I don't know what your point is. Perhaps you are trying to say that the programmer didn't understand the problem. But you didn't tell us what happened after the programmer talked to the customer. Did he screw up and the customer never got his report? Or did the customer get his report after the data was reloaded? In the latter case, I'd say the programmer did understand the problem.

I strongly disagree that you don't understand a problem if you cannot explain it in a few sentences to someone totally unfamiliar with the field, and who has no interest in knowing.

After I graduated, I did a few years of theoretical research at a university. The first nine months I spend studying topology before I could understand some of the problems I was working on. Was I a bad researcher because I won't be able to explain the problems here on this webboard? I don't think so.

If all people who really understood things well all could easily explain things to other people regardless of their level, the quality of education would be much better. I've seen people, top of their field by a large margin, who write very hard to understand papers. That doesn't make them second rate.

Abigail

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