Halfway through one interview we stopped asking about code and asked the candidate to explain a feature they had built as if we were the client paying for it. They did it in two plain sentences, no acronyms, and that is what got them hired: an engineer who cannot explain their own work leaves the client guessing for months, and guessing is where budgets quietly go. We check for it now in every interview, because most of the friction we have seen on projects was never a technical failure, it was a translation failure. What is the last technical explanation you actually understood the first time you heard it?
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