[malandrew]

It's not US-centric. It's English-centric and English is the lingua franca of software engineering as it is with many other professions. TBH, programming is and will always will be English centric and I would never feel 100% confident with any software engineer that isn't very proficient in English insofar as reading and writing are concerned. Practically every tome, text, blog or article of any real value in the field is published in English, and only once they are really well known are they translated to other languages. The only time the English speaking programming World is behind that of another language is when a new language is developed by a non-native English speaker (such as Lua developed in Brazil and Ruby developed in Japan). And even then no language would ever see popular adoption to the point of importance if it doesn't adopt English as the language of its source and its documentation.

This isn't bigotry. This is just the way things are.

FWIW, English isn't my first language, Portuguese is, but I have native fluency in English.

[jballanc]

> This isn't bigotry. This is just the way things are.

Indeed, I don't think this situation is all that different from Medicine or Biology. Parts of anatomy, diseases, and taxonomic classifications will forever be known by their Latin names. Likewise, programmers will probably still be referring to "if" statements and "for" loops long after no English speakers remain.

[mseebach]

> Likewise, programmers will probably still be referring to "if" statements and "for" loops long after no English speakers remain.

Or, in reverse; I knew what those words did in BASIC before I knew what they meant in English (which isn't my native language).

[kolinko]

Same here :)

[mangodrunk]

    ... will always will be English centric ...  

I don't think you can claim that. Maybe for the next few decades or centuries but beyond that who knows what will happen.

    Practically every tome, text, blog or article of any
    real value in the field is published in English ...  

Is it possible that you just don't know they exist? You probably don't know enough to make such claims, as an English speaker myself, I know of a few books that I would want to read but they haven't been translated yet. There aren't many, but then again I don't know about others because of me not knowing the language.

[burgerbrain]

To add to this, I suspect any non-English speaker would rather have English comments that they can at least throw at Google Translate, than no comments at all.

[gbog]

That do not match my experience in a Chinese Web company. All my colleagues are very good hackers but only some of them are confident at writing English. Most important literature is translated in Chinese, and they prefer reading translated versions. Comments in the code are in Chinese. It is sometime a bit more difficult for us for variables and functions names but it works.

I would agree that a good coder must be able to express clearly and unambiguously complex processes in mother tongue and his programming language of choice but excellent grasp of English is only a "nice to have", when your local community is developed enough.

[nknight]

From my work with Taiwanese engineers, I have found that reading and writing are as much two different skills as speaking and listening are.

Almost all of them can read English remarkably well, but some of the emails I get from them... Often grammar and syntax are nowhere to be found, and the vocabulary is occasionally amusing (a couple of the memorable gems have been "USB sticker", presumably thinking of "USB stick" (and still ambiguous in the context of the message, what they were talking about was a USB WiFi dongle), and "redeploy" referring to a reboot or power cycle).