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by lgieron 4446 days ago
> I want to underline that in most countries in Europe, the language of programming and tech environments is mostly English (documentation, internal communication, white-board meetings). So just English is enough in most cases.

That is not my experience of working in Poland. As a native, I've worked in multiple projects and Polish was the communication language in all of them. I am sure there are jobs available where everyday communication is in English, but my guess would be that they are in minority.
1 comments
copter 4446 days ago
I was not directly referring to Poland here but more like to the tech driven countries of Europe (Germany, Estonia, Scandinavian countries etc.)

As for Poland, indeed the white-board meetings will held in Polish if everybody else is Polish.

Being a non-Polish developer employed in Poland - during the relationships I engage with other partners or the projects that I work with my team, everybody are totally Okey switching to English for discussion. In-fact they think that they are improving their communication skills.

Talking about documentation or any other material that is necessary for a software project, I have never seen a language other than English in such places.

Of course these are the companies/projects has a revenue, impact or importance higher than an average one. If you are developing websites for locals with ASP.NET 1.1, just ignore what I have been talking about.

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lgieron 4446 days ago
I think that you might have just been insulated from the large parts of Polish software industry which straight up wouldn't hire someone who doesn't speak Polish. And it's not just some small shops doing websites for locals, some of the projects I've been on had hundreds of developer-years worth of work in them, tens of thousands of pages of documentation - and were being performed in Polish exclusively.

For a foreigner, IMO the best bet would be to get work at places like R&D centers for Google, ABB, Motorola, IBM (all in Cracow), Intel (Gdansk), Samsung (Warsaw), Nokia (Wroclaw). Since they're multinationals, English shouldn't be a problem.

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