languages...
In Ireland, it's difficult to find IT professionals, and expensive if you rind one, while everyone else is struggling to get by. So we're now looking for domain experts (high school teachers) with even a smattering of IT skills to work in our company.
I also happen to be a language nut, and here's my comments on languages I know:
Dutch: useless, they all speak English fluently;
Finnish: great for me, I lived there for 1.5 yrs and had a ball
Swedish: fun, easy, but has never been useful to me
East timorese (Tetun) : very useful, none of them speak English
Russian : would have been useful if I'd learnt enough to be conversational
Mandarin Chinese : don't speak it but I'm very keen to have my son learn it.
In short, I think these people learning programming languages are the smart ones.
