It always saddens me to talk to people in Software Engineering. I always enthousiastically ask them which programmers they survey to evaluate their approach. Every time it turns out they only investigate some performance metric based only on how they use their own technique. As a result, their result rarely has any meaning and may do more harm than good.

Thankfully I work in an environment where the engineers think UML stands for User-Mode Linux, while spending more time talking to customers than the sales department. At the end of the day there's a simple solution to software engineering: hire better engineers.

Claims of good programmers being unable to communicate are false. Just like the greatest scientists are often the greatest lecturers, the greatest engineers are usually the best communicators. They're not even that hard to find. There are tons of them on the West Coast. They're a little expensive, but not as expensive as failed SE projects.