisting in this forces me to improve my French, which in turn aids in many other every-day activities.

    Bah.

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered) in reply to ubersoldat
    ubersoldat:
    I'm native Spanish speaker and I completely disregard any software/IT related professional who doesn't speaks/understands a minimum of English.

    Why? In code I hate to see stuff like:

    if is variableTemporal: # Esto va a imprimir algo print algo

    In my college days, I once signed up for an Anthropology course for a general elective.

    On the first day of the class, the (female, not that it mattered) prof started talking about "Australiopitico". I dropped the class immediately.

    I don't care how much Spanish-language culture there is in San Antonio (where I was, and I still miss it, being a mere 80 miles to the north in Austin, where there are actual non-tourism-related jobs), Anthropology is a science class, not an arts class, and you damn well will use the proper scientific terminology for the language you are speaking to the class.

  • Jerome Eteve (unregistered) in reply to OldCoder

    Well, if there wasn't a half elbonian team already in the company, there would be only two ways out of this situation:

    • Dismiss the guy. But a lawyer will probably argue that the company DID hire him knowing he was not speaking english. That could spell trouble.

    • Bite the bullet and pay for a few months of english courses. After all, if he's technically competent (more than any english speaking candidate?) it's probably worth it.

    And a note to Sean for later: do not hire non-english speakers ever again.

  • (cs)

    I really enjoyed the style of the writing of this article. Great job, snoofle!

  • AV (unregistered)

    To me, the WTF is not that an English-speaking company hired a dev who could not speak English. To me, the WTF is that they hired a dev who could not speak English, full stop.

    All developers we hire have to know English, at least in writing. And i'm a German working for a German company in Germany. The language in the office is German. Our clients are mainly German. However, the coding language is English (comments, variable/class/method names, commit messages...).

  • (cs)

    "The poor guy was made to sit at a desk and stare at the wall for his whole first day."

    So he had the typical first day experience of a new hire at a big company.

  • Dave_H (unregistered)

    In one company I employed a Ukranian, Nigerian, German, and a Chinese man whose name we could not pronounce! (We also gave him a copy of Roger Mellie's prophanosorous to learn better English from!) After a few weeks we (including a dozen English) could all understand each other well enough verbally, but all the time having no problems at all in written word. (All except the Irishman none of us could understand in the afternoon after a lunchtime drinking session.)

    In another job as a consultant I worked for a German company, where all business was conducted in English as they thought that German was so cumbersome, and a Norwegian company where they switched to English mid-sentence whenever I drew near.

    When I worked for a few years for many of the Formula One teams, everyone spoke English apart from one (now defunct) French team where even us English Engineers had to speak French to each other.

    I've also spent time at a French holiday camp, where the 'English' were derided for not speaking French to the French staff. Listening carefully I could understand all the accents, and the English speakers were from just about every country in Western Europe, and most of the truly English guests were at least trying a little schoolboy French.

    In the UK many Pharmacists are Danish, as Pharmacy training in Denmark is conducted in English (it being too small a country to justify translating the text books), and I’m sure this applies to so many other countries and occupations too.

  • Alex (unregistered)

    You old-timers and your outdated ideas of "language!" Google translate has made language barriers irrelevent when combined with a simple text-to-speach program. The only language a developer really needs to know is C-Hashtag!

    It's perfect! Look, I can translate through google multiple times and get totally reasonable results:

    Has made ​​you veterans and their ideas antique "language" Google Translate is irrelevant language barriers when combined with simple text for the clinic program. The only language that the developer really need to know is C-tag!

    (English - Spanish - Arabic - English)

  • ccj (unregistered) in reply to Kyrall
    Kyrall:
    It absolutely IS discrimination - which is of course an essential part of an interview (not to mention a normal, healthy life).

    I can't stand the daft demonisation of the word "discrimination". The phrase should be "unfair discrimination", and to be perfectly honest I'm not 100% sure about that either...

    seconded!

  • Andre (unregistered) in reply to ubersoldat
    ubersoldat:
    It's really annoying to be kept going in/out of English. I really hate localization of English words like hardware, software, cpu, etc.

    Or worst, people who mix both english and native language (portuguese, in my case) in the same member name: GetVerificacao(), IsPublicado, and so on...

    Thanks modern IDEs for global replace...

  • Paul_S (unregistered)

    I once worked on a programming project with an Chinese programmer where functionally the only languages we had in common were C++ and the English comments therein.

    You probably own an item made using that software.

  • jim (unregistered)

    It's quite clear that the real communication problem here is not with the new hire, language barrier or no. Hiring somebody fluent in Elbonian but not in English isn't necessarily a WTF if the company has a significant minority of Elbonian speakers, as this one surely does.

    Reading between the lines, I suspect that Sean did in fact tell HR "I recommend we hire this guy, but be warned, his English isn't very good and he'll need a lot of language coaching and/or mentoring by a native Elbonian speaker, and by the way, make sure there's an Elbonian speaker on hand to welcome him to the company" and HR just ticked the "hire" box and didn't bother telling anybody about the rest of it. Still, Sean really should have made sure he was around for the guy's first day himself.

  • neminem (unregistered)

    I have no problem with this, even though basically the same issue bit a friend of mine. By which I mean, he went to China to try to learn more Chinese, and when he lost his job as a tutor due to some internal politics, I said, hey, my company has a branch in Shanghai, you're living in Shanghai, your degree was in CS, maybe you should apply there! He was at that point only semi-fluent in Mandarin, but as it turns out, it didn't really matter: they mostly spoke Shanghainese there, which you will note is basically a completely different from Mandarin, and which he didn't speak at all. They said he was perfectly competent for the job, but they couldn't hire someone who couldn't talk to anyone else there in any meaningful way - which is totally a reasonable thing to require.

  • (cs) in reply to FragFrog
    FragFrog:
    OldCoder:
    You can't expect to roll up in [Insert random country here] and get any job without being able to speak the local lingo.
    That depends quite a lot on the type of work you do. For example, academics are (at least in Europe) expected to work at least a couple of years in a foreign country, and rarely learn the language unless they stay.

    For example, I am currently doing a research project in Sweden, at a Swedish university, and out of 8 people in team only 1 person is Swedish. No two of us are from the same country, and we use English exclusively.

    It depends of course on where you are (the smaller countries tend to more easily accept English as the workplace vernacular), but there are plenty of 'international' workplaces in bigger countries too.

    Having said that, English does seem to be the primary go-to language - especially for programmers. Strange that someone would not at least be functionally proficient in it.

    Sweden (as well as the whole of Scandinavia) is not a good example for this, due to the simple fact that most Scandinavians speak 2 or 3 foreign languages, with English being the most common. You'd have a much larger problem in, say, France or China.

  • Bring Back TopCod3r (unregistered) in reply to Mikael
    Mikael:
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    How is this a WTF? If you go to another country, you should be expected to know enough of the local language to communicate.
    Well, at my workplace in Norway, it's certainly not expected that everyone speaks Norwegian. Though, everybody should be able to communicate in English. All code, documentation and written communication is in English, English should be used if someone in the conversation doesn't speak Norwegian. I guess that's how it is in a small country with it's own language.

    I've heard of similar policies in Germany, so it's not just smaller countries.

  • QJo (unregistered)

    The real WTF is people incapable of learning a foreign language.

  • Jasper (unregistered)

    Is this really a WTF?

    This was clearly Sean's fault, he should have known that it would be a problem if the person he'd recommend does not understand or speak English.

Leave a comment on “Technically Competent != Qualified”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article