Your argument ignores one important aspect - incentives.
English is the global lingua franca, hence the incentive to learn English is incredibly strong. Outside of Germany, what exact benefit does the German language get you?
English is the global lingua franca, hence the incentive to learn English is incredibly strong. Outside of Germany, what exact benefit does the German language get you?
German is also official language in Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg. In many neighbouring countries it is also often well-understood and/or there exist language minorities.
> English is the global lingua franca
From my professional experience I can tell that depending on the countries or persons from countries that you deal with, Spanish, French, Russian or Chinese can be much more important than English.
So, calling English the global lingua franca is in my opinion rather based on a selection bias on specific countries.
In software, if you don't speak English, you don't really exist. Same for pilots and some other industries. Spanish programmers will need to learn English even for jobs in Spain. I have no idea what you are talking about.
I know from programmers from Russia that in this country, you can pretty much do software development without knowing any English, Russian suffices (to the surprise of programmers from other countries). This is also why it cannot taken for granted that a programmer who comes from Russia knows English (at least more than minimal, shallow knowledge from school).
I heard similar things about programmers in China.