We hire people remotely, though so it happens that they dwell mostly in Poland (plus on in the UK and one moving to SF); that gives us a bigger advantage over companies that employ locally people that must communicate in English only, e.g. by easier company get-togethers and basically smoother in-house communication.
This. I was getting more interested at every line, until I read about the Polish.
I mean, I'm italian (from Italy, not NY :p), and I would only require English because it's just the main language in tech in the current period of time.
That's true - we won't consider anyone without a good command of English. However, as written below, we think the overall communication could get fragmented if there was only one English-only speaking person in the company.
That's definitely understandable, though I guess a bit sad. Does anyone who's not Polish speak Polish? That hasn't been my experience. I've met a few Polish people and seemed such a foreign language to me(doesn't sound like any European or Slavic language I've ever heard). Does it have any related languages whose speakers would be able to pick it up easily?(such as French/Spanish/Italian for example).
Since you're hiring and working remotely doesn't this severely restrict your hiring pool?
Yup, that's true. People from Ukraine, Russia, Slovakia, Czech Republic can easily relate to Polish.
This might be a bit controversial (purely my opinion, not company's) but I think that you'd rather either go full monty and employ 100% multicultural crew or rather stick to a 100% monocultural group. Why? For easier communication.
I recall a situation, working at my previous work, where we hired one guy from South America. His tech side was impeccable, his English needed some brushing up, he's really amiable yet the main problem was people not always switching to English with him around. Not out of malice, some people weren't that comfortable with Eng.
I am Greek/Italian, with a good command of both langs, but talking about development or even IT any other language than (my poor) English it's cumbersome.
The thing is all of us are Polish and we had a discussion some time ago about hiring English speaking people. The problem was that it would make the communication more complicated (switching from Polish to English for inhouse communication) while providing little benefit for us at this particular time (there's still a lot of talent to scoop in Poland) so we decided to not recruit foreigners. This may change someday, but I don't think it will be in a forseeable future.
Certainly a foreigner who is wild enough to have learned Polish and is a developer is probably a good candidate. I would be interested if it included language lessons, but that is a bit much to ask.
That is a good point. The other way to look at it is a way to go back to Poland, especially if you do not intend to stay in Warsaw where I assume more of the job opportunities are.