>I'll have you know that brazilians who speak English fluently are the elite

Not exactly. Different realities exist among the many states and high school public education levels. Most English-speaking people in Brazil might come from affluent or high-middle-class households, but that doesn't necessarily determine their interest in pursuing a career in tech. More to the point, having an interest in tech can motivate learning English, as that makes you instantly able to tap into the wealth of free information and learning material out there. Most excellent professionals I know didn't even have a degree for their first 2 or 3 years of experience, let alone formal training in English, but they all could communicate adequately. I would also add that formal education "support" you way less than other fields. Experience is the critical component, imo.

I can illustrate this perfectly, albeit anecdotally: I come from a very disadvantaged background, a poor family, both parents didn't even finish high school, got public education all my life. My first PC was assembled from old parts that my father could salvage after he left his job as a bus driver to fix computers for a living. He got me a magazine one day with a CD that came with visual basic 6.0, he installed it, and I started messing around, knowing almost nothing of what I was doing. I just liked that when I dragged some things and put them in that grey window, it looked like the other programs I used to draw on (mspaint). I was 11-12 at the time, and from that moment on, I was hooked. I began understanding how to put behavior into things and what code was, mainly from the magazine pictures, then from other books my father started to get for me. Fast forward 5 years, I got my first internship 2 years before getting into an IF because I made a PHP website for someone, and they referred me to someone else.

10 years later, I had more experience than people who were almost twice my age, having worked for 4 different companies and building a clientele myself, because trust me, I needed that extra money. All along, I learned how to read and listen because of all the studying needed to do things in my job. Then I discovered forums, then Reddit, which made me start to write. That came in handy when I decided to apply for positions in foreign companies. 2 years ago, I started working for a company in Central Europe.

Now pair that trajectory with one from a friend of mine the same age as me, born into a wealthy family in Rio, both parents highly educated, always had access to quality equipment, internet, etc, graduated from a respected federal university, learned to speak 3 languages since he was a kid.

Because he spent so much time in uni, when he joined the company I was working for, he had no professional experience. Because of that, the way he progressed was slow, much to the incompetence of leadership, who saw people like that as always green, regardless of talent or skills acquired. He couldn't recognize that he was being held back; he had never worked for anyone else before, so he stayed and stayed and stayed, lured by derisory raises and false promises. He didn't have the drive to pursue clients outside the company, so he kept to his hobbies most of his free time. Anyway, long story short, all the other teammates left (interestingly enough, with stories similar to mine) for foreign companies.

Anyway, the moral of the story is: incentives are different depending on your background and the market tends to reward experience over formal education for relatively good paying coding positions.

Sorry for the wall of text.