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Comment by dartdartdart | Hacker News Reader

Agree, but this does skew in favor of people who's first language is English, which shouldn't really be an indicator of engineering quality.

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If anything I would think this is the opposite. Written communication above verbal/face-to-face gives the non-native speaker greater time to formulate their correspondence, look things up if necessary, and use translation tools for help. On the flip side they may get less from language-agnostic channels such as body language, but I think that is a small loss compared to the gains.

IDK for me as a non-native english speaker, it's harder to discern non-native english from native english speakers when inspecting written communication as it is when listening to spoken communication. I assume it's the same for native english speakers, but please say if you disagree.

Also, I think it's easier for non-native folks to both comprehend others and communicate as they can look up stuff or use google translate.

I'm a native English speaker who works with mostly non-native English speakers. And in my experience written English is much closer in similarity(and basically indistinguishable) to a native speaker's written communication than spoken english is to a native speaker's.

I think the reason is as someone else in the thread said, it gives you more time to formulate your thoughts and there is tooling to support cleaning up your thoughts (spellcheck, more time to look up words, translation tools, etc.)

I think this is also true for the language I'm trying to learn right now, Ukrainian. When I try to speak it the problem is that I don't have enough time to think about what words I'm looking for. I don't have time to think about my grammar/declensions(very hard for me as an English speaker). But when I interact with Ukrainian speakers online in a written format I can actually formulate sentences that don't sound like I'm 5 years old. Instead I get to sound like I'm maybe 8 years old :)

An engineer that can't communicate properly is a poor engineer, regardless of their coding ability. I've worked with too many great coders who were terrible at communicating. This includes engineers who were fluent at English. Communication is an extremely important skill.

This is a reality of life. If I moved to Nigeria and could barely speak the language, should I expect people to accommodate my poor communication skills? Or would I get passed over for a local who is possibly sub par in terms of coding quality but is more effective in all parts of their job?

> If I moved to Nigeria and could barely speak the language

English?

lol I randomly picked the worst example in the world. But you know what I meant, some country that didn't have English as an popular language. You know, like India! (just kidding!)

I just learned right now that Nigeria's official language is English!

Not writing well doesn't mean that you don't communicate well. Plenty of engineers can communicate just fine in English, just sloppily without perfect grammar.

You never work with people working in different countries? In the same company, or just some partners (suppliers, customers…).

I don’t think it skews towards English speakers in particular: it actually skews towards strong communicators in the preferred communication language of the team. A great engineer who can’t communicate effectively with the team due to a language barrier isn’t a very useful team member. It’s tempting to think that technical ability should be the sole measure of someone’s worth as a engineer but that simply not true outside of working in a vacuum.

But English skill is a major component of being a strong communicator in English.

Native English speakers who practice speaking English every minute of their lives would be at a huge advantage.

Not necessarily. English as a second language speakers who may have a accent or take longer to formulate their responses are at a disadvantage in person. I've met many who have expansive vocabularies and impeccable grammar, and I am one myself, but it's hard for us to get over the first impression of the accent and to formulate our responses with natural timing.

For us writing sets a level playing field.

> A great engineer who can’t communicate effectively with the team due to a language barrier isn’t a very useful team member.

This is a much lesser bar than "strong English writing skills" that the article say you should require. "strong English writing skills" will force you to overlook most immigrants, but most of the great engineers in USA are immigrants so you'd handicap yourself by doing that.

You'd handicap yourself much worse by hiring people that you can't effectively communicate with.

You're not necessarily hiring people you're working with, even if you're hiring for your local office.

Say your company has an office in Germany, well you're going to communicate with colleagues whose native language is German. Or say your company decides to select a supplier from Japan, you have to communicate with them. You can't say they shouldn't have been hired in the first place.

That’s a completely different topic from hiring immigrants with insufficient English skills.

If they can't even communicate in person because they aren't familiar with English, they shouldn't even be considering a remote job where they have to write and overcommunicate in English all the time.

> this does skew in favor of people who's first language is English

You mean the people who don't know the difference between your and you're ?

Not really, unless you assume that a great writer is someone with perfect grammar, as opposed to someone who is good at communicating their ideas in text (and image) form.

In fact you should probably deliberately include some grammatical errors and omissions so that you can flush out the people whom are unable to understand which things matter and which don't.

First language is Danish btw.

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