Who considers it gauche to have software written in non-English? The Russians you mean? I certainly find it perfectly acceptable and even desirable depending on the contributor's English fluency.
2x BigCo's I've worked at, with 1-5K IT staff. Yandex is xbig though, with 5K+.
>That came down to the developers not speaking English at all.
That sounds implausible and not very sane, unless of course you're working for something very static like the government, and the tech stack you're using is set in stone.
Imagine that you're using a popular library and decide to update your dependencies, who's going to read the change logs & the documentation? Sr. Architect?
If you have a security issue and the only writeups are in English, who's going to be trusted to implement a fix correctly if the people can't understand what the problem is in the first place?
Anyway, you'd be surprised at how much documentation and resources are available in Portuguese. You can get by alright with it. I did it when I was younger and eager to learn how to code.
I've worked in big companies in Brazil where docs and comments were mostly in Portuguese. And some teams would even use Portuguese variable names.
Just because they do it differently in Russia, it doesn't mean every country is like that. Remember what you said about bubbles and all.
By the way, interestingly, I've briefly worked for the government there once and it was one of the places where English was most prevalent. People there were very open source oriented, which the Brazilian government incentivizes (at least used to back then). So, nearly all code had English comments and docs. Differently from closed source intiatives in the industry where other people reading it was considered a liability and not a goal.
Also, it seems that the situation with education in general is still better that in Brazil at least in some regards. In 2014 I worked in São Paulo and had a difficult time communicating with a taxi driver. I was trying to ask him to at least write the amount of money we have to pay for the ride on a slip of paper. Later a colleague explained that illiterate drivers are quite common.
In general Brazil felt mostly like home to me. Maybe Brazil is a version of Russia where homeless people don't freeze to death in the winter :)