Ask HN: Learning from Experienced Engineers

[49pctber]

I'm an electrical engineer and have been in the workforce a few years. The correlation between how talented an engineer is and how well they are able to communicate their work is not as strong as I expected it to be. Some of the most talented engineers are really bad at explaining what they do or how things work. Other less talented engineers are really good at explaining how things work, but don't get as many "results". (The same goes for academics. Some of the best research professors are really terrible teachers, and some of the best teachers aren't great researchers.)

Do you have any advice on how to learn from those talented engineers who aren't good teachers? As a young engineer, I recognize that these engineers have so many valuable ideas in their heads, but extracting those ideas can be painful. Sometimes they spew too much jargon, making any explanations incomprehensible. Sometimes they don't seem to answer my questions even if I think I've explained the problem very well. Sometimes they get so lost in the complexity of a problem that I can't see the forest through the trees. Any advice on how to learn from these engineers would be greatly appreciated.