That is a big part of it I think, and just being able to provide meaningful names for code/documentation/discussions makes a huge difference, though I'd say communication problems alone don't tell the whole story.
Even when you're just working alone, having seen something before and knowing the theory/literature means you can build on it instead of wasting time thinking about how to reinvent the wheel. Like you can imagine someone who knows nothing about ACID or transaction isolation being frustrated by apparent concurrency bugs in their database and hand-rolling some abomination of a locking mechanism to manually serialize database transactions. They're going to waste a ton of time on that, and it'll be fragile and have terrible performance. Or if you're working on some task tracking application and wondering about how you can untangle dependency relationships for users, you should have a basic suite of graph algorithms in your head so that you can use them effortlessly and focus on the actual problem instead of being mired down in retreading basics that every CS graduate already knows.
Also it doesn't seem like an issue of communication in the case of the homebrew guy; he was just stumped.
Even when you're just working alone, having seen something before and knowing the theory/literature means you can build on it instead of wasting time thinking about how to reinvent the wheel. Like you can imagine someone who knows nothing about ACID or transaction isolation being frustrated by apparent concurrency bugs in their database and hand-rolling some abomination of a locking mechanism to manually serialize database transactions. They're going to waste a ton of time on that, and it'll be fragile and have terrible performance. Or if you're working on some task tracking application and wondering about how you can untangle dependency relationships for users, you should have a basic suite of graph algorithms in your head so that you can use them effortlessly and focus on the actual problem instead of being mired down in retreading basics that every CS graduate already knows.
Also it doesn't seem like an issue of communication in the case of the homebrew guy; he was just stumped.