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English is the official language of software development. English is necessary for software developers who want to work in international companies. In this article, we discuss real-world English for developers. We explore the best tips and habits and the most common uses of English in day-to-day programming to help you prepare for aninternational job.
If you're a developer that wants to land an international job faster by speaking English fluently, Leap, the online English school for developers could be for you. Learn more here.
Yes, English is necessary in software development. Let’s take a look at your life working in the Information Technology (IT) industry as a software developer.
Consider that it is your first day at a Fortune 500 company X. You are a software developer, eager and excited to take on your first project there. Your project manager assigns your first task to you via an email, completely in English. For the purposes of this article, your name is now ‘Developer-1’.
Hello Developer-1!
I’m Steve. Welcome to company X. I’ll be your English advisor. Allow me to share with you all the areas where English is necessary in software development.
The first areas, thankfully, you are already acquainted with. It is also the first information we reviewed before hiring you:
✓ Cover Letter
✓ CV (Resume)
✓ Professional LinkedIn profile and other professional social media profiles.
Other areas that will be more closely aligned with your daily duties include the following types of communication:
✓ Professional correspondence such as emails, memorandums, and formal letters
✓ Internal messaging on platforms like Slack, Discord, or Skype
✓ Descriptive README’s
✓ Github collaboration including ‘commit messages’, ‘pull requests’, ‘code reviews’, writing good ‘issues’, and writing ‘project descriptions’
✓ Meetings such as morning-session, stand-up, department, management, client, or general
✓ Growing your network with pitch statements
✓ Phrasing questions to ask for help.
This list is not exhaustive, but gives a snapshot of the scope of English activities you will likely see within international software development.
Yes, software developers should be good at English! English will be used from the very first communication in your international developer role.
To demonstrate this, here is an example of an email from your project manager:
A great professional email is short, clear, and allows the reader to visualize one idea. Learn tips for writing amazing emails in this article by Dmitriy Nizhebetskiy.
In this email, the ‘Subject’ is a mix of abbreviations and key title words that tell the reader what they expect the email to be about.
The reader knows that this email is about ‘An Excellent Start’, your ‘first project’ from the client ‘Microverse’ dated ‘June 2023’.
The next important piece of information is in the introductory sentence. The keywords are ‘project requirements’ and ‘client’. Notice that all sentences are brief and to the point.
A quick skim read of the email tells you all you need to know and you can start working as quickly as possible.
Finally, you need to include a ‘call-to-action’ (CTA) within every email. This CTA asks the reader to carry out a certain activity. The author can thus ensure reader engagement and provide a way to eliminate any reader confusion that may arise.
Notice here that the CTA is ‘Please feel free to contact me with any questions, should they come up’. Apart from giving the reader a clear way to clarify any doubts they have, the key word here is ‘Please’.
Using polite email phrases such as ‘please’, ‘thank you’, ‘could you’, and ‘I regret that…’, will go a long way for good communication.
It is common that written communication within large international companies be in English for easier communication across culturally diverse international teams. If you’d like to perform any of the following:
Then you need to understand industry specific English language.
If you need more opportunities to practice your English and these skills, consider Leap, the online English school where software developers gain the confidence to speak English fluently and land a higher-paying international developer job.
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IT is a global industry that touches many facets of life. This means that there must be a way to communicate with the stakeholders and users of technology to ensure benefits.
When the application of a particular technology is local, then communicating to understand and utilize it becomes a local challenge.
However, there are certain technologies that grow beyond the scope of a single culture, nation, or country. There are shared needs that impact the entire globe and thus require collective experience, skill, and effort from global communities.
For example, looking at a White House Archives article talking about International Scientific Collaboration, we see many humanitarian efforts would not be possible without global teamwork.
From finding ways of revolutionizing agriculture to fight hunger, to working together to combat potentially fatal diseases such as Polio, AIDS, and cancer, there has never been a greater need for us all to understand each other.
IT, which is the vehicle for many of these global initiatives, must use a common language to drive change. English is that language.
The Information Technology Industry covers many professional disciplines. Knowing or memorizing these and their related vocabulary in English can be a challenge even for native English speakers.
Unless you are working in this industry you may not be aware of these interconnected specializations or the English language required. It will be beneficial to brush up on the most common expressions to perform well in your job.
As we discussed earlier, in your daily duties as a software developer there are tasks that benefit from particular English grammatical structures and vocabulary.
Boost your English vocabulary with common phrases and grammar used in the IT industry with this free English guide for software developers and IT professionals. You’ll find useful words and phrases that every person interested in IT should know.
When working remotely, your primary form of communication is electronic; email, video conferencing, internal company instant messaging software, or voice calls. Increase your chances of getting hired in remote work with this article 7 best tips to help you get a remote job.
Oral and written English skills become a key part of your everyday responsibilities. This is greatly increased when communicating remotely. Now that you are armed with some IT industry specific lingo, let’s see how we can up our remote work game.
To successfully complete your duties Developer-1, you must communicate with different colleagues, teams, departments, management, and clients when working on your project.
This can be challenging, as our company X is distributed across culturally diverse regions around the world. It’s a good thing you’re willing to invest a great deal of time preparing yourself to communicate effectively with your peers.
It’s even better that we have a universal way to respectfully and professionally share ideas. You’ve guessed it, English!
When you focus your learning efforts on the areas where you will practice English most frequently, you cut your mastery time down to more manageable chunks.
What the best language is, is not a question that can be easily answered. The development project, tech stack of your company, and client need or scope of work, often determine which language you will use.
Different languages have strengths particular to unique job specifications. These languages are also chosen based on how much control is needed between the programming language and the machines which they instruct.
Programming languages are further separated into categories based on this balance of machine interaction. For instance, we have zero interaction between machine hardware and your written code with lower level languages.
We can also have high levels of interaction between code and machine using higher level languages. Those languages falling in the middle share characteristics of both lower level and higher level programming languages. Speed is the major difference with lower level languages. They are usually faster than higher level languages.
One thing all of these mid to high level programming languages have in common is that their instructive words are modelled after a language that is understood by humans, English.
There are many ways to improve your English. The first that comes to your mind, is often the best way. This is normally the area you are most interested in. Learning English has a great deal to do with your desire to embrace it.
What is English? It is a way to convey your thoughts, ideas, and opinions to the person that you want to receive them. If you keep that at the top of your mind, then learning English isn’t a chore, it’s necessary.
You can improve your English through lots of practice. This might sound simple, because it’s also like coding. You want to code and so you simply code. You figure out what you want to say, your message, and you learn the syntax to convey it. Coding is very straightforward in this way, once you can define your input. You only need a feasible recipe or algorithm to implement that input into a desired outcome or output.
Improving your English is trickier though as many people lack the opportunities to practice speaking English. There are many courses and videos where you can watch people speaking English to learn more about grammar. However, if you really want to improve your English to be able to use in a professional setting, you must practice speaking about software development.
One free way to do this is to connect with other developers who speak English and practice. If you are really serious about making progress in your English to land a higher-paying international developer job, you need more though. If that's you, consider Leap, the online English school where software developers gain the confidence to speak English fluently.
The internet is littered with free and paid resources for learning English. Take your pick of Leap, Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, Quizlet, Coffee Break Languages, Youtube (channels like “Learn English with Movies” - through to the remaining top 10 best language learning tools. Leap is the only option that is specifically for software developers to improve their spoken English.
Overall, your determination and commitment to learn English is what will help you improve it.
One day, I was at home experiencing the joy of remote full-time study when I started thinking, “Where are all of these ants coming from?” Apart from the obvious notion, that these ants do not pay rent, so they should not be living in my home, I thought about their resilience.
An ant is the single most determined creature I have ever observed. The level of problem solving that ants possess is incredible. I remember trying to preserve a delectable sweet treat on the kitchen counter before bed one night.
I set the delicious pie in a glass dish on top of a handleless cup and set the whole thing in the middle of a brimming pan of water. “I’d love to see you get my pie now ants”, I thought as I went to bed.
The next morning, through some unnatural force of nature, those ants were having a feast on my pie.
What’s the point of this story?
Be the ant, and let English be your pie!
There are a dizzying number of best practices and techniques for learning English available on various mediums today. For this reason, knowing where to start in your English learning journey can be difficult to say the least.
During my five years as a TEFL educator, I learned time saving best practices that will supercharge your English learning. Below are my top four:
Years of Teaching English in Latin America from kids to adults has taught me that knowing how to correctly pronounce English sounds is often overlooked when first learning the language.
For example, in Latin America, the sound of the consonant ‘R’ is formed with the tongue placed just behind the top teeth and barely tapping the alveolar ridge. If you’re interested, here is advice for forming the Spanish trilled 'R'.
Whereas in English, we form the sound of the consonant ‘R’ with our tongue placed lower in the mouth towards the middle and is produced towards the tip of the tongue. This great article gives advice on producing this important sound correctly.
When we are young, we learn how to identify and produce language from first listening to our parents or loved ones as they speak familiar phrases to us on a daily basis.
This contextual repetition creates associations within our brains between language and the world around us. This forms meaning.
Learning to speak English can be improved by listening to as many different contexts of the language as possible.
This is easily achievable through watching movies, vlogs, tv-series, or news broadcasts. Podcasts, radio shows, and music are also great ways to improve language context association for the English learner.
When we see English grammar structures and speech patterns in written form, we naturally learn the language structure. It’s a best practice to find topics which interest you in English and read about them frequently.
Start with more simple writing and advance as your comfort level and vocabulary increases.
Use articles, blogs, breaking news, novels, and even children's story books. You will be amazed at how quickly your comprehension of the English language progresses.
As a learner of Spanish from a native English background, I know that there is great fear in speaking your first words in a new language.
You don’t want to sound like a novice, even if in reality you are. A word of advice, take the pressure off of yourself. People are generally very forgiving when you are learning a new language. You may find that the majority of people are more than willing to help you produce the target language, and are even happy that you are doing your best to speak it.
Utilize online chat forums on hobbies or other areas of interest, and engage with English speakers internationally.This is a great way to practice natural English, having the ability to think about your answers before typing them or even using translators until you are more familiar with common English phrases used in your groups.
The key here is to Speak, Speak, Speak. Own your English progress and know that every day you remain committed to English, you improve.
This is why Leap was created, to give software developers who want to improve their spoken English the opportunity to do so, with other software developers, to gain the confidence and fluency needed to land a higher-paying job.
Well Developer-1, you’ve made it to the end of your first day as an international software developer, armed with the tools you need to communicate effectively in English.
The IT industry has a library of words, phrases and techniques to accomplish your tasks. So, knowing what kind of work you are expected to do is the best way to match the English words to the message you want to deliver.
All you have to do next is use the immense amount of free and paid resources online and begin English mastery one area at a time.
If you're ready to commit to improving your English to land a higher-paying developer job, learn more about Leap and start improving your spoken English!
For more tips from ESL learners at Microverse, watch Studying and Working in English: How hard can it be?
Steve Wayde Dames Jr transitioned into web development after five years teaching English as a Foreign Language. He believes collaboration is the key to growth.
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