Did you ever see Stephen communicating in real time? Not a prepared speech, but a live conversation? It took him a great deal of time and effort even to form a single sentence. Yes he had a lot of help, but you would still have had to wait while he spoke; two minutes for a sentence is probably not far off.
From your original comment:
> It was impossible to verbally communicate with Bob wihtout Alice present to translate. It took 2 very long minutes to ask "how are you today?" at the interview start. 120 seconds. How was anybody going to effectively communicate with this person on a daily basis or have technical verbal discussions!? If they said communication would be written text only with the CTO I doubt I would have accepted the interview.
> To me engineering is all about communication. You communicate ideas in varying degrees of technical depth to cater for your audience, who in turn communicate their ideas to other parties - be it board level, juniors, external parties or even the accounting department. Communication was totally broken here.
> What was most concerning was Bob didn't seem feel his disability was serious enough to step down from such a role (or management didn't want to suggest he step down... maybe through fear of law suit?). His inability to verbally communicate anything would have a bit impact on their product development.
> ... It's not really comparing apples to apples.
I disagree, it's an apt comparison. Bob obviously had sufficient technical experience to do his job, that's why he still had it, in spite of the communication problem. Stephen Hawking likewise had valuable contributions to make in his own field and had to communicate those ideas widely, so people helped him to communicate and looked past the difficulties; they didn't find it concerning that he wouldn't step down because he couldn't speak.
The fact that you couldn't work with Bob's speech issues is, frankly, your problem, not his.
From your original comment:
> It was impossible to verbally communicate with Bob wihtout Alice present to translate. It took 2 very long minutes to ask "how are you today?" at the interview start. 120 seconds. How was anybody going to effectively communicate with this person on a daily basis or have technical verbal discussions!? If they said communication would be written text only with the CTO I doubt I would have accepted the interview. > To me engineering is all about communication. You communicate ideas in varying degrees of technical depth to cater for your audience, who in turn communicate their ideas to other parties - be it board level, juniors, external parties or even the accounting department. Communication was totally broken here. > What was most concerning was Bob didn't seem feel his disability was serious enough to step down from such a role (or management didn't want to suggest he step down... maybe through fear of law suit?). His inability to verbally communicate anything would have a bit impact on their product development.
> ... It's not really comparing apples to apples.
I disagree, it's an apt comparison. Bob obviously had sufficient technical experience to do his job, that's why he still had it, in spite of the communication problem. Stephen Hawking likewise had valuable contributions to make in his own field and had to communicate those ideas widely, so people helped him to communicate and looked past the difficulties; they didn't find it concerning that he wouldn't step down because he couldn't speak.
The fact that you couldn't work with Bob's speech issues is, frankly, your problem, not his.