[yakshaving_jgt]

My interpretation was that it was more of an encouragement to think about things at a higher level of abstraction rather thinking of implementation details, as is a common reflex for so many programmers. Being able to communicate at that higher level of abstraction is a consequence of first having trained yourself to think at that level.

[Enginerrrd]

Yeah it's an important skill. I knew an engineer that was about as smart as me in school. If there was a real stumper of a question on the exam, we'd be the only two to get it right. He was a hard worker. But that guy was incapable of discussing things at the 64,000 ft view, let alone the 30,000 ft or 10,000 ft. As a result, he had a really tough time working with anyone else, and the entire program was deeply focused on teams. You became like family with the other students by the end of the 2nd year. Your reputation in groups was incredibly important. This guy, he could be completely correct, and yet somehow get other smart engineering students to turn against him, including myself. No one could work with him. One instance of that still haunts me... It's really unusual that I don't listen to someone else and consider what they had to say, and yet I did exactly that on a really important project with that guy. He was completely correct about a very important and fundamental thing, and yet I just couldn't see it until it was too late. 10 years later, that still bothers me.

That lack of skill haunted him in his later career. The last I'd heard, he had gotten fired from a job with a company that didn't fire anybody. It was bizarre to watch someone that could think about such technical and difficult things effortlessly, yet be unable to reason about them (or at least communicate) with nearly any level of higher abstraction.