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My sense (I could be wrong) is that once that amazing engineer really understood the class of problems (i.e. he handled it multiple times) and was really comfortable that they would in fact be able to communicate plainly about the decisions and architecture.

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Being a good communicator is a skill in itself and requires understanding not only of the problem, not only of yourself, not only of the language but also of other people. And not everyone is capable in all of those at the same time.

>but also of other people.

Yeah, there's this thing called the curse of knowledge. If an engineer has a deep understanding of something, it's not a given that they can explain it well. For them, the topic feels so simple, and they've done it so many times that they may have forgotten other people aren't as knowledgeable. They will throw terms around without explaining them, etc.

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