If you've ever felt like a fraud in an interview in English, this is probably what you need to read.
1. Prologue
Quick intro: I'm Daniel, 27, Brazilian and started working as a dev in the beginning of 2018.
Somehow (I know how, it's in the article LOL), in 2021 got my first job outside of Brazil. At my first daily with a European team went more or less like this: someone made a joke, everybody laughed, and I laughed too.
Three seconds late.
I had no idea what the joke was. I just saw the faces on the call and followed the crowd. Camera on, smile on, brain on fire.
A few weeks before that, I was in the interview for that same job. I had my notes open on a second screen, my answers rehearsed in my head, and a voice in the back of my mind repeating the same thing on loop: "they're gonna find out."
Find out WHAT, exactly? I didn't know. That's the funny part.
At that point I had been coding since 2011, I had been a Developer Advocate, I had four years as a Microsoft MVP and a community with thousands of devs. None of that mattered in that moment. In my head, I was still a script kiddie from a technical course in Brazil, someone who learned to code by writing Pawn scripts for a GTA San Andreas server, now trying to join the "Major League of Software Development" (the EU/US market).
``
And here's the thing: I'm pretty sure that if you're reading this from Brazil (or anywhere in Latin America, Africa, South Asia...), you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about. This is, and always will be, a canon event!
2. The three questions
Every time I applied for a job outside Brazil, the same three questions showed up. Always in this order:
- "Is my English good enough?"
- "Do I really understand what this job is asking for?"
- "Am I actually qualified for this?"
Notice something? Only the last one is about skill. The first two are about access: language and context.
And we usually treat all three as the same thing. We fail the first question and we conclude we failed the third one. "My English is bad, so I'm a bad developer." That's not logic, that's panic.
That's the core of this post, so let me say it straight:
The impostor syndrome of a dev from an underdeveloped country is not only psychological. A big part of it is a distorted reading of a REAL inequality of access.
You're not crazy. The starting line was different. Let's talk about it.
3. The uneven starting line
Quick history lesson, I promise it's short.
The Internet (ARPANET) was born in the United States. The Web, the thing with pages and links you're using right now, was created in Europe, by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, in 1989.
So both poles that produced the foundation of what we use today were in the Global North: the US and Western Europe. On top of that, the US imported talent from everywhere (MIT, NASA, the big tech companies), so a huge part of the early technical content was written there. In English.
Documentation, books, forums, conference talks, Stack Overflow answers... all of it, in English first. Sometimes in English only.
And that's fine. I'm not writing this with resentment (I wasn't even born yet, so why would I care LOL). It's just a fact about the starting point. Someone had to build it first, and they built it where they were.
But it created a filter. Until not long ago, the devs who "jumped" to international jobs were the ones who had three things at the same time:
- good internet;
- good education;
- a good (and usually expensive) English course.
Now let's look at the numbers. In the EF English Proficiency Index 2025, Brazil is 75th out of 123 countries, with 482 points. We went up six positions, which is great, but we're still in the "low proficiency" band. In Latin America we're 16th out of 20. And our weakest skill? Writing. (Yes, I see the irony of writing this in English.)
But the national number hides the worst part. Inside Brazil, the gap between the most and least proficient capitals is up to 169 points. The Federal District and Rio Grande do Sul are on top with 541. Porto Velho, in the North, is at the bottom with 408.
Same country. Same passport. COMPLETELY different starting lines.
So when a dev from the North of Brazil feels like an impostor in an interview in English... is that really just "in their head"?
4. What I hear at He4rt
I've been running He4rt Developers since 2018. Today it's more than 25k devs, many of them working for companies in the US/EU. And after all these years, I can tell you: this isn't my personal drama. It's common knowledge in the community.
The stories repeat themselves, with different names:
- The dev who has been coding for years but never applied for a job abroad because "my English isn't there yet".
- The dev who got the job and spends the first months afraid of turning on the microphone.
- The dev who reads the job description, knows 8 of the 10 requirements, and still thinks it's not for them.
- The dev who understands the technical part of a meeting perfectly, but freezes during the small talk before it starts.
Every single one of these people is qualified. What they're missing is not skill. It's a way to name what they already have.
5. "With little, we always did a lot"
Here's the part nobody tells us.
The same inequality that makes us feel like impostors also trained a skill the market outside doesn't know how to measure (and that we don't know how to name): doing a lot with very little.
I learned to code by myself, writing Pawn scripts for SA:MP on a computer that could barely run the game (512MB of RAM, while most PCs back then had 2GB). Of course, I had mentors along the way, and they became my first "community thing".
Most of the good content was in English, so I started learning English the same way I learned to code: breaking things, looking at errors and trying again. My whole learning journey happened on my Twitch channel, practicing EVERY FUCKING DAY for an entire month, and even then I felt I wasn't ready.
Back then (2021), my long-time friend João Correa, who is now the English tutor at He4rt Developers, gave me a few lessons as a "check-up" of my English level. At the end of every lesson he told me I was more than ready, but I still didn't believe him. So I'd repeat the cycle, learning more terms and possible interview questions!
Still insane, I know. But after 2 months of practicing daily and applying... I got my first role! In the end, I still felt I wasn't ready, but the company hired me anyway.
A lot of us did exactly that. We learned from translated tutorials, broken forum posts, YouTube videos with terrible audio. We made things work on slow machines and bad connections. We figured it out. As Brazilians, we have something called "jeitinho brasileiro" and "gambiarra" (roughly: always finding a way, and hacky fixes that somehow work), which are basically superpowers to push through any doubt in the process.
That's not a gap in your CV. That's autodidactism, adaptation and resilience, the stuff companies say they want in every job description.
I remember nodding in a meeting, saying something like "yeah, makes sense", and then spending the next hour rereading the notes and the ticket to understand what I had just agreed to. I felt like a fraud. Today I see it differently: I got it done. I found my way through, with the tools I had.
And then, some time later, I got some feedback I was NOT expecting. Something positive about exactly the part of my work I thought was the weakest. The gap between how I saw myself and how the team saw me was huge.
That gap has a name, and YOU KNOW which one.
6. AI: it democratized access AND raised the bar
Now let's talk about the elephant in the room.
Since 2018 access to content has been getting more democratic: free courses, Stack Overflow, communities like He4rt. And then AI arrived and made it happen at a scale we had never seen.
Today, a dev in Porto Velho has in their pocket the same tool a dev in San Francisco has. It translates, it explains, it reviews your English, it lets you practice an interview at 2 AM. The EF report itself says English remains essential because the main AI tools are built mostly in English. The door is still the language, but now you have help to get through it.
Beautiful, right? Yes. BUUUT...
There are two sides to it. Remote work opened global opportunities, and it also opened global competition. The same tool that helps you is helping everyone else. Recruiters are already drowning in AI-generated applications. The bar went UP.
And this is where I'm gonna be honest with you.
AI is in your pocket and you use it like a polite Google.
"How do I center a div?" "What's the difference between let and const?" Little questions. Meanwhile, someone with the exact same free plan is designing hardware, writing a marketing campaign, building a product, learning a whole new field in a weekend. This person doesn't need to be the best, but they can't depend 100% on someone else. They need to be able to discuss any topic that pops up on their radar. Get it?
I use it way beyond code, for things I'm NOT a specialist in, like music, video editing and even physics (for gamedev, sorry). I didn't need to be a specialist. I needed to know how to ask, how to check the answer and how to keep going.
In the end, guess who gets the job?
Not knowing how to use the tool is the same as not having the tool.
"But Daniel, isn't this just the same inequality again?" Kind of. But now the filter is not your ZIP code, your bank account or your English course. The filter is how well you use what's already in your hands. And that, for the first time, depends mostly on you: on spending some time studying AI, harnesses, skills and all the terms that show up in our daily routine.
7. So... are you an impostor?
Probably not.
Probably you're someone who got here with less, and never stopped to count how much you built with that "less".
Every day, with AI growing, someone with "everything in their pocket" can be more capable than someone with all the technology in the world. We never had the right toolkit, and we always found our way and conquered our space anyway. Now the toolkit is here. The question is whether you're going to use it for real, or keep asking it little questions.
So I want to hear from you in the comments:
What's the question that shows up in YOUR head when you apply for a job abroad? And what did you have to figure out "with little" to get where you are today?
Bonus: not long ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing ThePrimeagen here in Brazil. I asked him about the Brazilian developers he has worked with, their English level and so on. Of course, the goal was to show my followers that they may be overthinking something nobody gives a sh*t about :D
Well, don't forget to like this post, follow me on the socials and fill your water bottle xD
See you in the next article!
Top comments (1)
Eu comecei a arriscar mais em entrevistas internacionais quando tu começou a fazer lives em dois idiomas (nem sei quando foi) e percebi que já compreendia bem o inglês falado...
Comecei a me colocar em situações em que eu precisasse falar (eventos, entrevistas, conversas naquele servidor de inglês) e descobri que o abismo entre o que a gente fala e o que o gringo entende é bem menor do que os nativos fazem parecer, sabe? O sotaque, falar mais rápido, falar com mais pausas não são um grande problema.
Desde que dê pra entender, o começo é bem convidativo. E o que você vai fazer pra melhorar é com você. Esse ano, depois de um teste no EF Set, eu decidi investir em aulas. Comecei nas do João na He4rt e evoluí pra outras da Renata English.
Na minha visão, o impostor muitas vezes só está ali porque temos medo de que a opinião do outro seja verdade e a gente esteja perdendo tempo. Quando a gente não presta tanta atenção no outro e sim no que a gente quer, e em como a gente vai fazer acontecer, aí acontece algo mágico: o impostor perde voz, e parece que finalmente você passa a evoluir como alguém que sabe inglês.
Hoje ainda fico pensando:
Não é algo que me trava; sigo em frente mesmo sem essa resposta, mas é uma pergunta que fica.