And by stuff I mean literally anything. ...
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I'm not pushing that this is the mandatory skill just for a software engineer. It is a mandatory skill in general for a human being.
Try to parse some code you wrote years ago. Do you have any thoughts about it? To be honest, that's not the best code ever written - you know it. You hardly can recognize what it does. Now you can see the picture more clear, you can use the knowledge you gained during last years. You can think in systems and go bottom-up to distill the problem. You can take another point of view on that and consider it for some time. You can merge some approach with other one. You can tell why this code sucks and why. Good job.
You've just passed through levels of understanding. In context of programming, if you are able to explain stuff, it almost mean that you understand this stuff. That's why this "Explain X to me if I were 5 years old" is so popular at interviews.
It shows a few things:
- You are able to communicate your thoughts
- Good soft skills are one of the biggest talents across high-performing professionals. If you are clear in explaining complex things with easy words, then you will be really valuable part of the team because you will hold a lot of knowledge in the end that could be easily transferred to your colleagues. That results in the simplest math - managers spend less money on developers time.
- You are really have a deep understanding of what you are talking about if you are able to come up with some comparisons for complex stuff in easy words. Only by drawing these lines and analogies you can build your complete mind-map of skills.
To read:
- waitbutwhy.com - Tim Urban's blog where he explains like really a lot of stuff in clear and easy way.
Videos to watch: ...
Make your explanation clear, consistent and unforgettable.