Would you have the same problem working with non native English speaker immigrant programmers in the US? They’ve spoken English for decades but not native speakers.
Where they live is irrelevant, except that there's a correlation between speaking English natively and living in the US. The only real variable is their fluency, so an American living in Tibet would be easier to work with than an immigrant in Ohio who has only been speaking English for a year.
My anecdotal experience with this is minimal because immigrants often work with larger companies than mine, but I have had a few.
One coworker was from Ukraine, and communication was very hard. He'd been in the US for more than 10 years, but he sounded like his only experience speaking English was from formal classrooms. As someone who is awful at learning and pronouncing foreign languages, I can definitely sympathize with him. I'm sure it was not an issue of effort at all.
The others were Indian, and there was no noticeable communication barrier. They knew (and used) American idioms, and they never seemed to have trouble keeping up with the mumbly way that tech people often talk. These were CTO-level, went to top colleges, and probably had a lot of English immersion in India before they moved.
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Would you have the same problem working with non native English speaker immigrant programmers in the US? They’ve spoken English for decades but not native speakers.
Where they live is irrelevant, except that there's a correlation between speaking English natively and living in the US. The only real variable is their fluency, so an American living in Tibet would be easier to work with than an immigrant in Ohio who has only been speaking English for a year.
My anecdotal experience with this is minimal because immigrants often work with larger companies than mine, but I have had a few.
One coworker was from Ukraine, and communication was very hard. He'd been in the US for more than 10 years, but he sounded like his only experience speaking English was from formal classrooms. As someone who is awful at learning and pronouncing foreign languages, I can definitely sympathize with him. I'm sure it was not an issue of effort at all.
The others were Indian, and there was no noticeable communication barrier. They knew (and used) American idioms, and they never seemed to have trouble keeping up with the mumbly way that tech people often talk. These were CTO-level, went to top colleges, and probably had a lot of English immersion in India before they moved.