Oh dear, sounds like a tricky one, but I'm not sure that the "cultural" difference is what really mattered: the question is, did he have a willingness to unders

Oh dear, sounds like a tricky one, but I'm not sure that the "cultural" difference is what really mattered: the question is, did he have a willingness to understand where his worldview was falling short; to see that his limited experience of the world and college education was only a tiny subset of human experience and technical practices; to actively engage with those differences and continue learning? Unfortunately over the years I've also had some bad experiences with recent grads and the biggest problems usually boiled down to arrogance rather than ignorance... e.g. I can sort-of understand somewhere along the line that someone could have mistakenly learned that this new thing called "unicode" was invented for unix machines (after all, the names sort of sound similar) and that therefore we have absolutely no business trying to use it on a Windows system. But to then absolutely insist until you are blue in the face that you must be right about this because you learned it in college and everyone else in the team is just wrong, no matter what evidence is produced... well that is a difficult situation that I have personally encountered.