Why you should have good language skills...

There was this guy in my team (thankfully, he's left for another team). Together, we were supposed to finish two use cases. Our team was running on an artificially induced crunch mode.

One day, I felt that we had typed some code without the corresponding Javadoc. Since I was stuck with some work, and since he was free, I asked him to type the Javadoc before any other work came by. He refused, saying he was not very good in English and spelling errors would occur. I told him that he could not go on throughout life giving this as an excuse, and that if he knew he was poor in English, he had better improve. As a first step, I suggested he type the documentation in MS Word, which would point out his mistakes. He could use that as a learning experience.

He agreed, and some half-hour later, told me he was done.

I went over to his workstation, and as expected, his text was riddled with red squiggly underlines. I asked him to correct those first.

He said, "Ya I know I have to correct them, but how do I do so?"

I thought this guy probably does not have much experience with Word, and told him to place the mouse pointer over the word and right-click. He did so, and the menu popped-up.

He said, "Hey! I know how to open this menu... but how do I know which item to select in the menu?"

I was shocked, to say the least...