I’m Chief Engineer of a new startup here in Singapore. We were recently looking for a new developer for the team (position is no longer open, sorry). When the CEO and I were discussing what to look for, my very first requirement was “Eloquent fluency and literacy in standard English.” We’re using a tool stack and platform that aren’t widely seen as mainstream here, but to me, that wasn’t the primary need.

I don’t care if somebody knows all the intricacies of our toolchain as well as the teams that wrote the tools. I don’t care if she’s written sixteen systems that each model different pieces of what we’re doing. I don’t care if he’s the nicest guy you ever had a beer with. If I can’t communicate effectively and efficiently with a team member, then his or her value to the team effort drops catastrophically.

Realistically, there are only four significant (human) languages in software at the moment: English, Japanese, Russian and Chinese, with most serious developers native to the last three languages scrambling to improve their skills in the first. (Yes, I agree that it’s beyond self-defeating that too many native English speakers are monolingual, but that’s a different rant entirely.) The vast majority of technical documentation that you’re likely to deal with in Southeast Asia or North America is in English (of whatever quality). Therefore, an English-fluent team has a major step up over, say, a Japanese monolingual team.

And in my three-decades-plus in this craft, I have never, ever seen a team deliver a great product without a common language that all were highly proficient in. Very few even-mediocre products were shipped without such a team behind them. Can anybody point to counterexamples among teams that were not so large and dealing with such long timeframes that they could make effective use of translators?

My point is: given all of this, if you are communicating in English (or any other language) to participate in a development team, or in a professional discussion… if you know the language well, and don’t use it well…

In the name of all that you hold holy, why not?

I also have a huge issue with people misspelling jQuery. Why? Because as a programmer I would think that you have to pay attention to details. That’s what syntax forces us to do right? (at least in some cases)

As a former English major it bothers me quite a bit. Thanks for the post!

My “favourite” is the H1B Homework Problem, the kind of completely generic “help me” question that you’d think anybody who’d read the first three chapters of a mediocre “Intro to $LANGUAGE” book should be able to deal with as easily as breathing, and they’re asking for someone to do an entire application for them that they obviously only barely understand. Then you look at their email address or whatever and see that they’re actually on some body shop’s payroll.

Now, before you write me off, understand that I’ve run offshore-development groups, in three countries, with people who were (mostly) bright, motivated and working hard to get out from under Rumsfeld’s Rule; my position has always been that there is no such thing as a stupid question IF you don’t already know the answer AND are willing to put effort into learning.

Self-entitlement and obvious laziness are entirely the wrong attitudes to take when you’re asking for help.

The truth of the matter is that a lot of people haven’t quite learned the conventions of coding, and many (I was one of these) will go into the IRC room looking for a quick answer to a slightly complex question.

A lot of people will write these off as “newbies” or “ignorant”, but the truth of the matter is that they are usually asking in order to learn.

For those of us who can help, be careful who you write off.
For those of you who need help, don’t be afraid to ask even a simple question.

This is probably the most important bit of advice for asking questions on any forum about any programming topic.

There are several things that turn-me-off a question; no code and no demonstration page are the top two!

Another one is when people post server-side code along with their JS… this is quite regular in the ASP.NET+jQuery tags at SO. “Urm, I’m trying to make my partial .NET view slide across the screen like this cewl JQuEry plugin!??” … it’s just insane.

I don’t hang out in the chat room nearly enough to have an opinion about the questions. I think in any venue where you can ask questions there will be people who would rather not do the work themselves, and just get code to copy and paste in response to their question. IRC is slightly more relaxed than a Forum or StackOverflow for instance, but its still important not to waste other people’s time until you have spent some of your own time on the problem.

:)