> Plus, if they're so good at aping speech patterns, who says they aren't equally good at aping code patterns?
One is a social skill; the other requires understanding. Even in a technical conversation, a very large percentage of the interaction is social if the conversation is taking place face-to-face. I have also worked with people who could talk the talk, but not produce the code. Without social skills, those people seem to fail from job to job while not really understanding that they are failing: things just inexplicably go wrong all the time. With social skills (which is much more common), those people bafflegab their way into being system architects, middle or upper managers, and executives, where a lack of detailed low-level knowledge is more of an asset that keeps them from getting bogged down in details.
One is a social skill; the other requires understanding. Even in a technical conversation, a very large percentage of the interaction is social if the conversation is taking place face-to-face. I have also worked with people who could talk the talk, but not produce the code. Without social skills, those people seem to fail from job to job while not really understanding that they are failing: things just inexplicably go wrong all the time. With social skills (which is much more common), those people bafflegab their way into being system architects, middle or upper managers, and executives, where a lack of detailed low-level knowledge is more of an asset that keeps them from getting bogged down in details.