They wouldn't ask questions or admit that they're struggling with something. I saw a lot of this in the interviews as well, you would ask a question like "do you know what X is" and they would say yes, but then sit in silence. So you probe "well what is it?" and they would go "I'm not completely sure" or just try to make something up. They would sometimes sit for days doing nothing because they didn't understand the ticket.

Another was their definition of done. They would finish a ticket and mark it as resolved as soon as the functionality is partially working. I think because QA is enormously cheap in India they were used to handing things off to QA as soon as possible to save their own time. We didn't have a QA department so that was quite problematic. I started having to include all the edge cases I could think of in the ticket.

I don't think it's necessarily wrong, it was just different, different levels of politeness and views on managing their time. But it was these differences that made things more difficult for everyone involved than I expected. They probably had a lot of issues with my management style as well, although they were too polite to say anything :)