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I have no clue. Conversationally I never had any clue they had trouble with English. It was flawless. But it's like they suffered from some sort of specific language processing disorder where they simply could not synthesize new knowledge from spoken or written word. I have no idea how they learned anything in the first place, because nothing I ever said or wrote to them sunk in.
I think the best example I have is we had this one H1B on the QA team on a project I was on. Management was doing a demo, and wanted everybody off the servers so that the demo went off without a hitch. H1B decides that's the perfect time to do a full automated unit test against the demo servers. Project Manager runs into the back room mid demo yelling "WHO'S ON THE SERVERS!" H1B raises his hand and explains that he's running all the unit test. PM nearly cusses him out screaming at him to not run any more unit test, to which H1B agrees, and leaves satisfied that the message was got across. 15 minutes later PM runs back again wondering who the fuck didn't understand the simple directive stay off the server and H1B raises his hand again, because he was running the same damned unit test he was just running again. PM just stood their dumbfounded anyone could be that fucking stupid. Shit like that was a daily occurrence.
There was another Indian woman who was a project manager and my main point of contact for a contract. She was also the requirements expert for the project. There were 3 requirements that had this interaction where only 2 out of 3 of them could ever be completely obeyed in a fairly common edge case. No matter which two you picked, the 3rd was impossible. I spend roughly two days attempting to explain this problem to her, and consistently failed. It just kept going round and round, where I would explain that if I followed A & B, I couldn't follow C. She'd tell me to just do C anyways. I'd explain if I did C no matter what, I couldn't do A, so I'd be left with B & C. She'd insist I do A anyways. I'd explain if I did A & C I couldn't do B. And round and round and round like that until she tapped another project manager who immediately grokked the problem and changed the requirements. And that's more or less how every interaction with her went, which was frustrating because she was my primary technical point of contact. Every problem I had was 48-72 hours of beating my head against a brick wall until she handed me off to a non-Indian colleague who resolved the problem in 5 minutes.
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