[kuriho]

Yes, knowing English enough to read/understand the latest books in your field and being able to look up solutions online is absolutely necessary.

While I don't recommend it, you can definitely use Japanese and Cyrillic characters in Unicode compatible languages. There are people out there translating docs of popular libraries. Heck, even 3rd rate Blender books get translated into Japanese but they rarely make it into stores before the version used is already out of date.

[wink]

I don't have any numbers, but I'm inclined to claim that in any reasonably large economy there's tons of software engineering (or maybe programmer) jobs where you will never touch anything "latest" :)

In Germany there are quite some developers whose English is very basic (very often older than 40 or 50) and especially those who grew up in the East (some or most had Russian in school and not English). I mean, usually it's not -zero- but really basic on a reading level, even less writing. I'm not in any way saying they're bad at what they do - if you work in some fields you can absolutely get by just sticking to German variable names (or guesswork English) and those 50 keywords of your language aren't usually a problem. For looking stuff up online there's google translate.

On the other hand I would not -advise- against trying to be the best at English that you can, because if you happen to need to read some complicated stuff like advanced books or papers.. Let's just say I wouldn't look forward to reading even anything medium-level in another language where I only have basic proficiency...

Fun fact: I've actually seen one codebase where all the domain knowledge was German and everything "normal" was English - and it was the right thing to do. Was an application for a bank and they had a technical Glossary with obscure financial technical terms where a) the meaning might get lost in the translation and b) not even the domain experts would know them off the back of the hand. Also the chance you'll have international people working on this intra-country level stuff was deemed very slim. Not sure if the bank got bought by an int'l one later though :P

[kuriho]

You actually describe my day job pretty accurately. SAP based legacy systems where everything from system variables to customer codebase is this weird mix of English and German. Strict project guidelines and code review sessions can only catch part of this mess before it's rolled into production.

We have junior devs come and go that simply look problems up online, because they are able to translate their questions into proper English, that the senior German-only devs would spend days trying to work out by themselves. Or they somehow find the same solutions online but can't make sense of what Google Translate spits out for them. It's equally hilarious and sad to see a junior dev being used as a seniors LetMeGoogleThatForYou.